A NEW LOOK AT OLD AGE
Immortalists” say they’ve discovered how to slow and perhaps even reverse the ageing process — but is that really a good thing?
The scene a few weekends ago at the Westgate, a Las Vegas mega resort, was like many others in Sin City. Alongside the one-armed bandits and craps tables, about 1,000 people milled around a mega convention centre. Many would have been close to pensionable age, and they came from all corners of the Earth. But all the attendees at the event, RAADfest, were pursuing something out of the ordinary: immortality.
“RAAD stands for Revolution Against Ageing and Death, and it happens once a year,” says Neal VanDeRee, a 58-year-old who travelled to Las Vegas from his home in Hollywood, Florida, where he helps run the Church of Perpetual Life, a religious group devoted to living forever. “People from all over the world come together and have discussions and presentations on ways to extend your life.”
We’re all living longer. A girl born today could live for 82.9 years, and a boy for 79.2, barring any accidents or illnesses. “Life expectancy since the 1850s has almost doubled in some countries,” says Colin Selman, professor of biogerontology at the University of Glasgow. “It’s really staggering. Even since the 1960s, it’s increased over a decade in men and women.”
But for some — VanDeRee included — the West’s leaps in life expectancy aren’t happening nearly quickly enough. There are countries he wants to visit, and things he wants to do that he feels a normal life expectancy won’t give him enough time for.
“I used to hang out with older men on the beach in Florida when I was a child, and every one of them told me they wished they could have more time with their children and see their grandchildren grow older,” he says.
For the megabillionaires of Silicon
Valley, there’s a more prosaic desire: to make sure you have enough time to spend the money you’ve earned. Silicon Valley has become the crucible of the fight against ageing because of its preponderance of people with enough money to spend on trying to prolong their lives, and who have a willingness to take risks, says Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge-born computer scientist who invested almost all his R200m inheritance into preventing ageing. The foundation De Grey set up, SENS, boasted PayPal founder Peter Thiel as one of its early investors.
The ultra-rich in Silicon Valley are also among the few people with enough money and gumption to tackle the notion of immortality. “It cultivates this attitude of identifying the most important and momentous technological challenges facing humanity and not thinking that these challenges are too daunting,” says De Grey.
In 2013, Google’s co-founders set up Calico — the California Life Company — to try to combat ageing and its effects. After five years of research, their hard work paid off with the discovery of the world’s first “non-ageing mammal”: the naked mole rat. It was a boon for self-described “immortalists”, who saw in this small rodent the promise of perpetual life.
“Biological immortality is not something that belongs to the field of science fiction,” says Dr Marco Ruggiero, who last week visited Harrods to launch a probiotic that’s meant to improve the production of klotho, a protein described as an ageing suppressor found in the guts of long-living humans, and with similar characteristics to the microbiome (or stomach) of the naked mole rat. Ruggiero, a tanned, lean-faced 63-year-old who moved to Arizona after retiring as professor of biology at the University of Florence, believes his microbial formula — Immortalis Klotho Formula (IKF) — is the secret sauce to living forever.
It doesn’t come cheap. A three-month treatment of IKF, of which Ruggiero recommends half is taken orally and half by enema, costs over R150,000. IKF’s customers include celebrities and royalty.
One area showing promise is parabiosis — the transfer of blood between old and young mammals, which pumps the body full of younger blood cells. Part of the way we develop diseases is through the gradual wearing down of cells. As we age, cells reproduce less perfectly, and those flaws develop into serious illnesses.
Parabiosis —which has been tested in mice in the US and Japan — would replace old, mutated blood with new, vibrant plasma. One company targeting Silicon Valley executives, Ambrosia, was ordered to stop offering blood transfusions this February after the US Food and Drug Administration warned people were “being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies”. For the previous three years Ambrosia had offered one-litre transfusions to about 150 users, each of whom paid around R120,000 per treatment.
Dave Asprey, the founder of Bulletproof Coffee and author of a new book promising how “to age backwards and maybe even live forever”, injects stem cells taken from his own bone marrow into his spinal column in an attempt to prolong his life. He plans to live to the age of 180.
Some, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, are trying lower-stakes, lower-cost alternatives. Dorsey is a proponent of calorie-restricted diets and fasting for 22 hours a day — as is VanDeRee. “What I do is I eat all the food I eat within a six- to eighthour period and the rest of the time I fast,” he says. “I also try to eliminate carbohydrates from my diet.”
As well as taking his own IKF formula — blitzed into fruit smoothies — Ruggiero also follows a ketogenic diet high in fats and low
Discovering the world’s first ‘non-ageing mammal’, the naked mole rat, was a boon for selfdescribed ‘immortalists’
in carbohydrates.
Research shows that cutting daily calorie intake by 15% can slow the effects of ageing — and many of the harmful diseases that result from old bodies. Says Glasgow’s professor Selman: “There’s good evidence that if you put humans on a lowcalorie diet, you can improve a whole host of markers of health. You can decrease particular markers in the blood associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease.”
But, despite the fact that calorierestricted diets have been shown to extend lifespans in rats for about a century, “we still don’t understand the mechanisms and processes through which reducing caloric intake works”, says Selman. The other issue with calorie restriction, as anyone who has tried a beach body diet knows, is that it takes more willpower than many of us possess.
Others hack pre-existing drugs to take advantage of their benefits in preventing ageing. VanDeRee takes a cocktail of vitamins and supplements alongside two other medicines he believes can help promote anti-ageing. One of them is metformin, a drug used to lower blood sugar levels in diabetics. It purportedly activates the body’s metabolic regulator, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). AMPK is also kicked into life when you exercise or restrict calorie intake, nudging cells into life when they’re low on energy.
VanDeRee also swears by a drug called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), a compound that stops cells from declining as they age. NAD+ is also a key element in keeping telomeres — which protect our chromosomes from the ravages of age — stable, strong and long.
The pursuit of improved telomeres is the holy grail for immortalists. Elizabeth Parrish, the CEO of a West Coast US company, BioViva, has even claimed she’s been able to make her telomeres longer — in effect, reversing the ageing process. VanDeRee is also excited by the latest innovation: the use of two “senolytic agents” used to treat diabetic kidney disease, which early trials have indicated can destroy senescent, or decaying, cells.
Another startup, Unity Biotechnology, has developed its own drug specifically made to target senescent cells, which De Grey sees as the next frontier in the fight against ageing.
Naysayers might feel the pursuit of immortality is a fool’s folly; stopping the clock on ageing and conquering nature the goal of people with more money than sense.
Yet those seeking perpetual life are not deterred. Says VanDeRee: “I want to see the future. To me it’s a very bright, very cool place. If you look back to 500 years ago you had the plagues ravaging Europe and death and destruction and war and horrible things. That was then and now we have a better lifestyle. Imagine what it’ll be like in 500 years’ time.” —
Telegraph, London