“Forever Young” by The Youth Group, was starting to do my head in. At first, I was haunted by its wistful melody, and because my boys liked it too, it always made me think of them. I’d almost tear up. Then I saw the video clip – the skateboard kids of thirty years ago, with their miller shirts, desert boots and stovepipe jeans, just like I used to wear, and their long, tousled locks (in the days before “product”, some of us might remember that hair would actually blow around) – and I realised it was actually directed at my generation.

It wasn’t really about being forever young. It was about people who want to hang around too long. The lyric suddenly turned sinister: “Do you really want to live forever?” Lachrymose soppiness gave way to suspicion. I was beginning to think this insidious dirge was just a way for Y-gens to do, in their uniquely caring fashion, what they’ve been doing for quite some time now: show us the door. At the risk of sounding like some 40-something try-hard, I felt like saying something they might understand: “Listen up! Homies! Not dead yet! See?”

Now I find that they might actually get there before me. Not only are people living longer than they have since little Noah was sailing cherubs, but history might one day reveal that this trend peaked with the so-called Baby Boomers. That’s right, we might outlive our parents and our children. Ageing research has found that this particular generation has a pretty good “fitness base” compared with Gennexers and Y-gens. Much as I hate that BB label – or any label, for that matter (it’s a sixties thing) – X-treme longevity is one magic bus someone of that generation – like me – might not mind catching, even if it is packed with embarrassing old ABBA lovers that I wouldn’t normally cross the road to run over. Don’t get me wrong: as long as they don’t wish it on me, I don’t really want to see off the sedentary arses of today’s kids. And frankly, I’d rather my own kids came along for the ride.

But anyway, it’s all speculation. At this point, the handful of laboratory rodents, primates, assorted mammals, reptiles and annelids lucky enough to have been in “longevity” control groups during scientific experiments will be the only life-forms on board.

However, consider this: a lot of eminent scientists fall into the “middle-aged” category. You might expect quite a flurry of research if they thought there was even an inkling that funding might come their way – from middle-aged people in government – for investigation into a cure for human aging. And they do have Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey paving the way. He’s convinced that none of us should be even approaching middle-age until around the year 2,600 – no kidding.

Death eradicated?

Aub de Grey has, he reckons, cracked the Quantum Theory of human ageing. He also reckons he can make death from what we today call “old age” (men currently look forward to a base age of 78, women 83) look like infant mortality. Aub says we can easily live to a thousand, beginning right now. In fact, he’s made the astonishing claim that the first person to hit four figures might be sixty years old already! What’s more, once we’ve reached that stupendous age, we’ll have every resource to keep us going until some misadventure kills us.

Now, leaving aside the brain-freaking conundrums that living a thousand years poses – like constantly renewing the hunt for a good roof tiler and someone to make a decent kebab – how is this possible? Is Aubrey, in fact, a nut? Some people might regard his floral shirts, long hair and ragged, yard-long ZZ Top beard as qualification. But in fact, this head of the Methuselah Foundation (named after a biblical figure who fell just short of his millennium after a grafting, well-controlled innings punctuated by several drinks-breaks) has a degree from Cambridge in computer Science and a PhD in Biology. He says we should view medicine as a branch of engineering, which gets around the problem of our relative ignorance of metabolism. For Aub, it also gets around the problem of having friends in either the medical or engineering professions.

In 1995, he wrote The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, which claimed that it’s likely that cumulative damage to mitochondria (see the breakout box) is a significant cause of senescence, even if not the single dominant cause. To inform us of all seven causes, Aub also edits a journal called Rejuvenation Research.

The Methuselah Foundation, moreover, has the backing of a very cheerful, well-off bloke named Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who has pledged a total of $A3.5 million until 2009. He has that optimist’s, er, optimism for the outcomes of the Foundation’s research: “People alive today (will) enjoy radically longer and healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones.” And as the obit columns shrink, and posterity becomes a thing of the past, they’ll also enjoy the company of about 60 billion other die-hards, I presume. But I have a pessimist’s pessimism. Kierkegaard had a point…come to think of it, no he didn’t.

Aub’s approach to life-extension is called “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence”, or SENS, which, he says, differs from other approaches in two main ways: 1. It reverses, or repairs, age-related changes, rather than just retarding them, and 2. It’s a piecemeal approach, addressing the various types of such damage individually, rather than looking for a single “magic bullet”, as he calls it.  “Most biogerontologists appreciate that ageing is bad for you and should be postponed as much as possible, as soon as possible, just like any disease.”

So if life is, as some other pessimist once noted, one long process of dying, age is its disease. And since age seems to be a major cause of death, most of us would readily agree with the notion that it’s “bad for you”, and should be cured.

But what to do until Aubrey and his mates find a treatment we can stick in a bubble-pack and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme bungs it on its list so we can all afford it? Though it might happen sooner than we think, all those bustling middle-aged researchers will, like us, need to stave off the effects of this age pandemic using more tried and true methods.

…or postponed indefinitely?

One of these is calorie restriction. CR is not just a method, it’s a movement – with its own Society, and everything! The Calorie Restriction Society’s tag line says it all: “For people trying to live longer by eating fewer calories.” Okay, so we’ve established that ingesting fewer calories doesn’t make you any more creative. But there’s no doubting the robustness of their research – in labs, at least. Since the 1930s, the idea that calorie restricted diets extend life-spans has been proven repeatedly, and you can get testimonials from any number of sprightly old worms, monkeys, fruit flies, rats, spiders, and cows who have been granted more biological RAM to do a lot more of whatever it is they do. The CRs believe our vital years can go on much longer, once they can reliably apply it to humans.

Have you asked yourself a million times what a calorie actually is? Me neither. Still, for those who want to know, calories are a measure of how much energy the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats you eat supply your body. You use food as fuel, burning it to produce energy. When you tuck into a meal with more calories than your body needs (get thee behind me, Satan!) you store the excess energy as fat. “Fatty” foods are high in calories, and, like any food that’s bad for you, they taste good. The calorie has gone metric and changed its name to the more pretentious joule, but it still hangs out at the same restaurants – a dead giveaway. The accepted wisdom of dieticians is that we should reduce our energy intake and increase our energy expenditure, however the CR people claim that diet and exercise alone might lead to a healthier life, but not necessarily a longer one.

The CRs believe we should be eating thirty calories less than normal per day, while still getting the same amount of nutritional value. This, they reckon, eliminates such party-poopers as clogged arteries, and high levels of insulin, glucose, dangerous fats, bad cholesterols and blood pressure, increasing the biomarkers of longevity by causing a “metabolic adaptation”, which might be also termed a change in the use of energy. Like changing from unleaded to gas with the flick of a switch. They don’t preach immortality – yet. But they do believe that CR is the shining path to old age, and infinitely preferable to a permanent stopover in that hellish cul de sac where Alzheimers, dementia, heart disease, socially unacceptable behaviour, cancer and Parkinson’s lurk.

The calorie restriction lobby has its own nutbags, of course, some of whom live such lives of self-denial, they make Gandhi look like a gluttonous sex fiend. Still, it’s a chore finding enough people willing to prove that the results are transferable to humans. In fact, the one case that seems to prove CR’s validity beyond all doubt was the result of a blunder, as are all good scientific discoveries. In 1991 a bunch of scientists locked themselves away for two years in a sort of bubble environment (called Biosphere 2) in the Arizona desert, for some stupid reason. It was obviously unrelated to diet – they found they’d neglected to stock the fridge.

One of them, a pathologist and CR advocate, comforted his ravenous, panicky colleagues with the thought that this might be their opportunity to extend their lives by grazing in the meagre herb and veggie garden provided. He then showed them a snack he’d prepared earlier. Anyway, they emerged healthier in every respect. That pathologist, Roy Walford, went on to write Beyond the 120-year diet: How to Double Your Vital Years. But it seems Roy had few clues about converting conspicuous consumers into calorie curbers. His death in 2004 probably didn’t help the cause. The book’s in its fifth edition, yet only 1,400 people have adopted the diet as a way of life. Who’s counting, you ask? They probably count themselves. Anyone on this stingy fast would spend their lives counting. Depending on your body mass index, you might be on some destitute diet of, say, 1,921 calories every day – and I mean exactly 1,921 calories – every day. This nutritional number-crunching looks suspiciously like a plot by various neurotics, right-brainers and certain personality types to make sure the geek inherits the earth. But we’ll have to live with it. Calorie restriction is the only current method we have at our disposal to add a few years to our lives – that, and marrying properly the first time.

But even CR comes with a caveat: no-one knows precisely how much calorie intake or body fat mass is associated with optimal health and, it follows, longevity. It is known that it may actually harm people with low body fat. But these factors differ from person to person. How big is a lump of wood? Only you know how big yours is. The trouble is, “listening to your body”, rather than looking at other peoples’, is an art lost amid the noise pollution of modern life.

Okay, two caveats: the older you are when you take up CR, the less effective it is. So, as rule-of-thumb, if you find yourself sitting next to some cantankerous old poop flinger in death’s waiting room before you decide to ask your caring Gen Y nurse to remove all the saturated fats from your plate of gruel, you’ve probably left your run somewhat late. But don’t be too concerned. They say second childhood’s more fun than the first anyway – especially if you’re the one flinging the poop, eh? Gotta laugh. Not much alternative by that stage, except gnashing your gums.

So far, though, you’ve got to admit it all seems a bit too hard for the common slob. I don’t know. Do you feel discouraged? I do. But wait! There’s a pill! And it can imitate the effects of calorie restriction, even as you wolf down that wicked Oreo McFlurry when you’re supposed to be out hiring a video for the family. Because they imitate calorie restriction, they’re called calorie restriction mimetics. To eat ad libitum and still live long? Yeah! To have your pan-fried pepperoni with cheesy crust, and eat it too! That’s anyone’s kind of scientific breakthrough. There are a number of ways, apparently, to imitate CR, and it seems the most favoured is to target the body’s production of insulin. One of the main candidates for doing CR impersonations is this thing called Resveratrol, which contains the anti-oxidant found in red grapes, which means all those claims for the health benefits of a glass of red are not just put out by the Wine Growers Association, after all.

There are others, notably Metformin, which has extended the life of many a mouse, including, I’m sure, the ones in my pantry. And a compound called 2DG that reduces insulin levels in rodents. It, too mimics caloric restriction – but again, not yet in humans. The trouble is that the wrong amount can be highly toxic. Minor problem. Work it out, I say, and get back to me with the pill. And some clear dosage instructions.

Generally, it seems the best way to do CR impressions is to be an antioxidant. But they apparently only mirror certain aspects of CR, not the whole catastrophe. The trouble is, there’s little evidence that they increase longevity, so I don’t know what they’re even doing in here. If CR doesn’t claim to drastically extend human life (yet) so much as increase its quality, then it’s unlikely a pill that mimics it will do so, either. Still, if it has any effect at all, then the pill is the go. Either way, it seems that CR mimetics gives us the best clue yet as to how the body’s cells repair and maintain themselves, and therefore is the most accessible doorway to prolonged years.

How to make a horm – anyway!

Let’s see – what else? Ah, yes. Hormones! It’s believed that CR helps a person retain youthful levels of certain hormones (such as DHEA) that tend to fall with age. But CR doesn’t need to be the vehicle. Some doctors just go straight for hormone replenishment. Endocrinologists dispense enough artificial hormones to embarrass half the NFL. Sometimes, these are administered via things like progesterone pills, DHEA and testosterone cream. They come with no guarantees that your life will be longer, but evidence suggests its quality will improve markedly if the rapid decline of such hormones after a certain age is halted or reduced.

You’ve probably spotted a book called The Perricone Promise, written by Dr Nicholas Perricone (hence the title). He has a simple equation: Stress reduction equals life extension. What’s more, he’s on the psychoneuroimmunology boat, and as you can see, it’s a long boat. It has endocrinology, immunology, psychology and neurology on board, and Dr Nick believes that these disciplines can act in concert to produce longer life through cell rejuvenation. He also believes that the endocrine system “works hand in hand with the nervous system. In fact, the endocrine and nervous systems are so closely linked that they are more accurately viewed as a single neuroendocrine system.” Stress hormones, he says, are brought into play too often in today’s world, rather than only being utilized when necessary. In other words, we reach such peaks of stress these days that we might as well be dodging falling pianos on the hour. Today’s lifestyle puts the entire system under strain. Stress, says Nick, accelerates the ageing of our cells. High stress levels also cause oxidation – cumulative damage caused by free radicals (see breakout). He claims that a reduction of stress will lead to longevity. In fact, he promises it (hence the title).

A little poison goes a long way

And there’s a thing called hormesis – a direct response to the idea that we drop off the twig because it’s nature’s way of regulating population. It apparently involves exposing the body to low levels of toxins and other stressors that would kill you in larger amounts – like only being married every other month. This happens in much the same way vaccinations work. The body’s repair systems are kick-started, and neutralize the invader’s effect even when higher doses are introduced.

Everything in moderation, including excess, I say! A nightly glass of “red” has enough Resveratrol in it to prolong life. Copious amounts of it, and don’t hope for an even longer life – just a good time. But don’t listen to me, listen to Paracelsus. “The right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy.” That was 450 years ago and Paracelsus is either dead, or working in the dead letter section at Australia Post – it’s easy to confuse the two – but some things never change. The principle also applies to small versus large doses of exercise, mayonnaise, rogaining, and children.

Because living systems (yes, you are a system, and an open system at that, drawing energy from your environment) repair themselves as a matter of habit, hormesis can help the body do so more effectively, and, by extension, extend your life. But again, we don’t know to what extent.

The gene genie and spare parts industry

Gene therapy is another one in the news, but its early successes in treating disease don’t indicate that, on its own, it will lead to longevity. No doubt it will, eventually. Only last year, it was successfully applied to the treatment of cancer for the first time.

Therapeutic cloning, once it dispenses with all those pesky moral objections, is bound to lead to a boom in the human spare-parts industry, and one day we’ll be like the proverbial “old hammer.” We’ll own none of our original organs. Identity – already a tricky concept – will be as elusive as a – a really elusive thing. The first bladders have already been replaced using cells grown from patients’ own cultures. Eventually, stem cell research will enable expansion to other organs, and, they say, treatment of diabetes, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s. Australia is leading the way. At the Bernard O’Brien Institute at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, biochemists have already grown enough liver, pancreas, muscle, bowel and breast tissue to make Dr Frankenstein curse the fact that he’s just a fictional character stuck inside a nineteenth-century novel.

The great confluence of discoveries in these areas – cloning, the mapping of the human genome, nanotechnology – added to all those other advances, means that, somewhere down the line, there’ll be a UB card at Centrelink marked “Reaper, Grim. Occupation: dealer of death (all modes), star of community service ads. Hobbies: bowling, lurking, scything.”

Where was I?

So there you go. Longevity studies. Everyone’s at it. If you really want some serious sounding research (with some funny names thrown in for comic relief), check out Orgel’s  Error Catastrophe Theory and the Gompertz law of mortality. Great for a cack.

All these approaches have one thing in common: they have arisen from a newfound belief that the body’s decay is not inevitable – at least while it’s alive. Even at this relatively unadvanced stage, we should be looking at 120 as a reasonable expectation, probably beginning, as Aub says, with the current generation. It seems all it really takes is a healthy lifestyle and wising up to the fact that certain habits (do you enjoy it? Drop it!) kill us and certain others keep us alive. Aub reasons that, once he can get us to 120, we can reach “escape velocity”, and the very things that keep us going that long should be able to keep us going forever.

The brain? That’s a slightly greyer matter. We’d better hope it catches up, though. Some of this research has obvious benefits for the old onion, and I know there have been some amazing advances in cognitive neuroscience and stuff, but I haven’t heard enough encouraging words on dementia or Alzheimer’s. Aluminium pots and pans were still the universal scapegoat, last I heard. A new scapegoat – that’s the only sign of progress that matters!

But let’s hurry, for heaven’s sake. We need to get to the bottom of this brain thing before we forget what we’re researching. What’s the point of living to a thousand if my mind goes AWOL at eighty? Of having all the lights on if I’m out shopping and can’t remember how to get home? I’m at an age where I can still put my forgetfulness down to stress and busyness and no-one questions it – at least not while I’m in the room. But that’s going to change soon enough. Meanwhile, I intend to consume handfuls of the latest amazing brain pills just as soon as I get my hands on some.

So um…yeah! Why did I come in here again?

Published in Elevator magazine, June, 2007