Why it is a sin NOT to strive to develop medicine that eliminates aging

Speaker 1

All right. It’s now my pleasure to introduce to you the person who will be our keynote speaker for this morning session of the conference. doctor Aubrey DeGrey, who’s making his way up to the front and who I’m sure that you all recognize. Aubrey DeGray is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, United Kingdom and Mountain View, California. And he is the Chief Science Officer of Sense Foundation, a California-based nonprofit charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also editor-in-chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest impact peer reviewed journal focused on intervention and aging. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for the repair of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side effects of metabolism, or damage, that constitute mammalian aging. termed strategies for engineered negligible senescence, or sense, which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. Thank you so much for being here, Aubrey. Stage is yours.

Aubrey de Grey

Well, thank you very much, Lenkin, for that lovely introduction, and thank you all for coming. I’m delighted to be here. This is my first time at this conference. I have certainly learned quite a lot this morning. I didn’t know there was such a thing as an atheist Mormon before. There are lots of things I didn’t know. I I but I do think I have a much better understanding than I did when I arrived of why uh Mormonism and transhumanism have such a great intersection and why this particular organization is thriving so well. So I’m delighted to be here.

Aubrey de Grey

Now I’m going to spend my time pretty much I’m going to spend maybe fifteen minutes on describing basically science, but at a relatively high level. I’m not going to get too technical. In other words, I’m going to talk about what Sense Research Foundation does and why and why we think it’s going to work. And then I’m going to spend the rest of my time talking about, well, the title of my talk, really. Most of my remarks are going to be from a secular perspective, I guess, so I’m going to be talking really sort of ethics in general rather than from a particularly religious perspective And towards the end, I think I’m going to say one or two things that will be explicitly with regard to Christianity in general and perhaps also Mormonism. But anyway, I’m going to start with, as I said, some science.

Aubrey de Grey

What is aging? There are an awful lot of definitions of aging out there And I would like us all to be on the same page with regard to the definition that I’m going to use today, so I thought I would start with it. Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place It is the accumulation of various types of damage in the body, damage that eventually, when it becomes too abundant, causes the diseases and disabilities associated with old age. And this definition is it’s a mechanistic definition, obviously, which is very important for this purpose. It also emphasizes that aging is a lifelong process. It doesn’t start when you start going downhill. It starts before you’re born. The accumulation of damage is a side effect of the normal operation of the human body, and therefore it starts when the normal operation of the human body starts. So that’s an important thing to start with.

Aubrey de Grey

So first of all, I’m going to explain why I have chosen to work on this problem. My early life wasn’t as a biologist at all. I was a computer scientist. And I worked in that area for humanitarian reasons. I was interested in developing artificial intelligence because I thought that it was a great shame that people have to, you know, spend their lives going down mines and serving hamburgers and all those tedious things when they could be instead doing what we’re good at and what we’re made for, enriching each other’s lives. But when I discovered at the ripe old age of about twenty eight, twenty nine, that hardly any biologists were actually interested in aging, I decided that I had to switch fields really, because this was an even more important problem. There’s not much use having all these machines to do all the tedious stuff for us if we’re already dead. So so the the the the the the the the key thing I want to explain here is that this is by far humanity’s biggest problem, not just humanity’s biggest medical problem. And here’s a good way of describing why that is.

Aubrey de Grey

If we accept that all aspects of age-related ill health are parts of aging, which we must accept, because any specific disease of old age, let’s say Alzheimer’s disease, is a disease of old age only because it is an aspect of the later stages of something that goes on throughout life. If we accept that we have to include all the diseases of old age as parts of aging then anything that kills older people is death from aging. And that means two-thirds of all deaths worldwide, roughly one hundred thousand people every day out of the one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty thousand that die each day. And of course, in the industrialized world, hardly anyone dies of malaria, and so it’s a much higher proportion, something like ninety percent.

Aubrey de Grey

And it’s extraordinarily expensive. Most of a typical person’s medical expenses in their entire life is spent during the last year of their life. And that’s whether they die at sixty or seventy or eighty or one hundred and ten. And of course, it’s not just the direct expenses, it’s also the indirect stuff, the fact that people are less productive when they have to spend time looking after their parents because their parents are sick. It’s the fact that the elderly are no longer contributing wealth to society. And of course the different different expertise that older people may have that is less prevalent among younger generations. So, how are we going to fix this?

Aubrey de Grey

Well Traditionally, there have been two major schools of thought, major approaches to combating aging. I’m going to call them the gerontology approach and the geriatrics approach. And they can be very clearly distinguished and sharply distinguished using the definition of aging that I’ve already given you. This metabolism, the normal operation of the body, causes this lifelong accumulation of damage, which is eventually pathogenic. What we can basically say is that geriatrics is about combating the pathologies of old age directly, beating on them just as if they were the any other disease, like measles, for example. And that’s really not a very good idea. In fact, it’s not a very clever idea, because the fact is, you’re never going to be able to eliminate from the body something which is the consequence of something that you’re not attacking. it’s obviously just too late in the game. If the damage is continuing to accumulate, then any approach that attacks the consequences of that damage is going to become progressively less effective as the patient gets older. So this is essentially why the geriatric approach, which essentially accounts for everything we have today in the clinic against the diseases of old age Is essentially useless. It’s not it’s better than nothing, but it’s very little better than nothing, and it never will be much better than nothing.

Aubrey de Grey

So, of course, I’m not the first person to point this out, though I may be doing it in somewhat starker language than most people do. And many people for many decades have realized that prevention is better than cure in this case, and that we ought to dive in at an earlier stage of the chain of events and attack the process up here somewhere. And the gerontology approach consists essentially of saying, well, okay, since this damage is a side effect of metabolism, let us clean up metabolism. Let us try and slow down the rate at which the body creates these various types of damage in the first place. And that would, of course, have the appropriate effect of postponing the age at which the damage becomes pathogenic.

Aubrey de Grey

Unfortunately, that’s not too clever either, because metabolism is rather complicated. This here is a simplified diagram, for those of you who don’t know, of a small subset of what we know about how the body works. And as you can see, it’s a bit hairy, and it’s completely idiotic to suppose that we might be able to actually tweak this thing, manipulate it so that it does substantially less of something we don’t want it to do, namely the creation of damage, without having undesired side effects, undesired consequences That we didn’t expect that do more harm than good. It’s just not going to happen for the remotely foreseeable future.

Aubrey de Grey

And of course, this is an understatement of the problem. The real problem is that this is a Simplified diagram of a small subset of what we know about how metabolism works, which is completely dwarfed, as any biologist will tell you, by the absolutely astronomical amount that we don’t know about how how the body works, even ignoring all the stuff that we don’t even know that we don’t know. So Yeah, you can you can you can forget this approach. Um but of course if that were the end of my story, which is rather grim so far, then I wouldn’t be standing here. So what’s the what’s the what’s the what’s the trick?

Aubrey de Grey

Well, the trick is to look at what we already successfully do to extend the longevity, the functional longevity, of simple man-made machines way beyond their warranty period, way beyond the length of time that they were built to last. Because that’s what we’re trying to do here, right? We’re trying to keep the body going in a good shape for longer than it was built to last. And the way we do it is by maintenance. We don’t necessarily build VW Beetles to last more than fifteen years or so. But some of them last fifty years. This one is more than fifty years old, doing just as well as it was when it was built. And the reason is because it has been frequently and comprehensively maintained.

Aubrey de Grey

And if we look at that from the point of view of the human body, we are fundamentally talking about regenerative medicine, repair at the molecular and cellular level of the structure of the body therefore thereby delivering repair and restoration of the function of the body. This has a fair bit going for it. First of all, of course, it’s something that in principle can be applied late in life, relatively late in life. so that it can have benefits far greater than the what I call the gerontology approach could have, even if the gerontology approach were possible in the first place. That’s good.

Aubrey de Grey

And that’s what we work on. Fence Research Foundation, as we’re now called. We’ve just had this sort of slight rebranding. We are a charity, a US based California based five hundred one C three, and we’re interested in developing and indeed, of course, working to promote and disseminate regenerative medicine solutions to aging. So this is what it’s all about, the maintenance approach. And we can put it on this same diagram very easily. The maintenance approach says let’s leave this process alone, this process whereby metabolism creates damage. And let’s also leave this process alone, the one where damage creates pathology. Instead, let’s dive in and separate, uncouple those two processes from each other by periodically repairing this damage, not necessarily completely, but fairly well. So that the damage simply does not reach the pathogenic threshold.

Aubrey de Grey

I can describe it also in relation to houses. You might not think of houses as machines, but they’ll do for this purpose because It’s quite easy to show the analogy this way. A gerrycritian is someone who addresses the problem of a hole in the roof. By dealing with the consequences of the hole in the roof, the ceiling’s falling down and things like that. And of course, this becomes increasingly ineffective. A gerontologist. Deals with the problem of potential holes in the roof by planting trees around the house so that it will be less likely that something will hit the roof. But of course, this means that there’s a potential side effect of the tree hitting the roof in a storm. So that’s not so clever. And of course, the engineer is doing the sensible thing, waiting for damage to happen, but actually repairing the damage before it has too many pathogenic consequences. And I think this is a pretty clear and concrete analogy. I think it’s a valid one.

Aubrey de Grey

So, I’m not going to tell you very much more about the science. All I’m going to tell you is that this is not just a theoretical abstract idea, this is a very, very clear and detailed one. First of all, the reason why I was able to get excited about this back in two thousand or so when I had the essential Eureka moment that I’ve told you so far is that I realized we could actually partition, subdivide the problem into a manageable number of sub problems by looking at the types of damage that exist and enumerating them and enumerating how we might actually address them. And the way I’ve been describing it for the past decade is like this, that there are just seven types of damage, and they’re very concrete, down to earth thins, as you can see. Cell loss simply means Cells dying and not being automatically replaced in the body by the division of other cells. So we have to replace them using medicine instead. I haven’t got time to go down this entire list, but there are Two ways in which you can have too many cells rather than too few. And there are two types of damage that matter inside cells, and there are two types of damage that matter in the spaces between cells.

Aubrey de Grey

The first piece of good news is that it really does seem that this is a complete list. Everything on this list has been the subject of intensive durontological interest and research for at least thirty years. which is quite nice. Furthermore, I have actually, as I just said, been challenging the community to extend this list. I’ve been describing it in these explicit terms for ten years, and nobody seems to have done so, so that’s pretty good news.

Aubrey de Grey

But the best news, of course, is that we do have a very good idea how to actually go about addressing these things. So if we start at the top with cell loss, of course, you’ve all heard of stem cell therapy. That’s exactly what stem cell therapy is. It’s putting cells into the body which will divide and differentiate to replace cells that the body is not replacing on its own. And we can go down this list and talk in similarly concrete terms about all of these other things.

Aubrey de Grey

The reason Sense Research Foundation exists is because most of these things are not being pursued anything like so aggressively and heavily with any tons of money as stem cell therapy is, and therefore, they’re at an earlier stage of advancement and they need small organizations such as ourselves. We’re only four million dollars budget last year. to actually push this forward. Much of the work that we do both at our research center in Mountain View and extramurally in universities around the world, mostly in the US. is based on the more neglected areas among on this list. And of course, I’d be very happy to talk more about the science here to anyone who’s interested during lunch. I will only be here, I’m afraid, until about half past three. I have to get on a plane to Baltimore. But I will be delighted to chat with anyone who’s interested.

Aubrey de Grey

And this is this book I wrote a few years ago is also a good place to go. It’s written for a general audience. I call it semi-technical because it’s definitely heavy going. If you’re not a biologist, you will have to read it slowly, but it does not rely on you know prior knowledge of jargon and expertise, it definitely is something that any educated layman ought to be able to get through with a bit of work. And the good news is that even though it was written five or six years ago now it is still pretty up to date, by which I do not mean that nothing has happened. there’s been plenty of progress. The good what I mean is that the progress has been very much in line with what we predicted. The types of steps forward that have been made have been very much the ones that are already described in the book, or else we’d have written another one by now. So that’s pretty good news.

Aubrey de Grey

But as I said, for the rest of my time, I want to focus on the issues surrounding the desirability of this work. And indeed, I want to put the case to you that not only is the crusade against aging a thing that’s compatible with Scripture. But actually, that it’s mandated by Scripture, that it would be a sin not to do this. Um I’m going to start just with psychology, because it seems bleeding obvious, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about preventative medicine for the diseases of old age, diseases that we are spending the most fabulous amount trying to treat at the moment very ineffectively. And, you know, that seems like a no-brainer. But unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be like that in most people’s minds. Most people have a lot of difficulty seeing that the diseases of old age really are just indistinguishable, indivisible from aging itself. They think there’s this thing, aging itself, which is somehow different and somehow natural and inappropriate to be addressed with medicine. It’s complete bullshit. So, I’m going to talk about this a little bit.

Aubrey de Grey

First of all, why do people think this way? My view is that they think this way because they have to. People basically need to put aging out of their minds because they know it’s ghastly and they know it’s inevitable, whereas they’ve got this weird idea in their minds that the diseases of old age are not inevitable. Of course, the only reason people can think that the diseases of old age are not inevitable is because you only get some of them before you die. But if you didn’t get those ones, you’d get the other ones, right? And people just sort of kind of forget that. So they put this out of their minds because they know it’s ghastly and they think it’s inevitable. And that makes perfect sense. It’s rational to do that for something that really is ghastly and inevitable. you know, and get on with your miserably short life and make the best of it. Um uh but uh but of course the problem is that now uh we are within striking distance of seriously doing something about aging medically.

Aubrey de Grey

And that means that this whole attitude, this ra this denial, has become a vastly enormous part of the problem. I call it uh uh this is where it generally comes down to. This is why it’s so hard to break this down. People have decided that aging is immutable, and the main way that they have convinced themselves to put it out of their minds is by deciding that aging is actually good, or at least not bad And these two things feed on each other in my experience. I s I talk to lay people about this issue, of course, all the time. People essentially will, in so many words, they will say, yes, I refuse to think very seriously about the question of whether aging really is immutable or whether it might be attacked by medicine, because No, who cares? It’s not it wouldn’t be a good idea anyway. Aging is a good thing. But then the same people in the same breath will also be s be thinking and sort of saying, Well, I actually refuse to think seriously about the question of whether aging is desirable, because, after all, it’s academic. We can’t do anything about it. So, um um yeah. So so so it’s a bit ridiculous. And so most of my much of my time is spent embarrassing people into pulling these things apart and addressing them individually. And I’m going to address the question of whether it’s a good thing now.

Aubrey de Grey

So, these are some of the things I’m going to talk about: potential ethical issues of seeking to defeat aging. I’m going to go through six of them. Um uh actually I’m kind of joined two of them together, I think. But anyway, here we go. Um first of all, I’m going to talk about the question of whether it’s actually wrong to seek immortality, whatever the hell that is, by technology.

Aubrey de Grey

Now here’s the big problem. I’m not actually only proposing to extend the healthy human lifespan by thirty years. I think that these therapies that we’re working on and that we want to work on and that I feel we have a good chance, maybe fifty, fifty chance of developing within the next twenty five years or so, will deliver about thirty additional years of healthy life. And furthermore, the good news is that they will deliver those years to people who are already in middle age or perhaps even older at the time that those therapies arrive. because of course they are repair therapies, not just slowing down the accumulation of damage. So that’s fantastic. But as many of you may know

Aubrey de Grey

I have made a rather um more uh extreme claim over the years based on the concept of longevity escape velocity. which essentially says that if we get those thirty years, or once we get those thirty years, therapies that can be applied to people who are, let’s say, sixty and will rejuvenate them well enough that they won’t be biologically sixty again until they’re chronologically ninety Then we’ve got those we’ve bought those thirty years to d to figure out what to do next, what to give to the ninety year old when they come back biologically sixty to re-rejuvenate them more thoroughly so that they will be able won’t be biologically sixty a third time until they’re, let’s say, chronologically one hundred and fifty. It turns out when you go when you delve into the details of this and you think about how rapidly technology would need to develop this medical technology in order for this to happen, it turns out that it’s completely certain, it’s vanishingly unlikely that we would fail to maintain longevity escape velocity once we get to the point of getting those first thirty years. In fact, even thirty is probably an over conservative number. Even if we only got initially fifteen years, I think we’d definitely be in the longevity escape velocity region. So that is good news.

Aubrey de Grey

But what it means is quite a lot. It means that we are likely to live a lot longer. I’ll come back to that in a second. If you think about the length of life that people live today, and you look at the causes of death. and you factor out the ones that are age related, in other words, if you look at the risks of death that are not related to old age, and specifically if you look in the industrialized world, then you essentially find that people less than ten percent less than ten percent of people die of age independent causes. And that means, broadly speaking, that if you eliminated aging, then people would live about ten times longer. That’s quite a lot longer, really. In fact, that’s a rather conservative estimate for reasons that I may be able to come back to later. It’s very likely that we would have at least four digit lifespans once we got rid of ageing, and so long as we maintained Longevity escape velocity, we wouldn’t actually have to completely get rid of aging at the beginning, but the effects would be equivalent to if we had.

Aubrey de Grey

So the question is, you know, is this a bad thing? Should we regard this as equival morally equivalent to actual immortality as talked about in Scripture? And of course the answer is, of course not. Until 200 years ago, we already didn’t have death from aging to speak of. Hardly anyone died of aging because they didn’t have time. Aging at death had what you might think of with a radioactivity-like distribution. People had a rough a half-life. Of course, there were differences. It was very bad to be age zero, you were particularly vulnerable then, things like that. But it was, broadly speaking, a a a a a an exponential distribution. Today, it ain’t like that. Hardly anyone dies until about sixty. Almost everyone’s died dead by a hundred, so it’s a sort of convex survival curve distribution. So what we’re talking about is removing aging from the equation, and that effectively takes us back to the premedical era in terms of the distribution of ages at death. It goes back to being essentially a radioactive distribution. It’s just it’s more stretched out than before. So the idea that this is in some w sense morally wrong seems to be, you know, pretty damn crazy. It’s it’s bizarre. You know, this is how we how we were originally. I’m going to move on now to this idea, the idea that we might end up with extended ill health.

Aubrey de Grey

So in other words, it would cause more suffering. And I want to stop there for a second because I do want to emphasize, especially to an audience like this, that I don’t work on longevity. Longevity of the thought that I’m talking about here, dramatic though it may be, will be a side effect of staying healthy. It’s all about keeping healthy. So I mean You know, this is actually what biologists say.

Aubrey de Grey

Colin Blakemore is a guy that I did a debate with about a year ago in England. And he’s a very influential man. He used to run the Medical Research Council. That’s the UK equivalent of the NIH. Which means he is far more influential than anyone who studies the biology of aging. And he actually said this. This is not even like off the cuff remarks. This is actually part of his prepared speech. He says that the the mission of trying to defeat aging is unrealistic and is a distraction from the task of preventing and curing disease. Now I’ve just explained to you that in fact it’s the only way to cure. So um and he actually thinks this. He actually thinks this. He’s completely blind to the fact that age-related diseases are part of aging. Secondly, he says, if this miracle should somehow happen, the consequences would be disaster for humanity and for the planet. In other words, he totally hasn’t thought about the fact that aging is actually quite bad for you, it causes quite a lot of suffering.

Aubrey de Grey

Um so I mean we we can unfortunately we can make these dramatic statements. If you get into the details of um you know what this means, then it’s chances the chances are that once we get those ex those initial thirty years so that we have people living to up to one hundred and fifty, of course, the world record longevity at the moment is around one hundred and twenty, then we will be almost there. We will have done the hard part. People only slightly younger will probably live to four digits. We can say this. But in the short term, we’ve got rather more important things to worry about. You know, the fact that people won’t get these diseases that we’re not terribly fond of. And I think that’s quite important to remember.

Aubrey de Grey

So it’s all about this. It’s all about remembering that the longevity benefit is the side benefit. And we’re talking about restoring people and maintaining them in a state where they don’t just look, but they also feel and function. Just like a younger dove, however long ago they were born. That’s what this is all about. So it’s absolutely ridiculous. To oppose this work on the basis that it might somehow extend age-related ill health and thereby increase suffering or anything like that. All right, so here’s the one that makes my blood boil the most, actually.

Aubrey de Grey

And I’m going to talk about this a little bit because it’s something that Gerontologists who study the sociology of aging actually think in large numbers most social gerontologists would subscribe to what you’re saying on this slide. You don’t have to read it because I’ll just pick out the important part. The key thing here is that there is some kind of it seems almost deliberate confusion, conflation. between ageing on the one hand and old age on the other hand. See this? Several professional groups present themselves as waging war on old age. He actually wrote this. This is John Benson, a very distinguished British social gerontologist. And quite a nice guy, actually, if you talk to him about anything else. And he goes on about the symbolic practices of these groups, and it reveals that they share a dominant cultural view. What’s the sort of language that sociologists like to use? And they talk about the extending disguise, a contradiction in their aim of understanding these diseases. By advocating the goal of an extended healthy lifespan, which avoids having to confront the moral dilemmas of extending the lifespan for its own sake. In other words, they’re making this complete straw man, this completely false accusation that we’re in this for longevity’s sake. And trying to sort of hide behind something that is actually worth doing. So it it’s a bit it’s a bit of a frustration, that, but it happens a lot. And when you come across this in the wider world when you l when you leave this room, you know don’t tolerate it. Okay, I’m going to spend a little more time on these two, which I’m going to deal with jointly because they really are two sides of the same coin.

Aubrey de Grey

The issue here is You know, um, relative priorities. There are an awful lot of good causes out there, things that we ought to spend our time and our money on. The question is which should we spend our time and money on? A lot of people will say, well, you know, when we’ve cured malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and and, you know, generally helped the disadvantaged sufficiently, then let’s worry about dealing with the um health and and um and welfare of people who are already doing pretty well. I say that’s bullshit because basically, first of all, there are a lot more people suffering because of old age than there are people even suffering from malaria and such like. And secondly, because the main reason for thinking this way is actually this down here. that people inherently aren’t really convinced that this is even slightly possible and therefore, they don’t really want to prioritize it.

Aubrey de Grey

I think it’s really important also to think about what we think what we might call the discount rate, because when something is at an early stage in research, It, of course, by definition, is going to be a while before it actually benefits humanity. And therefore, one might say, well, okay, it’s more important to do good now. And one could interpret that as simply, you don’t know whether the research is going to succeed But one could go further, one could just say, Well, people who are alive today matter more than people who will be alive in the future or will be in need of help in the future. I think that’s dubious, personally. I think that’s basically not true. Apart from anything else, we’ve got to consider the possibility of positive feedback. If we actually do even a little bit of good early on, we may be able to spur more effort to do more thereafter because people will think it’s more realistic. This is the real discount rate thing, though. Your uncertainty. Intervening events may make the effort pay off less than expected. That may be because the research will fail, or it may be that the research will be found to be the wrong research, and something else will come along that works better. But really none of these none of this really adds up. You’ve got to work with the information you have, I think, and try and make the most of it for the benefit of humankind.

Aubrey de Grey

GiveWell is an interesting agency that does evaluations of charities. And this is from an email that I had from the guy who runs GiveWell, Holden Karnofsky. He’s very convinced that this is a good idea. He definitely thinks that, and he talks about life extension, he doesn’t even talk about health the way I do, right? He thinks that this is a good thing. He’s using very diplomatic language here, basically saying I’m not interested in this, but saying he thinks it will take us a while to come to the to decide whether he should be interested. is whether it represents the best use of funding when factoring in existing efforts and tractability. In other words, he hasn’t read my stuff, he doesn’t know whether it’s actually going to work, and he doesn’t really believe it anyway. Which is a great shame, but you’ve got to start somewhere and actually educate these people. This is something that another person working in this same movement, which is now called the Effective Altruism Movement

Aubrey de Grey

And generally evaluating whether particular causes are more are better uses of dollars than others. He says things like this. My house probably won’t burn down this year, but I still buy house insurance. This is an important point to remember. Even if you think that there is a low probability of research to to postpone or indeed eliminate the diseases of old age will succeed. If you think that probably won’t succeed, let’s say you even think it’s only got a one percent chance of succeeding. So you divide the potential impact by one hundred, then it’s so bigger than v than anything else, really. So you can’t really use that as an argument for not prioritizing it.

Aubrey de Grey

This is an interesting statement by a very prominent ethicist, Peter Singer, at Princeton. And he basically said the same thing. This is at the this is from the end of an essay he wrote just a couple of months ago that was very widely published actually. I was very happy about this. As he says, there’s only a small even if there’s only a small chance that I’m right, the huge payoffs make it a better bet than areas of medical research that are currently far better funded. That’s the key thing that I think if that idea can get out there, then we’ve got a much better chance of getting this work funded better.

Aubrey de Grey

It’s a temp I think basically Karnofsky’s position is something that it’s very sed it’s very seductive to think that way, to think that you’d like to um you know, be able to evaluate these probabilities accurately and come to a conclusion. But we can’t. We just know that we can’t actually do so. So it’s it’s high-risk high gain is all very well, even if you agree with that If you know that your uncertainty of the risk, of evaluating the risk, is enormous, then maybe just don’t go there. Just do stuff where you can evaluate things more accurately. I think we should resist that temptation. I think we have to determine the expected value of a particular effort on the basis of the information we have, even if we know that that information is woefully inadequate. So finally, I’m going to talk about other unknown things going wrong.

Aubrey de Grey

There was a question after one of the earlier talks concerning the the possible consequences, in particular to do with overpopulation, of seriously combating aging and essentially decimating the death rate. And of course, this is a question that has been asked once or twice before over the years. And I have a and unlike the speaker who said he didn’t have a good answer, I do have a good answer. But before I give the answer, I want to point out how insidiously pervasive this sort of thinking is. And it’s not just about overpopulation. It’s about general dystopic consequences of the defeat of aging.

Aubrey de Grey

This is a blurb from a book that I can’t remember what the book’s called, and that’s good because I don’t want to tell you. This is the sort of thing that you have to put up with in fiction. And of course, it happens in film all the time. Imagine a near future where a curfew rating is discovered and made available to people worldwide after much political debate. Immortality, see the the the I word. Yeah, you c you can you can always tell when someone’s going to disparage this work if they use the word immortality to describe it. Um however, comes with its own unique problems, including evil green people. Government euthanasia programmes, you know, I mean you’ve seen you’ve seen probably Blade Runner and In Time, you know, the g you get the idea. A disturbing new religious cult. I couldn’t yeah, you know all about that. Oh God, I’ve got the name of the book right there. I’m sorry about that. It’s an unforgettable thriller. Well, I’ll forget it right now.

Aubrey de Grey

So, this is what happened. But here’s the point. If you actually put the faintest thought into the actual topic that we’re talking about, you can immediately reject this sort of argument. It always comes down to the uncritical adoption of some particular assumption about what the future is going to be like. which, when examined even a tiny little bit, can be seen to be absurd.

Aubrey de Grey

So let’s just first of all talk about overpopulation. Now, one rather important thing about the elimination of aging, or indeed the elimination of death, is that people will still only get older at one year per year. Right, we’re not going to have any thousand-year-old people for another 900 years, whatever happens. Now, an awful lot happens in 900 years. In particular, an awful lot of technology happens in 900 years. And that’s rather important to bear in mind here. We are not going to be surprised by this problem. This problem is going to happen progressively. And we’re going to have the opportunity to use technological and other means, maybe technological though, to address it. However, let’s first of all look at what the problem is. How many kids are people going to want anyway?

Aubrey de Grey

You know, fertility rates, I’m sure you all know, have been going down worldwide. The United Nations predicts that at this point as things stand, without the elimination of aging, global population will actually peak and start to decline around the middle of this century. Sure, that would probably be delayed if we didn’t have a didn’t have death from aging anymore. But the reason it’s happening is because people are getting less keen on having kids. As any society gets to the point of a certain level of hum of female prosperity and emancipation and education, they just seem to want to do other things with their lives for a lot longer than they used to. They and so it’s and it’s not just about how many they have, it’s also, I just alluded to, the age at which they have them. At the moment, we see universally that when our population goes through this transition of having fewer kids they also have a rise in the average age at which women have their kids. Of course, women sometimes want to get their kids younger, but we’re talking about averages here because we’re talking about population. One thing that has to be borne in mind, therefore, is that an aspect of aging that will be eliminated along with all the others is menopause, which means that the increase in the average age of childbirth is very likely to accelerate by as women who are choosing to have their kids later can choose to have them a decade later still and a decade later still. And that, of course, has an enormous impact, I’m sure you can easily see, on the trajectory of global population.

Aubrey de Grey

The big one is this one, though. The carrying capacity of the planet is not a fixed quantity. It’s determined by technology. As we develop, whether it’s nuclear fusion or more renewable energy or whatever, the carbon footprint comes down and it becomes possible to have more people on the planet with less environmental impact. And therefore, the overpopulation problem, such as it might be, is powerfully alleviated. So none of these things come into the thinking that ninety nine point nine percent of people actually engage in when they dis when they address these things. And we’re actually funding a project now with a very distinguished group at the University of Denver to look at this properly, to develop really rigorous systems for forecasting through to twenty one hundred what’s actually going to happen.

Aubrey de Grey

People also say, Well, I wouldn’t want to work all my lo you know, for nine hundred years and I wouldn’t want to like, you know, I want to retire when I’m sixty five, same as I always thought I was going to be able to and all that sort of thing. Well, hello. You know, my previous field, artificial intelligence, is an important player here. We know that at the moment there’s been an enormous shift over the past century or so. from manual labor jobs, manufacturing and agriculture and so on, into the service sector. And the reason there has been this shift is because we enabled it by automation that meant that we don’t need so many people working in the um in the manual sector. Now of course we’re seeing already a great deal of automation of the service sector, and that’s going to continue. And what’s going to happen next? What is there left after that? There’s entertainment, basically. There’s only so many people you can have entertaining, right? So we’re going to have to bite this bullet and abandon the entire concept that the economy is revolves around everyone Who wants to being able to work forty hours a week on things they don’t actually want to do? So the whole idea of thinking about pensions in the way that we think about them now or thinking about The working life in the way we think about it now is already completely crazy, irrespective of anything that we might do with the elimination of aging. I’m going to come finally in my last two minutes to a question that is explicitly religious.

Aubrey de Grey

And I think it’s an important one. I wrote a paper about this a few years ago. This is essentially an attitude that I come across quite often when I speak to religious people about this topic. They have a sort of lack of urgency about the whole thing, because, you know, well, yeah, it’s going to be grim being sick when I’m old, but I won’t be sick for long, and then I’ll have an indefinite time when I’m in heaven and all that, and that’s wonderful. But the thing is, you know If we examine Scripture here, and I think this applies pretty much universally across religions, um, then it doesn’t really seem to work, it doesn’t seem to fly. I mean, we know that scriptures tend to say that murder is probably a bad thing. Okay, you shouldn’t do it. Um and we know that they tend to say that suicide’s a bad thing, you shouldn’t do that either, right? Now, they also say that there’s no

Aubrey de Grey

Distinction, there’s a moral equivalence between action and inaction. So let’s just take for the sake of argument the parable of the Good Samaritan. It was the people who didn’t act who were sinning, right? So In other words, if we tolerate our own ageing, we are essentially sinning by inaction. We are hastening our own death by inaction when we could act To stay down here for as long as God wants us to, and you know, do more good down here until God calls time on us. And of course, this is in no way playing God and disrupting God’s plan, the way some people carelessly say, because, you know. Last I heard God was supposed to be omnipotent, and therefore he can strike you down with a thunderbolt, however healthy you are, right?

Aubrey de Grey

But above all, above all, aging is bad for you. It causes an amazing amount of suffering. And therefore, you know, defending aging, or even like being ambivalent about it, not Pursuing some contribution to the crusade against aging is ultimately rejecting a chance to alleviate suffering. And that seems to me to be absolutely clear and present evidence that it’s a sin not to strive to fix aging.

Aubrey de Grey

So I’ll just stop there and point out that most people in this room would probably prefer to be the person on the left, even if he is about to have his head bitten off by a shark, and that it’s up to you to help. I can’t do this on my own. I’m a biologist, I’m doing the research, I’m orchestrating the research, but ultimately the research takes money. Money only happens with public support. Public support only happens with advocacy, and everybody can do advocacy. If you like what I’ve said, then don’t just keep it to yourself. Go out and say it to your friends, to your colleagues, to your finally. Make sure that this is m is increasingly adopted as a way of thinking that actually makes sense, and then this research will bear fruit sooner than it otherwise would. Thank you very much. All right. So is the time for a few questions? Good, marvelous. Good. Uh he w he actually was to us one that way.

Speaker 4

It wasn’t just yeah, uh great Very, very, very poignant and exactly why I think I want to run for office. So I got a two-part question. One is how much of your funding currently is coming from government sources. I can answer that real quickly. None. No. We are actually in the process of trying to change that, but we’re not holding our breath. At the moment, virtually all our public funding comes through philanthropy. And two, what came up to me was once we achieve this and we have more time

Aubrey de Grey

you know, we see often in tribal society and then in just with people who are spoiled with the time, they get into a lot of trouble. And they start wars when they’re not harvesting. Where is have you have you put any thought as how we will prevent? Okay, yeah, this is an excellent point, and I think one can definitely argue it both ways. My sense is that the strongest influence on people’s inclination to violence and so on as a result of all this will be the opposite of what you describe, simply because violence involves risk to life. And The more you value your life, the less willing you are to put it at risk. So, you know, arguably this would mean that people would actually Withdraw from violence as the quantity of life ahead of them is increased and therefore the value of life as they perceive it is increased. I think the evidence for that is quite strong in what we’ve seen in recent history. For example, country after country abandoning the death penalty and abandoning conscription into the army, for that matter, abandoning were armed conflict pretty much. Now, the last time there was an actual armed conflict, a proper war between wealthy countries was World War Two. And that is actually the longest interval of time since, you know, since the dawn of history, that that’s been true. So this is pretty good news. And I think we can see certainly in more prosperous neighbourhoods there’s less violence, you know, how come? It must be because the people don’t want to do it, really. So yes, I mean, I think your point about tribal societies is, however, an important one. It definitely bears more research. Um I apologize.

Speaker 5

Um I apologize for the very elementary notion of question, but science is more science. So I don’t know a lot about this, but I’ve always kind of wondered um if I’m correct, you said earlier that in the past aging was heavy they’re who yeah, that’s right. Hardly anyone died of aging because they died of other stuff first. Okay. So I’ve always wondered in the Old Testament etymologies and stories when it says that him his wife and the child at 18 years old. Do you take or they, you know, they live for generations lived for thousands of years? Is that illegal or is that just Look at that as a spiritual. Is there some way more simple that maybe you would look at that? I haven’t the faintest idea, but I do know that whether it’s true or not. the way to go about restoring us to that the state that is described there, or better, is one that involves simply biomedical research, and so it doesn’t really change anything.

Speaker 6

Aubrey, thank you. First a statement, then a question. I want to tie everything you’ve said to a very deep-rooted Mormon thought, and that is the Mormon ideal ideology is to create a heaven on earth. One of the reasons that Salt Lake exists out in this eighteen fifties desert is to begin that Utopian city. And I’m just carrying that idea forward to create the Utopia That you’ve described. Of course, we do it in terms of Brotherhood, Fellowship, Liberty, and Poverty. I think you’re right. I just like to say, I think you’re right about that. And I don’t think it’s only the Mormon faith that feels this way. One thing that I ought to mention that’s relevant here is that the precursor of Sense Foundation, the Methuselah Foundation, which was the first organization that I started back in two thousand two, the co founder with me of that, David Goebel, is the Jehovah’s Witness, and they, of course, have somewhat similar beliefs in that regard.

Speaker 6

Now, my question, and it has a little hint of humor to it. Since people will live longer in your Objective here? Probably, depending on whether God throws a thunderbolt. Do you see as the ideal that we all age pretty much the way we do now and we plateau at age twenty-five? or that the life expectancy of sixty to eighty now simply gets elongated. Therefore, the terrible twos of that we now have get stretched out for twenty years. That the teenage years of 13 to 19 hit about age 50, etc. How do you see that? Yeah, okay, that’s a perfectly valid question. And the answer is very simple. Yes, we will basically. Not have any change in the development period in reaching adulthood, and then after that, people will stay pretty much at the age they choose to stay. So because aging will not be eliminated, but rather it will be repaired periodically, this means that your biological age essentially is oscillating between treatments. And exactly how old you biologically are simply depends on how thoroughly and how frequently you have the treatments.

Speaker 7

Hi, Aubrey. There was a survey that was that I heard reported on A few months ago, where only one to two percent of the population expressed any interest in living hundreds of years. And I’m wondering if there is a a role that you see for the arts to play in keeping people’s imaginations and in enlivening their imaginations to get more interest in that, which would convert, of course, Into more donations to foundations.

Aubrey de Grey

Yeah, there’s a kind of yes, I I believe in a kind of pincer movement here. On the one hand, as you’ve heard, I spend a lot of my effort ensuring that people focus on the health aspect rather than the longevity aspect. But secondly, I agree that if we could simply get people more comfortable with the longevity aspect, then that would sort of be a Pinter movement. And this is important to do because Try as I may, I cannot stop journalists writing articles about me with the word immortality in the title. The fact is, you know, it i that they b journalists do like to sell papers and they do like to sensationalize this work. So, sure. I mean, I don’t I’m I am Emphatically not an artist, so I do not know whether art or indeed humanities in general is really in a position to achieve what you describe. I certainly wish it were. My sense is somewhat pessimistic. I think it’s no accident that films and books about the about a post-aging world tend to emphasize arbitrary dystopic storylines. because it just sort of it’s it reinforces the pro-aging trance, so to speak, and thereby, you know, makes people go away, you know, comforted and their views that aging is a good thing and that we shouldn’t fix it are entrenched. And I think that happens simply because it sells, right? So it’s all very well to create art that, or indeed books or films, that Tell the opposite story, but you’ve got to make them actually be you actually got to get an audience for them, and I don’t know how to do that.

Speaker 8

Hi, I have a comment. I think aging should be part of effective altruism, of course, and that effective altruism is maybe the most important meta idea in the world, and that includes considering things that seem strange to other people, like aging. And I noticed that you yourself, mister DeGrey, posted a module, I think, on thinkthehighimpact network. org. So you seem to know quite a bit about it. I know quite a few of the people in that movement, yes. Okay, great. That’s really cool. In fact, there are about twenty or so meetups, and I’d like to start one in Salt Lake City. And I thought the people in this room might be more likely to be interested. So watch out for that. My name is Adam Isen, by the way. Excellent. I congratulate you, Adam. That’s a very valuable thing to do. I think that this movement is still much too small and could definitely benefit.

Speaker 9

We have a question from our online participants. And you mentioned sort of the headlines that you typically see in the media. What would be some of your preferred headlines for advocacy? Preventative medicine for aging is possible. Too many syllables, aren’t it?

Speaker 1

Unfortunately, this needs to be the last question. He’ll be around still during what? Yep, so please this feel Last question for the border. First, I wanted to, of course, thank you for answering my question I couldn’t answer.

Speaker 10

But the other question is: is thoughts in terms of the more immediate period of this? Because obviously, you addressed somewhat the question about work in general. But when you look at this research and perhaps what the Sense Foundation itself is doing and the question of patents, and economics of this and how it spreads beyond some incredibly long lived rich people. What is, I guess, if you will, the framework that the Sense Foundation has and yourself in terms of how this work should be done In the immediate term and then in the long term with the hard parts. Yeah, so the answer to your question is easy.

Aubrey de Grey

The hard part is getting the answer acknowledged and accepted by the people who need to. So the answer is, aging is such so extraordinarily expensive that any therapies that we had that really did constitute comprehensive and effective preventative geriatrics would pay for themselves in no time at all. It would become completely economically suicidal for any nation not to make these therapies free at the point of delivery For anyone who was old enough to need them, irrespective of ability to pay. The word that we paid for through taxation. I know that in the US or other sign insanely tax averse societies, um, uh unlike my own. Uh that the the um con that this concept sounds a bit a bit, you know, foreign, but the fact is, you know, it’s it’s like basic education. You know, basic education in this country is free too, right? And that’s because you all know that if you didn’t actually educate your kids, then twenty years down the road you’d be screwed. Yes, I mean the education should be better, of course, than it is, but still, it’s that sort of logic. The th this economic arithmetic does not apply to high-tech medicines of today, and that’s why we see indeed their availability being restricted by ability to pay. So people just have to understand that. And when I say people, I mean government, obviously, who have to make the policies to make this work. I mean the public, who have to vote the government’s in. And I also mean, of course, as you were alluding to, the private sector. The whole medical industry has to understand this. There’s a bit of a counterintuitive thing here because, of course, at the moment, the medical industry makes its money out of sick people, and the overwhelming majority of sick people are sick because of aging. So we one might superficially think that what we’re doing here is essentially destroying the medical industry, and they probably wouldn’t like that. But of course, that’s not really true because the medical industry is perfectly capable of developing and delivering products that constitute preventative geriatrics if the money’s there. So all we really need to do is get society to be on board for preventative medicine for the diseases of old age, and then the industry will follow the money.