Unexplainable - A 150-year-old human

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

Two scientists. A billion-dollar wager. One unanswered question: Is the first human who will live to 150 already alive? The technology to make that happen may already be in development. But if it works, there will be new, unsettling questions for humankind to answer. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to sign up for our newsletter, view show transcripts, and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So I was at a conference at UCLA, I think in about 2000. And there was a reporter there, and she asked the group, when is the first 150-year-old person going to be alive? Steve Ostad, biology professor. We all looked at each other, nobody wanted to answer, and finally I burst out. I think the person's already alive. Steve's quote got published, where it made its way over to his friend, Jay. And then Jay called me up, and I basically called Steve up and I said, come on. Jay Olshansky, public health professor.

You're not serious, right? That somebody alive today is going to live to 150. Steve was serious. So was Jay. That's basically the way that the wager started. I think the idea was his. He seems to be a betting man. We each put in $150 of course, which we subsequently doubled.

And they each felt confident, so confident that they started investing the money. And I think that it's going to be at least a billion dollars when all is said and done in the year 2150, but Steve and I will both be long gone. I would say in the best case scenario, Jay will be gone. But I don't think it's impossible at all that my children could be around then. It's unexplainable. I'm Noah Massenfeld. Stephen Jay's human longevity bet could last all the way till 2150. So we've got a long way to go before we finally get an answer here.

But till then, there are some good arguments on both sides. For one, people can already get pretty old. Jean Calmond, who cycled until she was a mere hundred and only gave up smoking two years ago, recommends laughter as a recipe for long life. Calmont died in 1997, and even though there's some debate about her exact age, it's likely she lived to 122. But since then, no one's even reached 120. It's interesting. You would think that with life expectancy going up so much that somebody would have surpassed Jean Calman's record at this point, but nobody has.

Ferris Jaber is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine. So life expectancy over the past century massively increased. And at first, that was because medicine, technology, culture, dramatically reduced deaths in childhood. And then more recently, it's been because we've been able to extend people's lives in their more elderly years. But lifespan, the maximum reported age at death, there's a huge debate about whether that is actually still increasing or not. This lifespan debate, it's not just, huge. It's wide-ranging. It includes everything from statistical analyses to bioengineering to fundamental questions about why we even age at all.

You know, each time life expectancy rises, it gets harder to raise it further. Remember, only one person has to make this age. We're not saying that the life expectancy would become 150. But for one person to survive this long, that strikes me as increased increasingly likely, not decreasingly likely. You know, just going from 122 to 130 is about a light year away. Going from 130 to 150 is about a universe away, which is why it's not going to happen, by the way. So Ferris, we've got this debate about whether humans have an upper limit to our lifespan.

Before we get to the biology of it, what's the evidence right now that this upper limit does exist? So when longevity researchers investigate, this question, they usually draw on these large data sets of lifespan statistics. And so when some researchers do this, they come out with graphs and conclusions showing that lifespan has reached an effective limit. You know, Jean Kalman was this outlier and people just really can't make it much past 115 to 120. So that's the argument that the top edge of our lifespan can't be increased. What's the argument that we might be able to get even older?

So other longevity researchers, when they also perform statistical analyses on mortality data, they come out with graphs and conclusions showing that the risk of death in people's elderly years seems to plateau. So the idea is that the risk of dying is pretty much accelerating throughout your life, but you have pretty much the same risk of dying from years. a year once you've made it into old age. And therefore, they argue there is no effective limit to lifespan because you could kind of just keep coasting. Right. That's sort of basically the idea of, you know, you can flip a coin and it's just a 50-50 shot each time. So maybe it's unlikely, but it's possible you could get a bunch of heads or tails in a row. Right. Theoretically,

you could just get really lucky and keep getting heads, keep getting life, and just keep living. But I think even the longevity experts who argue that there may not be a limited lifespan, I don't think they actually expect people to live for an incredibly long time without some sort of serious intervention. It's just that they think that there's a lot of inherent elasticity to human lifespan and that theoretically we could keep pushing it a lot longer than we already have. What do you mean we have inherent elasticity in our lifespan? Well, when you start thinking about it, as far as I can tell, there's nothing really in physics or biology that absolutely mandates that an organism has to age and die. You know, animals and plants and fungi and microbes, as long as they have a source of energy and a way to continually repair themselves, they theoretically could keep going. So then it's, you know, this really intriguing question, why do we age and die in the first place? like what is behind that, what is causing that?

Yeah, why do we age in the first place? So most scientists agree that aging refers to this set of physical processes that ultimately result in an organism's death. Cells stop dividing. Cromosomes will literally fracture and fragment. Mutations will accumulate. Your organs will start to fail over time. Your immune system just doesn't work as well anymore.

It's basically like a machine that gradually accumulates a bunch of small defects, and eventually it can't keep going because there's too many little things that are wrong, and it just doesn't function anymore. You know, just think of the body as a machine, and I argue that we're operating it beyond its biological warranty period right now. So I think the machine analogy doesn't work. Living systems can almost be defined as systems that have the ability to repair themselves. And machines typically don't.

You know, we're trying as hard as we can to push out the envelope of survival just by fixing body parts with band-aids. But we can't replace them all. All of our bodily organs have some ability to repair themselves. Ultimately, that fails. But that doesn't mean that we can't potentially incorporate those repair parts. processes and extend them. So if we were to start thinking of ourselves as these big machines, is there a reason why our parts start breaking down as we get older? So in biology, you know, in evolution of biology, there's always this instinct to try and figure out what, you know,

the adaptive function or purpose of a trait is. And most scientists agree that aging probably is not adaptive, that it did not evolve for an adaptive benefit. Some organisms, are able to kind of circumvent or escape this fate, but only a few. There's sort of a select class of organisms that are sort of able to evade aging. And it's because they're very strange in some ways. For example, there's a jellyfish called the immortal jellyfish.

Great name. Great name. A perfect descriptive name. And it's able to revert to its juvenile state if it is stressed or injured. And then recently scientists pulled up microbes from, you know, beneath the bottom of the ocean, and they think that those microbes had been there in a metabolically active state for 100 million years, just living and growing much, much more slowly than we are used to, but still technically alive.

But it's also true of really complex organisms sometimes like trees are probably the best example. Trees can be immortal? They can certainly be extremely long-lived. So, you know, there's a colony of trees called Pando, a colony. I believe it's in Utah. And scientists think it's probably been alive and sustaining itself for tens of thousands of years, at least, possibly longer. You're telling me that there's all these different types of organisms, from microbes to immortal jellyfish to even, like, a network of trees. So that seems like a wide swath of types of things.

I mean, why can't we do it? Why can't I be immortal? So we are complex vertebrates, and we have evolved an incredible suite of adaptations that while they are extremely helpful to us, they are also incredibly costly. They just requires a lot of calories and effort to maintain them. So, you know, everything from our incredibly large and dense brains to our ridiculously complex immune systems that we have not figured out at all. That's very different from being a little gelatinous blob in the ocean, like a jellyfish, you know, that is objectively much more simple. It doesn't have

nearly the kind of complex organs and tissues that we have. And even though we do have molecular and cellular mechanisms to repair damage, even those systems themselves are complicated and also begin to fail after a certain point. So I think there is pretty wide degree. that, you know, to truly have humans that are living for multiple centuries, we would have to do some sort of serious bioengineering that could take the form of tweaking our genetics. It could be drugs. So it would have to be some sort of fundamental change to our genetics or cells or molecules. I had this conversation with my daughter. After we had the bet, she goes, well, dad, I'm, you know, I might live to 150.

I go, if you live to 150, you don't get anything. Steve's relatives get all the money. I said, so, you know, you want to make it to 149 and a half. Yeah, a concern I've had when Jay tells me stories like this is that in 2149, when there are a dozen people ready to break the record, that some of his descendants are going to be out there prowling with guns in the neighborhood. God, thanks for the idea, Steve. I hadn't thought of that before.

He just guaranteed me the win. Right now, scientists are targeting cells, molecules, and even our genes to stretch the outer edges of our lifespan even further. But what if that's not the future we want? That's after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level.

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Free of charge. BetmGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. It's a surprise party for your 150th birthday. So Jay and I agree with the fact that in the normal course of events, where we get better at treating cancer and better at diagnosing heart disease and treating it, no one's going to live to be 150 that way. What we can do is find ways to slow the general aging rate.

He's right, but keep in mind you have to overcome the Achilles' heels of the human body. It's one thing to replace the knees and the hips and the heart and some of the internal organs, but you have to somehow influence the aging of the brain in order for this to work. I mean, in 120 years, right, we went from hardly being able to fly to sending things to Mars. And I think we're close to the beginning of when the biological technologies that we're developing are likely to take off. But the question is, how much can you forestall aging through technology like this?

And can we demonstrate that it simultaneously influences the aging of the mind and the body? Unexplainable, we're back. We've been hearing about what could end up being a billion-dollar bet. over whether someone alive today will live to 150. While the jury is still out on that question, both sides agree that to get a truly significant bump in our lifespan, we're probably going to need to do some bioengineering. And while that kind of technology might sound super futuristic,

science journalist Ferris Jaber says that a lot of it is about harnessing what our bodies can already do. As vertebrates, we do have the ability to renew and repair our tissues and cells. it's just that we mostly lose that ability as we get older. We all used to have superpowers. Children can actually completely regenerate their fingertips, and we completely lose that ability once we become adults. And other mammals are even better at regeneration.

There's a type of ground squirrel that has to go into extreme hibernation, and so its brain basically shrivels, and then it just re-sprouts when it comes out of hibernation, like a forest coming back from a forest fire. So it's not just immortal jellyfish, ancient tree colonies that have this potential. We have it too. You know, we do have these like innate lurking abilities of regeneration and part of the idea of this research is to kind of tap into those. Ferris says that there are three main ways that scientists are trying to tap into our

lurking superpowers. They're cellular, molecular, and genetic. We'll start with the ones that target cells. So James Kirkland at the Mayo Clinic. I'm not particularly smart. I just happen to have smart people around me. He's shown that there are certain cocktails of drugs, which will basically purge mice of their senescent cells. So these are the cells that have aged and have stopped dividing. They probably evolved as a defense mechanism largely against cancer and a way of clearing dead and damaged tissues. And he's shown in studies that if he gives mice and rodents these drugs, it gives them at least a month of extra healthy living, as he likes to call it. So that's option one, removing cells that come with aging.

Option two gets more targeted, focusing on actual molecules. At the University of California, Berkeley, there's a pair of bioengineers who are married, Rina and Michael Convoy. The idea is that they can dilute blood to remove molecules that promote aging. You kind of assume that aging is going in one direction. Believe it or not, it can go backward where you are younger. And according to their studies, it stimulates the kind of healing and rejuvenation that is more typical in childhood. Option three goes even further.

Rather than targeting cells or molecules that promote aging, this final option works with actual genes. David Sinclair at Harvard has shown that if you tweak gene expression of aging mice, you can at least partly restore vision loss. And all the genes that should be on when they're young, come back on. And all the genes that should be off when they're young gets shut off. He has this whole idea that a lot of aging

is to do not with the genes themselves, but the ways that the genes are being expressed, how genes are being turned on and off, and how that expression changes over time. Can we slow this down? And can we reset the system? Is there a reboot? Is there a backup hard drive of this early setup?

And he thinks that we could potentially reset those patterns of gene expression to more youthful states and that this would allow us to preserve your 30 or 40-year-old self for another decade longer than you would have otherwise. Okay, so are these all theoretical? Are these all, you know, it seems like you're talking about experiments on a lot of mice? I mean, how far are we from, you know, actual humans getting this type of treatment, so like realistic solutions to aging? I think we're pretty far away, especially from, you know, the kind of grand visions that researchers like David Sinclair have. I do think it's possible that in the next few decades, we could see some types of mild interventions.

I mean, maybe the kind of drugs that Kirkland is working on are the most likely to actually become, you know, realized. Yeah, his research seems simpler than messing with genes or molecules, right? Just removing the cells that come with aging? Right, because he's working with drugs, you know, that are already in existence, they've already moved into human clinical trials. But some of the other stuff like the genetic engineering, I think that's going to take a lot more work to prove that it actually works and that it's safe

and figure out how we would actually deliver it to people. What's really standing in the way here? Is it a lack of technology or is it safety concerns on people? I think it has a lot to do with the biological understanding. You know, when you're talking about rejuvenating tissues and cells, one of the major concerns is always cancer, you know, because a lot of the genes that are involved are the same ones that tumors

will take advantage of. And tumors are immortal cells that just keep going like crazy. Some researchers would tell me we're really playing with fire here. We have to be extremely careful with these types of changes. Zooming out here,

let's say we do get to a point where scientists have announced these workable lifespan extending technologies. Are we sure that's a good thing? So a lot of longevity researchers who are in favor of humans living for centuries, they see any sort of intervention that prolongs life and adds to health as inherently good.

The hope is that our generations will be able to expect to live till 90 and play tennis and even make it to 100 and still have a second, third, or fourth career. You could see your great, great, great, whatever it might be, grandchildren. You know, you could have a lot more time to experience the world. So why wouldn't we work towards that? Yeah, why wouldn't we want to work towards that? Probably the biggest one is overpopulation. What? Just fewer people dying, more people around?

Right. And then there's the problem of, what would that mean for politics and society and culture if there are all these generations that live for multiple centuries? And some ethicists have said, well, there is a wisdom to the evolutionary process of letting the older generation disappear. If the Civil War generation were still alive, do you really think that we would have civil rights in this country? Gay marriage? There's also a kind of more psychological or philosophical argument, you know, which is, is there actually value to having life being finite? I might say, I don't want this movie to end. And I'm really sad when the credits roll.

But that doesn't mean I want to see movies that never have endings. and therefore no middles or beginnings for then they wouldn't be movies a lot of writers and philosophers have worried that were we immortal we would suffer this malaise eventually we would just run out of meaningful experiences you know we would just have done everything

that the human brain can conceive of so this was actually I recently watched all of the good place and they explore this in the final season as well. You do everything, and then you're done. But you still have infinity left. This place kills fun and passion and excitement and love till all you have left are milkshakes. You know, when I think about technological advances, they often promise utopia. And then they just take what we already do

to more extreme places. And when you look around and you see that there's already this longevity gap between rich and poor, there's already this quality of life gap between rich and poor. Should we be worried that any sort of lifespan increasing technology would just sort of perpetuate this inequality gap that we already have? Right. And that's another major concern is that we clearly have not figured out how to have equality on a planet of about $8 billion. And it's easy to imagine a world in which only the truly wealthy could afford the best versions of them. It can get pretty apocalyptic when you think about all those possibilities.

Yeah, what do you make of the fact that there are all these scientists trying to extend the outer limits of the human lifespan when there are still so many people that don't even make it to any kind of old age, you know, or people that just have a really low quality of life at that point? I think a lot of these interventions, you know, come out of really important basic biological research because there is a lot to be gained from understanding more deeply the mechanisms underlying aging to help with a lot of new medical treatments, especially for things like cancer, you know, which are so closely related to those types of processes. So I think that that research is very worthy. And I also think the most desirable outcome of this kind of research would be to

dramatically improve people's well-being in the elderly years that they're already going to make it to. Yeah, could there be a scenario where we're just extending a type of old age that just gets worse? or harder? Yeah, I mean, I think there is universal recognition and agreement amongst longevity scientists that simply prolonging number of years is not a worthy or desirable goal. Like, you want people to live longer, but also healthier, right? Like, a lot of longevity researchers get somewhat defensive about this, and they say they were not interested in increasing lifespan.

We're interested in adding life to years, not years to life. That is their preferred phrasing. For there to be a 150-year-old person, there's going to have to be a life expectancy of around 100 years. And if it's just people staying alive that are frailer and frailer and frailer and frailer, that's a bargain that nobody's interested in. We've created this scenario. We got 30 years of added life as a result of reducing infant child and maternal mortality. We got exactly what we want. And in exchange, we got heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's, and all the diseases.

that appear in older bodies. We brought this on ourselves, but now we've got a different Faustian bargain that's in front of us. Instead of adding decades of life to children, we're now proposing to add decades of life to older individuals, but it has to be healthy life.

Yeah, the extension of life is going to be a side effect, but that's not a bad thing. The thing about addressing aging is that it doesn't just fix the brain, it doesn't just fix the heart of the muscles, or the eyes, you're going to be simultaneously fixing or prolonging the demise of all of these things. You know, whether or not somebody makes it to 150 or not, I think is largely irrelevant. The purpose behind the bet was to really emphasize and focus on the importance of aging science and

aging biology. It's real science. It's happening in real time. There's only been a few instances like that in history, where you've had some sort of breakthrough that has the potential to be as important as the one that we're talking about here. And the fact that we can now say with confidence that we will likely influence the aging of our species is revolutionary. Jay Olshansky is a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Steve Osteed is a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. They both still totally think they're right, by the way. And Ferris Jaber is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.

This episode was produced and scored by Noam Hassenfeld. Edits from Meredith Hodnott, Brian Resnick, and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing in sound design by me, Christian Ayala, and fact-checking from Mandi Nguyen and Laura Bullard. Bird Pinkerton has an unexplainable love for Formula One, Lauren Katz, heads up our newsletter, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of Vox Audio. You can sign up for a newsletter, read articles, and find show transcripts at vox.com slash unexplainable.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back in your feed next Wednesday. Yo, so for the jellyfish, I'm thinking something like, and then it's like big, it's like, and then it goes like, and then it's like three, ten, but it's just sounds sort of, I'm thinking like carwashy, like, flak.