Ending Aging

I wrote these notes in 2019; de Grey’s forecasts in the book date from 2008.

Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey is one of the more revolutionary books I’ve read ever. It doesn’t just ask the question ‘Can we live forever’? No, it proposes concrete research directions for solving the causes of death.

When I wrote this in 2019, I followed some of the research and found it amazing to see what had happened in the previous 11 years, since 2008. I hoped to become involved in solving ageing someday.

Here are some of my notes from the book:

The dedication reads: “To the tens of millions whose indefinite escape from ageing depends on our actions today”. De Grey’s central move is to focus on the damage metabolism causes and how to repair it, rather than trying to solve metabolism itself. In his account, removing that damage could remove ageing.

The book says that more than 90% of deaths in industrialised countries result from ageing, as opposed to homicide, suicide or road accidents. It also says: “The average person in the industrialised world consumes more health-care resources in his or her last year of life than in an entire life up to that point”. That makes me wonder how much keeping people healthy could save.

De Grey wrote the book to shift public perception, making ageing the new smoking and opening up the possibility of intervention. Writing in 2008, he gave a 50/50 chance of finding solutions to the then-current ageing diseases by 2038, followed by discoveries fast enough to stay ahead of new threats. I question how equally any such therapies would be distributed and how quickly they would be adopted, although I would like to benefit from those therapies.

On diet, I think we should eat well, enjoy food and eat mostly plants. De Grey agrees, but does not see diet as a way to solve ageing; he thinks it might add a few years, while he is aiming for more. He argues that there is no fixed biological barrier to preventing ageing because our bodies did not evolve the relevant survival mechanisms after reproduction. The book also favours prevention over coping with the consequences of a poor lifestyle: “Most people leave the serious maintenance of their car [body] until it’s too late”.

SENS, his non-profit, identifies seven kinds of age-related damage and proposed responses:

1. Cell loss and cell atrophy: cell therapy.
2. Junk outside cells: phagocytosis through immune stimulation.
3. Crosslinks outside cells: AGE-breaking molecules or enzymes.
4. Death-resistant cells: suicide genes or immune stimulation.
5. Mitochondrial mutations: allotopic expression of 13 proteins.
6. Junk inside cells: transgenic microbial enzymes.
7. Nuclear mutations, including cancer: telomerase/ALT gene deletion plus periodic stem cell reseeding.

The societal consequences remain another question. For related material, see longevity.