Negligible Senescence and its Implications

• “Is SENS following Gandhi?
• First they ignore you (2000-2002).
• Then they laugh at you (2002-2004).
• Then they oppose you (2005-present).
• Then they say they were always with you.”

Aubrey de Grey

Such was the confidence that Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge gerontologist, concisely displayed on a Powerpoint slide during a 2006 TED talk, in which he mapped out his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, a project he developed and of which he is Chief Science Officer. The project, that at first sight appears fantastic in several ways, treats ageing as a disease that can, should and will be overcome, the mere prerequisite being that society invests enough. What is more, de Grey asserted elsewhere that due to Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV), “The first 1000-year-old is probably less than 20 years younger than the first 150-year-old.”(1) In other words, those alive today will come to witness a point in time where engineering (a term he prefers over medical research) will be so advanced that every liveable time unit that is the outcome of this engineering will be greater than the time consumed for doing away with the causes of ageing. Because of this increase in time lived, ageing will cease to be, leaving only fatal accidents, murder and suicide as barriers to certainly indefinite life spans. In what follows, I examine SENS as the therapies for negligible senescence it hopes it will offer, and on the basis of this I ask what consequences the characteristics of such therapies might have for the society subjected to SENS as the organisation in control of these therapies.

Try to imagine how we might arrive in a world, or even just one, privileged, community for that matter, where the fruits of years of medical engineering would be able to stop anyone from ageing. How, technically, would we accomplish LEV and go on from there to fully stop ageing? Despite all de Grey's bold confidence, things may turn out to be slightly more difficult than demanding a few round numbers for funding – $100M a year, de Grey asserts us, would result in a 50% chance of therapies being available in 2030 (2). De Grey intends to spend this funding on combating the 'seven deadly things' that cause ageing, one of which he labels as mutations to our DNA or to the structure of proteins that regulate gene expression that cause cancer. Although he himself acknowledges that the SENS response to cancer is extremely speculative, this does not reduce the flaws in de Grey's strategies to combat cancer as a cause of ageing by preventing a single tumour from becoming fatal; Nicholas Agar, in his chapter on SENS in his book Humanity's End, points out that clusters of tumours – an inevitability, since a negligibly senescent person's chances of growing them increase exponentially to 1 – can also be fatal (3). The other six of the seven hurdles SENS wants to take seem equally ambitious: these are the loss of cells that perform important tasks, the accumulation of the wrong kinds of cells in some parts of our bodies, mutations to mitochondrial DNA, the accumulation of various kinds of waste (these are two of the deadly things), and, lastly, extracellular crosslinks as a special kind of extracellular waste. De Grey wants to revolutionise healthcare by transforming research into these respective areas, which now purports to offer sick people only a few more, allegedly miserable, years to live, into engineering that will stop these causes from altogether influencing one's vitality. That is, SENS is confident there are no more than seven causes of ageing – it argues on its website that since scientists have added nothing to this list for 20 years, it must be complete (4). But the website's display of the chronological coming into existence of this list refutes SENS's own argument: between the first cause discovered (extracellular junk, 1907) and the second (cell loss and cell atrophy 1955) there were 48 years – why could there not be remaining one, ten, or a million other causes of ageing undiscovered? Now, in Agar's words, “Can [de Grey] do it?” (5). Reflecting on some serious criticism on SENS from several journals, Agar draws a comparison with similar sentiments of disbelief amidst John F. Kennedy's commitment to send humans to the moon. Given the groundbreaking results required, however, it may be more apt to say that SENS will have to go to the moon seven times.

 robot nurse Riba, designed to aid the Japan's increasing elderly population

This hints at another aspect that merits more consideration than SENS grants it: the finances. De Grey may or may not be right in asserting that developing SENS will be much less costly than healthcare for the current elderly, but what is the value of this comparison (6)? For one, there will certainly be people who do not wish or cannot afford to be part of SENS's project; they will still require regular healthcare. But what is more, the costs of undergoing such treatment and keeping or making it available are set to be fuelled by a significant proportion of the world population that will, as the likelihood of getting certain diseases increases to 1 after one has lived a few hundred years, require perhaps daily medical care, of a nature much more complex than current healthcare. While mass production will make individual treatments more affordable – an argument provided by SENS's website – the scale at which negligibly senescent persons will need them appears neglected; it may too easy to claim, as SENS's website does, that a society with SENS “is likely to be far cheaper” than current healthcare expenses (7). And if indeed the reverse is true, and healthcare costs will be far greater than they are now, where will funding come from – especially when, after having tackled the seven deadly things, SENS has not achieved negligible senescence because there remain other, unknown causes of ageing? This is a speculative but important question; since SENS claims to be committed to improving people's quality of life, it would have to ensure that redirecting cash flows would not adversely affect this quality.

Without doubt it can be said that SENS's therapies, if at some point they will have come into existence, would have their share of potential patients; indeed, with the availability of such therapies the cost of dying becomes so much greater that people might become much more anxious to do everything in order to remain as physically healthy as possible (note that such anxiety potentially may infringe on one's mental health, which is not taken into account by SENS). Medical check-ups and treatment against a thousand ailments might become part of the negligibly senescent person's daily routine. What emerges here is the beginning of a description of a healthcare industry that will physically and mentally dominate the lives of those who have decided they want to live up to their 1,000s. Important questions arise: who, as the bearers of power in such a healthcare system, decide over the lives of these people? Who funds the engineering and what is so inferior to this project that money can be withdrawn from it to feed the ever-more-needy healthcare industry? Will powerful figures in the future healthcare industry (or industries, for that matter) become the effective political heads of communities of negligibly senescent people? De Grey, disappointingly, replaces current biogerontologists by “visionary philanthropists” and assumes that's that (8). One cannot help but wonder what could happen if SENS, as the organisation that might come to control the minds and bodies of all those negligibly senescent, would fall into the wrong hands. It appears, however, that de Grey himself is not remotely concerned with, for example, a democratic system that would replace the malevolent by the genuinely philanthropic – and that he himself knows best which 'visionary philanthropists' will best promote SENS. Thus, objectionably, we would simply have to trust SENS, our lives being in their hands.

Through this exercise of imagination, we have established that SENS, if it were to develop as promised by de Grey, will have profound physical and mental influence over those who undergo its therapies, and will possibly require a sizeable proportion of the economy's cash flows directed towards it. All that appears left for those who want to become negligibly senescent, then, is to trust SENS that it will not abuse its power to, for example, set exorbitant prices on those treatments required to keep alive those for whom the cost of dying is even higher (for after a certain age SENS will make all the difference between a 1,000 year old going to bed with the knowledge that the next day he will still be able to do the toughest physical work and a 1,000 year old who will perish quickly when his body does not receive its necessary treatments). If SENS is going to be fully developed and treatments made available, let us hope that indeed people will say SENS is following Gandhi.

sources:

1   Nicholas Agar, Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 102.

2   Aubrey de Grey, “TED 2006 Conference Presentation: Aubrey de Grey,” video posted 2006, <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3847943059984264388> (accessed 11 December, 2011).

3   Agar, Humanity's End, 95.

4   SENS Foundation, “Research Themes,” <http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes> (accessed 12 December 2011).

5   Agar, Humanity's End, 102.

6   De Grey, “TED 2006 Conference Presentation: Aubrey de Grey.”

7   SENS Foundation, “FAQ,” <http://sens.org/sens-research/faq> (accessed 11 December 2011).

8   De Grey, “TED 2006 Conference Presentation: Aubrey de Grey.”

Written by Caspar Plomp

2nd year student LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.