Transcriber: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
All right, so I'm doing a talk "When I'm 164",
which is a little beyond the 2061, 50 years from now, at least for me;
I'm not that old!
But what I really want to talk to you about is:
what are we talking about when we are discussing extreme aging?
There's an awful lot of talk in these meetings.
I go to a lot of them where people just kind of blithely assume,
"Oh yes. We'll be this age or that age."
I was at one of these meetings when I raised my hand and said:
"What would it really mean to live to be 150 or so?"
And I, of course, thought of the Beatles song:
"When I'm 64", and redid it, reworked it
for this theme of extreme long life, and always asking the question:
"Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm 164?"
Because you'll be older too, and you're lucky that I didn't sing that.
All right, now you all have been very patient,
it's late in the day here,
and I would like to include you just for a moment
and ask you a question.
Actually, I'm going to ask you a three-part question:
"How long do you want to live?"
All right, are you guys ready? Is everybody ready?
I'm going to give you three possible answers here,
80, 120 and 150, just to make it simple.
How many people here would like to live a normal life span
as of today, around 80?
OK, I'd say most of you.
OK, how about 120?
I think some of you raised your hands twice.
(Laughter)
How about 150?
Definitely, some of you raised your hands twice.
I've asked this over the last couple of years,
since my last book "Experimental Man",
to at least 20,000 people; that's when I started keeping track of it,
and here are the numbers.
You all were pretty close:
around 60% - 80, about 30% - 120, and a mere 10% - 150.
I think we were slightly higher here, maybe we've got you more enthusiastic
about living longer after all these talks today.
But, this is essentially where we're at right now with all of this,
and, of course, there are organisms that live an extraordinarily long time,
and let's share some of those here for a moment.
This is Methuselah.
You all may have seen pictures of this almost 5,000-year-old organism.
It's a tree that lives in eastern California.
You've got rockfish, which live to be 2, 3 or 400 years,
the most long live off the coast of Alaska.
This is the oldest living human being, at least who's been recorded and verified.
Her name is Jeanne Calment, she lived in France,
and she lived to just shy of her 23rd birthday
she was... I mean 123rd birthday.
She was just over 122 years old in 1997 when she finally passed away.
This little critter here, just to give you some of the variation of organisms,
is apparently immortal.
It's called a water bear.
So those of you that are pushing for immortality, it's already there,
you can become a water bear.
To give you a little context to being 164 I want to go back.
I was born in 1958,
and if you go back 164 years before 1958, you're in 1794
so I'm just giving you a little context of how much time goes by here.
The average life span then was around 39 years.
The U.S. president, our first president, was George Washington;
this also in Europe was just a few years after the French Revolution.
The major technology was steam, which was just revving up at the time,
repeating rifles, the cotton gin and the stethoscope.
So think about where we've gone from then,
and let's jump ahead 100... this is when I'll be 164
in the year 2122 - happy birthday to me!
Now, we have envisioned what things might be like in 2122
and we have to turn to fiction, to movies, and things like that.
There is actually going to be an eclipse a couple of years before this
which we can predict with some accuracy.
But this is the year the first alien movie took place,
not exactly the utopic future that we might hope for.
It's also the year that the NX starship for Star Trek
- for all you guys who follow that - began its development.
It was several years before it was finished,
and this was the ship used in the Star Trek Enterprise show.
These are some of the visions;
there are lots of novels and things that have envisioned life in 2122.
But let me tell you, we can go back in time to mythology
on what different people thought about living a very long time
or even being immortal.
This is a fellow being chased by a goddess,
the goddess Eos who fell in love with Tithonus.
Tithonus doesn't look very happy there,
but he was really unhappy when Eos asked Zeus, her father,
to make Tithonus immortal, but forgot to ask for eternal youth.
So he grew older and older and actually became a grasshopper,
and then eventually disappeared.
We've also got Ponce de León.
If you don't know what happened to him he was looking for the fountain of youth,
but he was killed by Indians long before he found it.
Dorian Gray, we kind of know what happened there,
he was trying to live a very long time.
And the Borg Queen - I've mentioned Star Trek several times here.
She basically enslaved entire solar systems, billions of people,
so she could live forever.
So, basically, storytelling mythology does not bode well
for people who want to live a very long time.
Now, to live to be 164, we will have to use science.
There's no way unless there's some people hiding out there
who are well over Jean Clemant's age.
We're going to have to use science;
we've got genetic manipulation, many of these things have been mentioned
basically reconstructing our bodies into being bionic.
We can fuse brains with machines, a lot of talk about that in my part of the world
in Singularity University where I also teach at times.
And then there's stem cell technology.
Walter's right, I've run all kinds of experiments on myself;
this is the only one I'm going to share with you today.
This is my stem-cell line that developed out of some blood cells.
They were able to bioengineer these cells back
to just like they were a few days after conception,
when you've got embryonic stem cells which can grow into any cell in the body.
There is now a technology called induced pluripotent stem cells,
and I've always talked to biologists about coming up with names
that are actually comprehensible to the rest of us.
But this cell line is frozen over in Wisconsin,
and I can dip into it pretty much anytime I want to over the years.
We'll probably all have a line like this, and here's what we did:
we developed some heart cells out of this, and let me go back to that.
I was hoping that they would be beating, but apparently not.
We had a little video, it's really freakish
to see your own heart cells beating in a Petri dish.
So these were also biologically induced from that stem cell line.
So you started with my blood, I sent it to Wisconsin,
they created a stem cell line and then created heart cells.
I wrote this up in a technology review two or three months ago,
and you can check this out on experimentalman.com
and find out all about the experiment.
But this is one way to make various tests
about how drugs will interact with you in terms of side-effects or efficacy
without actually having to try them in your body.
So the stem cell technology will eventually lead to regeneration,
which is, of course, another way that we may live to be 164.
Yet another way is tweaking genes,
finding gene pathways that seem to regulate life span,
and a number of them have been discovered in the last several years.
Probably the most famous one is called SIRT,
and there's seven of them in humans.
They also exist in many other organisms.
This is the enzyme created by this regulator gene
which seems to regulate, in many organisms, how long they live.
And obviously, if we think about it, organisms live many different life spans.
It would be convenient anyway and a lot of biologists hope
that there may be some simple mechanism here.
So this might be a way to live a very long time.
This particular enzyme is triggered by something I know you all are ready for,
but won't come for a little while longer:
wine.
There's a substance in wine called resveratrol,
and it seems to trigger this SIRT1
to do all kinds of amazing things in the cell,
repairing the cell, repairing DNA.
The problem is you have to drink about 700 bottles of wine a day...
(Laughter)
to get any appreciable effect.
I don't know about you but I start losing it after 200 or 300 bottles.
However, the good folks at GSK, the large pharmaceutical company
are trying to develop a pill.
They started out basing it on resveratrol; they discovered actually that didn't work
but they did a big search through thousands of compounds
and actually have discovered a synthetic version
of an activator for that enzyme,
and it's in development right now which is quite astonishing.
We may have a pill for longevity before we know it, if that actually works.
Some upsides - let's get a little philosophical here,
some upsides for you living to be 164.
You can take that raft trip when you're 102, like our gentleman.
Of course, he can't do it from the spaceship,
but you could take that raft trip that you meant to take all those years,
you can take up gardening, or a new hobby.
You'll have time to get the Ph.D. when you're 130
that you never got around to when you were only 75.
You can spend more time with your kids, and you'll have a lot of them.
In fact, if generations continue the way they are
you could be a great-great-great-great- grandmother or grandfather,
and still be alive, a lot of progeny floating around.
Some downsides for you - who's going to pay for this?
I hear a lot of billionaires talk about wanting to live forever,
we have a lot of them floating around in Silicon Valley,
OK, if you had a billion dollars, your wallet will be full for many years,
but what about the rest of us?
There's also these inconvenient things like wars, dictators, plagues,
some of the things we've heard about today.
And then boredom.
OK, so some upsides for society.
We could have Beethoven's 20th Symphony by now if he'd lived to be 164.
We'd have Einstein with us, he'd still be kind of a youngster actually.
We'd have Steve Jobs still with us.
Some downsides, though, and this is where it does get a bit serious.
We'll have fewer deaths.
There are 57 million people a year who die in the world,
and imagine if suddenly they just stopped dying.
Eventually, you would equalize,
that's around 500 million new people a decade plus,
so think about what we'd do with all those extra people.
There are lots of issues about things like social security and welfare.
The young can advance.
My great-great-great-great- grandchildren who I'll see born,
what jobs would they have?
And then who gets this stuff?
Will it be the 1% as we're talking about a lot in America right now?
I mean basically we have a class of people who live an extraordinarily long time,
and then the rest of us who don't.
Now I have a solution personally
that I think will work for me, or at least I ponder this.
I'm a historian by training,
and I mainly just want to see what happens in the future.
I don't have a huge interest in actually living all the years to get there.
So, I'm all in favor of cryogenically freezing myself down,
or in some ways suspending myself,
and that technology does exist for cells and some very simple organisms.
Someday it may actually exist for humans, we'll have to see.
But the idea would be: say, a company that offers you...
you get a little brochure.
Every 50 years you're woken up,
you spend a year, however long you want, but let's say a year,
and you check things out, what's going on.
You can find out then what's going on in 2061.
I would look pretty much the way I look now.
I'm not going to be old and decrepit.
And then I go back to sleep; I wake up again in 2111, 2161,
I mean, you get the idea here.
And if you actually take a normal life span
which most of you want to live, of 80 years,
but you freeze yourself down for 50 years and then wake up,
you're talking about being 80 years old in the year 4711.
We wouldn't even go there, that's about as deep in the future
as I've heard discussed in this meeting,
although you'd be almost the age of that tree - think about that!
But in the end - this is what's most important to me -,
this is my mother, my father and my older son,
I don't think I could live without them for 50 years,
maybe they'd be frozen down with me.
But this is what it's really all about, people, it's about being human,
it's about living with our people, however long we happen to live.
And let me just remind you:
"Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I'm..."
and you can fill in the blank.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)