Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So welcome. Thanks very much to all of you for coming.
I thought about how to tell this story
and had to begin with a moment
when I stood by a puddle as a small boy
and watched raindrops fall from a tree,
land in the puddle and raise bubbles, little splashes and bubbles.
Probably all of us have done that at one time or other.
You see the raindrop fall,
you see the bubble raised up,
and then, if you watch long enough,
you see another raindrop fall and smash that bubble,
and it's gone,
and another bubble rises in its place.
And I watched that for a while.
I still remember I was wearing one of those yellow raincoats.
I was on my way home from school.
I probably had the lunchbox
that advertised the possibility
of our growing up to be colonists on the Moon or Mars;
this was back in the early '60s.
I felt as if the world was telling me something
very, very important and very mysterious
the more I watched the bubbles appear and disappear.
It was the same sort of feeling that I had
that, again, I'm sure all of us have had,
of standing at the beach, at the edge of the waves,
watching the waves come in and seeing -
I can almost remember for the first time -
seeing the waves washing away my last footprints
and washing around my feet
and thinking thoughts and making discoveries
that human beings have made in every generation, no doubt,
since the beginning of human thought.
Well, I became a science writer.
I began writing about everything under the sun,
but I was drawn, as I approached midlife -
the middle of life's journey,
as Dante calls it in the first line of "The Inferno" -
to revisit the questions that are touched in all of us
by the sight of something
as beautiful and evanescent as tidal waves or splashes in a puddle.
I wanted to look at life at the edge,
science at the edge.
How much can science tell us about mortality - why we're mortals?
How much can science begin to do about our mortality?
In some ways, it's almost a silly question
because everything around us is in some way connected
with the long pursuit of science and technology
and extraordinary engineering and design
that has given us warm and beautiful places
in which to flourish
and in which to raise the human flag
and has prolonged our lives,
extraordinarily prolonged our lives
so that we in this room
are living three, four times as long
as our distance ancestors -
before the adventure of technology began,
back in the days of the caves and the plains.
And we take these extraordinary lifespans more or less for granted,
but they are extraordinary.
It's probably the greatest achievement of the human species,
that we have managed to live so long.
So my first foray, maybe a dozen years now back,
into writing about life at the edge and these efforts to push the edge back
was a story I wrote for The New Yorker magazine
about Jamie and Stephen Heywood,
two brothers in Newton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.
Stephen, in his late 20s, a wonderful young carpenter,
had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease, with ALS,
which meant that he had very little time to live
and very, very little time to do carpentry.
And his older brother by a couple of years, Jamie,
a mechanical engineer trained at MIT,
decided that he was going to save Stephen,
and he was going to cure the incurable,
and he was going to do it fast enough
so that Stephen would not only survive the disease,
but he would survive before the paralysis set in
that would prevent him from continuing his career
as a carpenter and as a builder of beautiful, beautiful innovative homes.
So Jamie raced to save his brother.
I wrote about their story in The New Yorker
and then in a book, "His Brother's Keeper."
It was in some ways a heartbreaking story,
and in other ways a very inspiring story,
and I'm happy to say that one of the other speakers here today
will be talking about some of the lasting good
that came from that extraordinary race of Jamie's: to save Stephen.
While I was finishing that story,
I met someone very much like Jamie in some ways,
Paul Cox, an ethnobotanist,
who had an idea about another rare neurodegenerative disease
that has been epidemic on the island of Guam
and may throw some light on ALS, PSP -
a disease that my mother was suffering from at the time,
very much like ALS.
And I traveled with Paul Cox to his extraordinary little laboratory,
on the island of Kauai, in the middle of the Pacific,
to pursue this idea and to write about Cox and his work,
which was also wildly hopeful,
almost manically pursued by Cox and a few close associates,
and which ended up being a profile in the New Yorker.
So far, that research remains up in the air.
While I was finishing that book,
I met someone whose quest topped, in some ways, in its ambition,
both Jamie's and Paul Cox's.
And that was Aubrey de Grey, who is a -
I have a mental image of him in my head, just saying his name,
and maybe some of you do also.
An extraordinary character,
almost a character by design.
He once said to me, "It suits my purposes to look unusual."
And he is six feet tall;
he has a beard down to here;
he's given one of the TEDTalks.
He is on a quest to conquer aging,
and he is highly articulate, highly ardent,
and in some ways,
far better grounded in science than you might expect
for someone with the avowed aim of conquering aging.
The study of aging, the science of aging, is called "gerontology,"
as opposed to "geriatrics,"
which is the treatment of all the various aches, pains, complaints and disasters
that follow from our failure to cure aging.
So, gerontologists are interested in the why question.
What is aging? Why do we age?
Why is it that we grow old and die?
And strikingly, to me, scientists are still arguing about that.
Scientists don't really know what aging is
any more than they can tell us, yet, what consciousness is.
In fact, in some ways, they know more about consciousness than aging
because at least with consciousness,
they've narrowed the point of origin down
to a zone somewhere above the neck.
(Laughter)
With aging, we really don't know.
Is it something happening in our cells?
Is it something happening in the way our organs talk to each other?
Is it absolutely foreordained?
Is it something that is evitable?
If we knew enough about aging, could we dodge it?
Could we even "cure it," as Aubrey says.
So, it sounds quite fantastical.
In many ways, it is fantastical,
but I want to tell you one or two of the ideas that I've come away with
after some years of talking with Aubrey and other people
at the far fringes of the science of gerontology,
because I have to tell you that the mainstream gerontologist
is concerned with much smaller problems than curing aging.
The mainstream gerontologist is interested in those why questions:
Why did aging evolve?
How does it progress?
Only a few people, like Aubrey,
have taken our current state of knowledge to this limit
and said, "Let's stop it. Let's do what we can to stop it."
And Aubrey argues that we could stop it
so that many of us in this room could live 500 years,
or we could see 1,000 years.
He even whispers about a million years.
This is why, and these are the ideas that I find I'm still mulling
though I don't myself hope to reach for the gold ring of a million years,
if that is even a golden ring,
if that is even something to be desired.
But here's some of his more provocative ideas.
One is that we don't really need to cure aging
in order to escape aging.
All we need is to achieve escape velocity,
as some people in the field have called it.
We need to slow down
the accumulating damage to our bodies
to the point that science, as it races ahead,
can keep ahead of what's going wrong with us
and keep curing whatever attacks us next.
And if we can only do that,
we will achieve this escape velocity because science races ahead so quickly.
In effect, now, if gerontologists are right,
we are gaining hours with every day we live.
What's meant by that -
and this is mainstream gerontologists talking -
what's meant by that
is that our life expectancies continue to increase year by year;
we gained something
approaching 40 years, 30 years and more in the 20th century
in life expectancy,
and we continue to gain now.
So, what that means is, in effect,
the road of life is being built still, ahead of us, as we travel down it slowly;
the longer we live, the longer our lifespan tends to become,
and therefore, we gain, in effect, five hours every day we live -
or almost a weekend every week we live.
And that's a fanciful, sort of surprising way
of putting this basic fact
that life expectancy is increasing very quickly,
even as we live our lives.
So, if only science can continue to attack
this basic problem of aging and late-onset disease quickly enough,
we will have a smoother, longer road ahead,
and we'll never reach the end of that road.
That's Aubrey's argument number one.
The second is if we threw all our energies in the biomedical enterprise
into solving seven of the biggest late-onset diseases,
curing those seven,
then we would have every chance of extending that road indefinitely.
And those are all the dread diseases of old age:
cancer, atherosclerosis,
Alzheimer's and the other neurodegenerative diseases,
the little cross-links that develop
that hitch one working molecule of our bodies to another,
more or less at random,
as if some little Maxwell's demon
were running around through our systems with staple guns.
If we could snip those,
if we could selectively snip those without damaging the molecular machinery,
those cross-links,
then our faces wouldn't wrinkle,
and our inner workings wouldn't get gunked up, and so on.
If we could solve
seven basic, dreary problems of old age,
we would stand to live for decades and decades longer.
Well, those two ideas -
the idea of escape velocity,
the idea of conquering those seven deadly things,
as Aubrey calls them -
lead to one other that I find I'm still mulling now,
sometime after finishing my book about Aubrey
and about this effort, this ancient dream,
to conquer aging,
which is now reframed by extraordinary progress in science.
And that is how fantastical,
how farcical is it to talk about a cure for aging, really.
It strikes us, most of us, particularly if we are well-grounded in the sciences,
it strikes us as absurd.
My father is an 87-year-old scientist.
I asked him if I could dedicate the book to him, when I was almost done,
and he asked me what the title and the subtitle would be.
I said, "Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality,"
and he said, "Say that again."
"The science of immortal ... "
He said, "I have trouble
hearing the words 'science' and 'immortality' in the same sentence."
And I assured him
that this is a balanced look at a very, very big picture,
and that I was not saying that we now have the science of immortality.
I think that's a normal and a solid reaction
to the topic, looked at from one way.
But look at it from another way.
If aging is nothing but slow changes
that lead toward a greater and greater likelihood,
particularly after the age of 60 or so,
that we will come down with all of those seven deadly things
and that one of them will get us.
Then to attack cancer, Alzheimer's,
atherosclerosis, diabetes -
all the rest of the late-onset diseases -
perhaps the best possible approach ahead for us
is to figure out a way to slow down
whatever the progressive change is
that then flowers at 60 or beyond into these diseases.
Whatever that is, is what we mean by aging.
So, we've come to a point, thinking this way,
and it's not just me now -
again, this is the mainstream gerontologists talking -
where you have to ask,
"Are we talking about something as fantastic as a quest for immortality?
Or are we talking about something as mundane as preventative medicine?"
And aren't we already,
in trying to keep ourselves as fit and healthy and vigorous as possible
at whatever stage of the life cycle we may be at this moment,
aren't we now on that same quest
as a Merlinesque, Methuselahesque figure -
like Aubrey de Grey?
It's a very interesting question,
and it's one I'm still puzzling through myself.
So, I've now spent a dozen years
following these people to the edges of science,
or beyond the edge of medicine,
and I stand here
as a writer coming back from a long journey.
And for me, I think the journey has -
although it has not given me hopes of the million-year lifespan -
it has enhanced greatly
my sense of the value of the lifespan that we have.
I thank you, again, all, very much for coming.
(Applause)