Frank Georgalis – Writer

New scientific discovery about longevity

 

We are shooting for the stars

By Frank Elias Georgalis

The Agony and the Ecstasy

If Aubrey de Grey’s educated guesses are right, the first person who will live to see his 150th birthday has already arrived here on earth. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years after the first person who made it to 150 years old.

It has been said that de Grey’s primary concern is the subject of healthy life style which can lead into longevity, believing that science can provide means and methods for humans to live beyond anybody’s expectations

A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to “cure” aging — banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.

But I understand and have learned following the researchers and studying their results, up till now they have used primitive tools to combat and defeat old age. According to de Grey and other dedicated researchers with positive thoughts, are very close to “cure” old age as we know it. Just stop chewing your tobacco and think for a moment.

My father was born in the year of 1902. If when he was a young man would have declared to the townspeople that in sixty years we will have man stepping on the moon, he would have been taken by the townspeople, tied to an olive tree and beaten for being devil possessed.

 

Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey de Grey

De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he cofounded in 2009.

Some researchers say, however, learning of de Grey’s predictions, that the trend toward longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.

That statement hit my head suddenly and created a lot of anger and astonishment. I found myself in the middle of two groups of people who are governed by ignorance and arrogance. The first group is the bunch of the researchers and the second is the bunch of reporters who asked information from the researchers, who are not and cannot be researchers of longevity because the course to longevity has gone from them because they feel that the whole world is filled with obesity and they sounded as if they think that obesity is contagious disease and we all going to die before we see our 42^nd birthday whether we are fat or not. They are not smart enough to think that de Grey did not say that everybody will live to see his 150^th regardless of his shape and physical condition and living habits.  He toned out very emphatically that the primary focus is not to expend the life span that is only a byproduct of the effort to prevent people from getting sick as a result of old age. De Grey divides the damage caused by aging into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.

De Grey’s ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist that showed that de Grey’s SENS theory was “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate” was never won.

The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as “pseudo science.”

They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS “exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt.”

Those nine scientists, who were so quick in dismissing the potential, remind me of the business men who were invited by Alexander Bell to listen to his idea, which was the invention of the telephone. The investors who had money to back him up, instead of listening to what he was saying and think what they were seeing, they began to laugh among themselves and mocking Mr. Bell and his invention. They were “pseudo investors” like those nine leading scientists were “pseudo researchers” jumping into unfavorable conclusions about de Grey’s theory. Regan was asked one time when he appointed somebody to high places, what are the requirements for somebody to be selected to high places, he said, “Know the right people,” on high  places. Now I believe these scientists who jumped to conclusions against de Grey’s theory are there for kissing you know what. It isn’t because of their knowledge, because if they don’t believe that life expectancy can be increased, they are blind to history of mankind.  They should be asked the question “Why life expectancy for men in Japan is 82 and in Russia, which is almost across the street from Japan, is 62?” The Japanese are doing something right, but is it the complete right?” No; and if these nine “Rushing to Judgment,” are scientists they should be fully aware of the father of science Archimedes who said, “It you can move it an inch you move it a mile.”

Just think that less than one hundred years ago the average life expectancy was around 55 years. Today Japan has confirmed that the life expectancy there has reached 82 years and America is pretty close the second

He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, but there are others where it’s already almost there.

He said that, “we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I’d call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so,” de Grey declared this in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain’s Royal Institution academy of science. He went to say that it will be the same sort of medical control that doctors and medical science have over most infectious diseases today.”

I have written and article and posted it on my personal web site, one year ago, that gave an idea to people as what to do to keep healthy. My third article “Science and diet will help you live over 600 hundred years”, is an article which I have written by studying many researchers’ and scientists’ findings, is dealing with centenarians. I was and still am fairly convinced that longevity is genetics. The researchers that are dealing with genetics,  have disclosed the same results as de Grey’s theory. They have announced that they believe that in 25 years people will live to reach 150. It doesn’t mean that in 25 years from now people will go to 7/11 convenient store and buy a package resembling Preparation H and use it to get to be 150n years old. To my age is useless to think that 25 year waiting period will be beneficiary to me, because under normal conditions of today’ mortality table I’ll be dead, but from what I understand is that many health improvements will come to pass whereby can have a great effect on me. So I shall live from day to day think of the Latin phrase “Dum spiro, spero,” which means as long as I breathe I hope, so my job is easy; keep on breathing.

De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular “maintenance,” which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.

He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body due to personal abuses of the body, such as eating and drinking habits.

“The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic,” and this [i]he explained. This service will be available for medical practice sooner than we think, according to scientists from the world of genetics. The scientists have declared that if you belong to a family of centenarians it’s almost certain, with dieting and regular excise, you will see your 150th birthday, that is if you’re younger than about 70 years old. If you can make it to 85, you will make it 100 and if you can make it to 100 you will make it to 150.

To date, the world’s longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010 and it has been predicted and agreed upon that by the year 2030 there will be one million centenarians around d the world

How soon his educated guesses will come to pass is debatable among the so called experts, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be millions centenarians across the world.

For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.

But de Grey says that’s not what he’s working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.

“This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health,” he told Reuters. “This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health.”

“Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It’s designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it’s already in clinical trials (in humans),” he said.

Stem cell therapies are currently being trialed in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.

Cardiovascular diseases are the world’s biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.

Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls “molecular garbage” — byproducts of the body’s metabolic processes — which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete.

“The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell’s workings,” he said.

De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells — and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans.

“If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease,” he said.

De Grey each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.