What If We Could Eliminate Aging and Disease?

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João Pedro de Magalhães, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the Institute of Inflammation and Aging at the University of Birmingham in England, has calculated how long people can live if there was no aging and disease. The human mortality rate between the ages of 10-20 is when we are not dying from aging and most age related disease.

João Pedro de Magalhães was recently interviewed by Scientific American and Popular Mechanics.

The initial mortality rate (IMR) is the death rate independent of aging. The mortality rate doubles every 8 years after we turn 30. The IMR is about 0.0002/year.

The IMR of a typical population in an industrialized nation is 0.0005/year. This would mean a life expectancy of 1,200 years. The lower IMR of 0.0002/year gives a life expectancy of 3,500 years. This assumes a constant IMR without wars or major new pests. If we improve the safety of transportation and other areas of accidents then we could further increase aging independent life expectancy.

The professor has study long lived animals. There needs to be better DNA damage and cellular repair. This would confer cancer resistance and resistance to aging.

His hypothesis is that humans have a very complicated set of computerlike programs in our DNA that turn us into an adult human being. But maybe some of these same programs, as they continue into later life, become detrimental.

The immune system is his first target. There are specific tissues, such as the thymus, that can be targeted for rejuvenation. We could change hust one transcription factor [a protein that acts on genetic material] and regenerate the thymus. Rewriting our genetic software could redesign human biology to delay or even reverse aging. This would be difficult but obviously would be great if it is successful.

He has compiled most of his ideas on aging at senescence.info.

11 thoughts on “What If We Could Eliminate Aging and Disease?”

  1. Still hoping there is something to the thought that it is almost impossible for something to end on every worldline possible but who can say? Not willing to test that theory.

    As far as deaths per population rate? I prefer to think of it by year groups and then considering their half-life, like radioactive decay. Take an existing group of people and then figure out how long it will be before half of them have perished. I’ve previously come up with a WAG of around 1,000 years, but 1200 is not much of a stretch at all if we can reduce vehicular deaths (which self-driving technology may very well do).

    So, with a million people getting the therapy, at the 1200 year point, half a million would still be alive, and 1200 years later, only a quarter of a million and so on., such that after 24,000 years, only one might still be around, with only a fifty percent chance of making it through each 1200 year period thereafter.

    On the other hand, people more than few centuries old might develop a very high suicide rate as, like Tolkien’s elves, the sorrows just keep building up, potentially far outweighing the happy times because people seem to remember the bad times better than the good (there would be a reason for that).

    Or they might just become addicted to extreme (and dangerous) experiences. This might be because the best explanation for why the passage of large blocks of time seems to speed up as we age is because our brains really only record patterns of experience that are unique, and as time goes by, there are fewer unique experiences to add to our memory. For example, you don’t really have a separate memory for every time you’ve pulled out your dining room chair for dinner. But you sure remember that one time when you accidently set one leg down on the cat’s tail! People’s entire lives could start becoming akin to an extreme form of road hypnosis. That would probably be unpleasant, seeming to fade in and out more and more frequently, with no awareness of the time spent in-between, even though witnesses would have seen you performing in all aspects of your life normally. Unseen by them would be that you weren’t recording any of to memory. I personally have experience road hypnosis myself, just once, several decades ago, but it suggests disturbing things about the very nature of our existence.

    Additionally, like a Windows computer that’s been running too long, the operating system for our nervous systems (us) might randomly hang, with that likelihood increasing the longer it is “on.” While it might be possible to “reboot” them, that would only be for the benefits of others, as the individual would still be gone, replaced by a new instance with the old memories.

    Then again, we might make multiple instances of ourselves, and keep on doing it, so that at least some might persist far long than we would predict with half-lifes or death rates.

  2. Imagine if this guy wins a NOBEL.

    The Magalhães family will be forever remembered for the first circumnavigation of the Earth (Fernão de Magalhães), the naming of two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way (Nuvens de Magalhães, or Magellan Clouds) AND for eliminating ageing in humans.

  4. While I suspect we will find that there is a common factor behind the aging processes, I suspect that initial therapies will need to be targeted against individual organs, like the thymus, eyes and ears as each organ shows different physical effects from aging.

    The actuarial approach to calculating lifespan in a non-aging population from the rates observed in industrialized aging populations produces the wrong results – we just can’t say how wrong. Will we see people taking fewer risks because they have longer to live, or just because they’ve lived long enough to know better? Conversely will we see more deaths from extreme sports accidents and suicide as people can’t deal with a centuries long ennui?

    I do not expect to see a one pill makes you younger approach in my lifetime.

  5. Sigh… once again, we have not even even cured baldness.
    Curing baldness is about a million times easier than eliminating aging.
    Why not discuss setting up Woolly Mammoth Burger restaurants?
    Because that will come before eliminating aging.

    The only way to extend your life with today’s tech would be to clone yourself and harvest the parts; and that is some next level evil there.

  6. Like curing cancer, even if we don’t see the benefits, it’s still a noble pursuit and something that we should do for our descendants – let’s be honest, we’re handing them enough problems as it stands.

    And anyone afraid of living forever needs to reframe that 1,200 years is by no means “forever”. It’s also a massively optimistic number; it would be amazing to see average lifespans extended to the 90-120 year timeframe at this point.

  7. Imperfect DNA repair is essential for a working immune system: an infinite variety of antibodies and receptors arise from a finite amount of genes because cells if the immune system introduce mutations and join gene segments in an imperfect way. Remove the variation and you are screwed. The same is true fir mutations in the population: without them the specie will be uniform and susceptible to pathogens that will have an evolutionary advantage becoming optimized to the “standard human genome”

  8. Get over it, dude, we don’t really understand how the body work, we don’t know how to prevent disease and it goes without saying that we are very far from “healing” aging. We need to focus on what the Medical Medium suggests, getting our liver to work by starving the body from foods that grow viruses and by cleaning the body from toxins and heavy metals. If our body starts working again, it will achieve miracles.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppQUdVlffiY

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