Gene Editing and Radical Life Extension

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George Church spoke at Aubrey de Grey’s conference to discuss using gene editing to provide radical life extension.

George is hopeful that gene editing can be used to realize longevity escape velocity. Longevity escape velocity is where we add one year of life extension to people life in less than one year. If Longevity escape velocity is sustained then people lives would be extended until accidents or random extreme situations caused death.

George;s approach is to maximally engineer the solution. He wants to make it easy to perform 20,000 or more gene edits as a common and cheap treatment for all humans. He does not want to do just enough to extend life. Fixing one aging pathway could extend lives about two years but fixing all aging pathways at the same time could add many decades or centuries to human lives. They have a data base of the genes of over 4000 animals. They are looking at the bow head whale which lives for 200 years. They want to add any of the genes that appear to help the bow head whale live longer lives to see if in combination they would be very helpful to human lifespan.

There are several papers which show the progress in multiple and combination gene edits.

24 thoughts on “Gene Editing and Radical Life Extension”

  1. Seems like it would be easier to build a new immortal being from scratch than all this.
    So, what can we realistically, kinda expect to be the best way of achieving an extended ‘existence’ in the near- to mid-term:
    1. Full body vitrification at a time well before natural death – if you can beat the ‘before death’ regs, this may have a high chance of getting a significant degree of revived functionality in the next century, if you undertake it in the next 10 – 20 years?
    2. Head vitrification at time of death, undertake in next 20+ years??
    3. Personality/ memory upload/ storage, to be transferred to another compatible sensory/control container next 10 – 20 years??
    4. Major (medium-complex) organ replacement to say 50% – natural/ part-natural/ cyborgian, next 20 – 50 years??
    5. Hibernation-extension with onboard repair, such as a bacta tank, next 50+ years??
    6. nanobot internal repair, next 50+ years??
    XX. Actually keep your original body, genome, mind, and functionality at kind of a middle-age, high-maintenance, high-cost, high-risk stable state for decades past 100, next century??
    XXX. Actually keep your original body, genome, mind, and functionality at 20-something stable state for decades past 100, No BETS.

    • I like the idea of a bacta-tank, assumed to allow some recovery on what could be equivalent to sleep cycles, which could very easily be incorporated into a daily routine with regular rejuvenation and deep monitoring and repair of many functions. Though, it is probable that major organs wil have to be augmented or replaced out occasionally.

  2. It would cause some interesting situations… You look and feel like 30.

    You meet this hot girl and fall in love. You have sex with her. You discover she is you 120 year old great great great grand daughter

    • Your great great great grand daughter isn’t a close enough biological relationship to be genetically risky or realistically be considered incest, though. You’re barely related at that point, people routinely ended up marrying folks that closely related, before cheap travel.

      • A great great great grand daughter has 1/32 of your genetic material, while it is not a “close relative” please bear in mind that it would increase to 1/32 the probability to transmit in homozygosis the genetic illness in your family.

        Please note that humans have 3 billions nucleotides so it takes roughly 32 generations to inherit less than one nucleotide from a given ancestor. So it takes 640-960 years (considering a generation age of 20-30 years) to be genetically unrelated to one of your ancestors.

    • I see a bigger risk in creating a humankind Balkanized on age clades, because the cultural differences between people of previous centuries is too great with the young, and they just can’t live with each other. And not just in terms of preferences and fads, but legit law liability differences.

      Would you live happily with an 18th century neighbor? What about a 15th century one?

      That might actually justify space settlements, which can be built faster than we become multi-centenarian: allow people to group in whatever way they want in an O’Neill habitat, and govern themselves with whichever fashion and mores they choose, as long as they don’t mess with others.

  3. The “Turbuckle” protocols are the way to go for now. These are the mitochondrial fission/fusion and the stem cell with senolytics. You can find these over on the Longecity forums.

  4. Gene editing is not damage reduction/repair. It is merely slowing aging. It will work only young adults. People in their 50s will still be old, longer. They will eventually get age-related disease in the long run.

    This work proposed by Church would be interesting AFTER we can rejuvenate people into their 20s so that thye can stay in their 20s for decades before applying again rejuvenation therapies.

  5. The assumption is that ageing is a collateral effect of bad genes and something that can be removed from the body without collateral effects. This is not the case and the 20000 cheapNeasy edit figure comes from the fact that humans have roughly 20-25k genes so your path to immortality requires 80% of your genes to be tweaked in some way… The reason for this extensive editing is due to the fact that cellular ageing is an actively evolved process that solves many issues in the organism.
    -embriogenesis
    -immune system developement and antibodies class switch
    -puberty development
    -metabolic reduction and genome stabilization through senescence
    -anticarcinogenic effect of critical telomeres erosion
    Are many different cellular pathway that we need and that require ageing related genes and ageing itself.

    You prevent dna damage agents (not dna repair) and you lose the ability of meiosis and progeny variation.
    You make dna repair more efficient and tumor cells that form will be more resistant
    You make telomeres longer/reactivate telomerase and cells will replicate for a higher number generations so an higher percentage of non threatening lumps will evolve into malignant cancers. I have a phd in molecular biology (with specialuzation on ageing and tumors) and all this stuff from church… is considered very poorly in the field to the point of being borderline pseudoscience and a scam targeting old billionaires. It is like claiming to create centaurs: we know that nature evolved horses so WE KNOW that with a PERFECT knowledge of embriogenesis, development and all the emerging issues that will popup in such endeavour we can make centaurs. The problem is that we are not even close to figuring out all the factors involved (both in ageing and centaur making) so a strong claim on feasibility is a bit of a stretch.

    • I wouldn’t say aging is the affect of “bad genes”, but “just fine” genes that over time, with wear and tear, get damaged. I agree, it’s the collateral effects “downwind” we can’t anticipate, let alone control. Genetics is most funky, and unpredictable. It’s been speculated that all biological events emerge from the quantum level (just when we thought we knew stuff…) To inquire into “Quantum Biology”, I recommend the excellent (and mind blowing) book: “Life on the Edge” The coming age of quantum biology. CR.2014, by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili (names are not typos) Penguin Random House LLC eBook ISBN 978-0-307-98683-2

      I would hardly call it “light reading”, but once I picked it up I COULD NOT put it down. I was walking and reading and walked into a wall. Stupid but true, hell I put a hole in the plaster. It’s THAT engrossing. I recommend it to everyone. Just don’t walk and read, that can be costly (and made me feel like an idiot, which is fair, I was).

  6. Interesting. But does gene editing take into account the “downwind effects”? At any moment, genes in living organisms will reproduce themselves many times over any moment (there are two time frames I can’t define. One is infinity which is so vast I can’t define, or a moment, to short, I can’t define either). We at least know that certain events happen in biological systems, that happen at some point, in a certain way that affect genes. If I knew the how, when, why and where, just give me the Noble prize. Sorry, I have no clue. If all you got from my post is to ask more questions, well, that’s not a bad thing IMO.

    To change what a gene is, can we know what it will emote (emerge) into in a nanosecond, a minute, or next week? Biology is so robust because it’s forever “reemerging”. And over time, errors affect what our genes do, and when abrupt changes happen, we call that among other things, cancer. When these changes happen more slowly, we call it getting old.

    This work looks interesting. If they can predict how this process works, they can create how it can work. We’ll see.

  7. Gene editting seems more like a long-term solution for future generations to live for centuries with no life extension procedures save the ones from birth. Even if you edit genes for someone already born, it will take a long time to figure out the optimal combination. Then again, the longevity escape velocity doesn’t require coming up with the Methuselah drug that makes you live a thousand years tomorrow but rather life expectancy rises at a rate of growth greater than or equal to one year per gear. So, we could live to see it.

    • The catch with “longevity escape velocity”, is that a lot of therapies don’t, in principle, actually add years to your life as such. They slow the rate at which you age.

      So the same therapy that would ‘add’ 5 years to your life if started when you were born might only add 1 year if started when you were 60. The young tyke only needs such an advance to come up every five years to achieve escape velocity, the oldsters need them to show up annually!

      OTOH, some therapies really do seem to turn the lock back, not just slow the ticking.

      • Which therapies really do seem to turn the clock back? I might want to have some of those myself.

          • I went to the website a couple of months ago when NBF commenters (maybe you?) suggested it, read it over, and applied to apply to be in the test protocol for Triim-X. They finally wrote me back yesterday. Although they are based in L.A., the visit to their clinic for testing is optional. But the cost: $1,200/month, is not. That’s a bit rich for my blood, so to speak and there’s enough uncertainty about cancer to give me a long pause at least. I haven’t done the online prescreening questionnaire, but it’s here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TRIIMX

            • Uh, a couple of weeks ago, not a couple of months ago.
              The thought of self-administering 4 subcutaneous injections per week isn’t appealing either. Funny how something so little can stop one. Maybe I just don’t believe it’ll work. One thing about getting old is you get cynical too. There are so many scams…

              • Yeah, it’s too expensive for me, too. Dr. Fahy isn’t a major pharmaceutical company, and the HGH and all that testing isn’t cheap. It’s on my “if I win the lottery” list. But the results so far have been astonishing.

                If they can get this past the FDA, (Hopefully while there’s still time for it to matter to me!) the price can come WAY down, there’s no fundamental reason HGH has to be very expensive. In the mean time, I’m investigating whether I can replicate the trial protocol using GABA to induce HGH release; The DHEA is easy to get, and the Metformin not too hard, the HGH is the only difficult part.

                • I received another email from Intervene Immune today, with links to their pivotal study (2019): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.13028
                  It’s very complex, including multiple protocols, two of which – Metformin & DHEA – are to counteract the hyperinsulinemia that can be caused by GH. As the paper admits itself, GH can be PRO-aging, the opposite of what one wants, and that may be counteracted by the Metformin & DHEA, so it’s really hard to tease out what’s causing the epigenetic age regression, net 1.5 years after 12 months, including aging a year during that test period (so, 2.5 years not including that).
                  And epigentics itself is a new field so it’s hard to know how reliable this measure is.
                  I think I will stick to traditional diet&exercise anti-aging efforts until more data is in, though I realize I am already aged out of the study’s 50-65 age group, so my results would already be less significant than the cohort’s.
                  The drop-outs of several subjects during the trial muddies the results & should caution anyone seeking a solid result, IMO too. Some men (only men were tested) had cancer potential, and other side effects were mentioned in the long discussion at the end.

                • The newer studies have expanded the age range of participants to 40-80+.

                  I agree the epigenetic clocks are a bit unproven. I’m more persuaded by their detection of new circulating T cells after the treatment, that’s an actual measure of immune function restoration, the goal of the treatment.

                  We each have our own risk tolerance, of course. I’d join this study in a heartbeat if I could afford it.

    • I’ll investigate that first protocol, it sounds doable. Not so sure about dosing myself with fullerenes.

      • Friends $95 an hour! Seriously I don’t know why more people haven’t tried this, I work two shifts, 2 hours in the day and 2 in the evenin. And whats awesome is Im working from home so I get more time with my kids. Heres where I went,

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