Rejuvenation

The spring equinox has at last arrived. It is the traditional start to the new year in many ancient calendars, competing with the winter solstice for the honor. The trouble with the solstice option, at least in northerly regions, is that, while the days do start getting longer then, those subsequent days are awfully cold. It’s… well… winter, and flora is still dying (or at least slumbering).  With the equinox we finally get a break from the cold. Green buds start to pop. There is a rebirth of life. It’s a natural pick for New Year’s Day. (Ancient calendars that tried to incorporate lunar as well as solar elements sometimes opted for the first full moon after the vernal equinox.) The time was commonly marked by festivals akin to the Anthesphoria, the Greek celebration of Persephone’s return from the Underworld for a 6-month stint above ground thereby making her mom Demeter happy enough to cause spring to spring. A hint of the old springtime New Year’s Day from the pre-Julian Roman calendar remains in the names of the months: e.g. “December” means “10^th month” even though since 46 BCE it has been the 12^th.
 
The whole theme of new life and rebirth at the equinox is all very cheery, at first, but it can’t be separated by thoughts about old life and death. After all, it’s not our new life and rebirth in particular, is it? No matter what date you choose to mark a new year, it’s still the notch mark of another year, and each of us gets only so many notches. This limitation has long been irksome to many of us, but in recent years researchers and entrepreneurs with credible credentials have undertaken to do something about it. Do they have a shot? Can we get a new springtime for ourselves? If it is possible it probably won’t happen in time for me. As for the reader… how many notches have you so far?
 
Former CNN bureau chief Chip Walker writes about the surprisingly well-funded efforts of several key personalities to extend life – more importantly, to extend or even renew youth – in his book Immortality, Inc. Among them are former Apple chairman Arthur Levinson who founded Calico corporation in 2013 with hundreds of millions of dollars from Google and hundreds of millions more from big Pharma investors. Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) was founded soon after by J. Craig Venter, whose sequencing method for DNA had been key to the completion of the Human Genome Project. HLI, too, attracted serious funding from Silicon Valley investors. Then there is MIT’s Raymond Kurtzweil, who has written conventional books on health (e.g. The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet and Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease), but is best known as a transhumanist, who foresees a blending of biology and AI technology so that the boundary between them blurs into insignificance. What they have in common is a view of aging as the core problem. Modern medicine long has treated its symptoms, but they want to slow or reverse the process itself.

So far, the remarkable rise in average life expectancy (globally and nationally) over the past 150 years has come from reducing the risk of dying early from accident or disease. But a 90-year-old in 2022 is much like a 90-year-old in 1872. The modern ones are not more youthful; if anything on average they are sicker because ill seniors are more likely to receive medical treatment today and so survive longer. Annual new cases of age-related illnesses from osteoarthritis to dementia climb each year. In countries with high median ages (e.g. Japan) adult diapers are a bigger market than baby diapers. Life expectancy rises, but aging itself continues – and ultimately the reaper can be kept waiting at the door for only so long. Human cells simply stop dividing (or at least stop dividing healthily) after a certain point, so there is an upper possible limit to human lifespan, calculated by most scientists to be about 130, though in fact no one is known ever to have lived that long. But what if this could be changed? Is some sort of genetic reset possible that, at least in principle, would allow humans to remain young and vital for two or more centuries? (Point of interest: holding steady other current risks, such as accident and murder, in the absence of aging and age-related diseases the average lifespan would be about 650 years.) Walker tells us about the scientists working hard to find out.
 
How are they doing? Calico’s website is https://www.calicolabs.com/. Perhaps the reader can glean more from it than I did. There seem to be some pharmacological studies in progress that are promising. If so, given the nature of the industry there are sound commercial reasons for the firm’s coyness about them, but this also makes it hard to do more than guess at what they might be.
 
Despite the talent and money invested in these and other longevity projects, I suspect (once again) that any fruits will be too late for me. It’s not too outlandish an idea, however, that they might have some eventual success. There is one mammal that can survive 215 years without obvious deterioration thereby showing such a thing is possible: the bowhead whale. It spends its life in arctic waters. I doubt that would work for a human though. Besides, even if it would I’m chilly just thinking about it. 
 

Bob Dylan – Forever Young