The allure of eternal life has been tugging at the human
imagination since we first began to contemplate our finitude.
From the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known literary work on
earth to the Taoist cult of immortality to Ponce de Leon's quest
for the elixir of unending youth, the desire to free ourselves
from the Grim Reaper's grasp has proven as persistent as the
force it aspires to counter. But although we may have been
inspired to hear of Himalayan yogis who have been alive for
centuries and although our collective obsession with health,
fitness, and increased longevity seems to be at an all-time
high, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, even the most
optimistic among us have probably never seriously considered the
possibility that death could become optional. Indeed, in an
increasingly chaotic and unpredictable world, it sometimes seems
like our mortality is one of the few things that we can still be
sure of.
Ray Kurzweil is determined to change all that. In the book
he recently coauthored with Terry Grossman, Fantastic
Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, the award-winning
inventor and futurist lays out a vision of “the science
behind radical life extension” that makes most science
fiction writers seem short on imagination. And he's not alone.
Over the past few decades, a growing body of research into the
aging process has been accumulating in laboratories around the
world. And among the more ambitious of the scientists involved,
there is, believe it or not, an increasing optimism about the
potential of actually bringing the seemingly irreversible
mechanisms of degeneration and decay that have haunted humanity
for millennia to a screeching halt. Soon.
How soon? According to Kurzweil, two or three decades looks
like the magic number. And for him, and other aging boomers, the
million-dollar question is: Will he be around and in good health
when the fountain of youth finally starts flowing? This is where
the subtitle of his book comes in. Living “long enough to
live forever,” it turns out, may require a bit more than
simply eating your vegetables and not smoking (although that's
definitely a start). For Kurzweil, building the “first
bridge” to radical life extension means a radical shift in
diet, a heavy supplementation regimen (he takes 250 supplements
a day), and regular checkups and rejuvenation treatments to slow
the aging process as much as possible using today's technology
(and, of course, regular exercise and low-stress living). But
even Kurzweil's “longevity program” is, he admits,
only a modest stay against the inevitable. With a little luck,
though, it will be enough to keep him kicking until the
“second and third bridges”—biotechnology and
nanotechnology, respectively—emerge to secure him his
place in eternity.
Are human beings really ready to live forever? Do we have
the psychological and spiritual resources to deal with such a
profound shift in the very fundaments of our existence? What
would a person be without the confrontation with mortality that
has defined life and culture as we know it? And as much as we
all run from death, are we sure that doing away with it would be
a good thing? What would become of the first species to break
the death barrier? When confronted with a prospect as radical as
immortality, questions like these start to beg for answers. And
given the possibility that we might actually be the first
generation in history with the luxury of having to ask them,
there are many who feel that we might do well to give them some
thought before we proceed much further down the road to
Shangri-la.
But that isn't stopping Kurzweil. Nor does it appear to be
slowing him down. Widely regarded as one of today's leading
futurists and innovators (winner of the prestigious National
Medal of Technology, his inventions include the first reading
machine for the blind and the first synthesizer to duplicate the
sound of a grand piano), his unbridled enthusiasm for the
omnipotence of technology to surmount any obstacle it confronts
has him ready to embrace whatever the future may bring. If even
one-tenth of what he predicts comes true, it will be the end of
life—and death—as we've known it.
What is Enlightenment: In your new book, you assert that in the not-too-distant future, we'll have the capacity to extend the human life span indefinitely. How long do you think we can expect to live?
Ray Kurzweil: One analogy that life extension
researcher Aubrey de Grey uses is, “How long does a house
last? If you take care of the house diligently, and quickly
address any problem that comes up, the house can last
indefinitely. If you don't take care of it, it won't last very
long.” The reason that analogy fails in regard to our own
bodies is that we don't yet understand all the methods and we
don't have all the maintenance tools for our bodies like we do
for houses. We fully understand how a house works, because we
engineered the concept of a house. We don't yet have all that
information about our bodies and brains, and we don't have all
the tools. But we will have them within twenty to twenty-five
years, so we will be able to indefinitely maintain our
bodies—and even anticipate, before they occur, the kinds
of issues that now cause us to age and die. We're talking about
putting your life into your own hands rather than leaving it in
the metaphorical hands of fate.
WIE: How is science going to bring this about?
RK: Terry Grossman and I have described what we
call the “three bridges” to radical life extension.
Bridge one has to do with taking full advantage of today's
knowledge of biology in order to dramatically slow down aging
and disease processes. This will enable us to stay in as good a
shape as possible for when bridge-two technologies become
available. Bridge two is the biotechnology revolution, which
will give us the tools to reprogram our biology and the
biochemical information processes underlying our biology. We're
in the early stages of that revolution already, but in fifteen
years we will have, to a large extent, mastery over our biology.
That will take us to the third bridge, the nanotechnology
revolution, where we can rebuild our bodies and brains at the
molecular level. This will enable us to fix the remaining
problems that are difficult to address within the confines of
biology and ultimately allow us to go beyond the limitations of
biology altogether. So the idea is to get on bridge one now, so
we can be alive and healthy when the biotechnology and
nanotechnology revolutions come to fruition. Our aim is to live
long enough to live forever.
WIE: You've been following your own “bridge-one
longevity program” for several years now. Do you have any
indications that it's working?
RK: When I was forty, I took these biological
aging tests that measure forty or fifty different biochemical
indicators, and I came out with a biological age of about
thirty-eight. I'm now fifty-seven, and last year I came out at
forty, so I've only aged a couple of years in the last sixteen
years. That does reflect how I feel and look. I've overcome a
major predisposition to diabetes—I was actually diagnosed
with it twenty-two years ago, but as a result of using basically
natural methods to reprogram my biochemistry, I now have no
indication of it. I also had a predisposition to heart disease.
My father died at fifty-eight of that disease, but I've never
had it. So I have a completely different biochemistry than I
would otherwise have.
WIE: Can you give an example of what you mean by bridge one, of how we can extend the life span using our current
medical knowledge?
RK: One aging process that we can control right
now has to do with the loss of phosphatidylcholine in our cell
membranes. The cell membrane is typically sixty percent or more
phosphatidylcholine in a young person, but it can be down to ten
percent in the elderly, in whom it gets replaced by useless
substances like hard fats and cholesterol. It's one of the
reasons that the skin of an elderly person is not supple and
their organs don't work as efficiently. The body makes
phosphatidylcholine, but it does so very inefficiently, so
gradually over the decades, our cell membranes are depleted
of that vital substance. You can reverse that by supplementing with
phosphatidylcholine; that's one of the 250 supplements I take.
The objective is to use these bridge-one methods, which is
applying today's knowledge aggressively so that
we can be in biotechnology revolution, become available in another fifteen years.
WIE: How is biotechnology going to aid in life
extension?
RK: Through biotech, we're developing the tools
to reprogram our biology at the most fundamental level—the
level of biochemical information processing. We're not far from
being able to overcome diseases like heart disease and cancer,
type 2 diabetes, stroke—the major diseases that kill
ninety-five percent of us. And beyond simply curing disease,
we're also working to reverse aging, which means addressing at
least a dozen different processes that contribute to aging.
One of the key ideas in the biotechnology revolution is
called rational drug design. We can design drugs to take on very
carefully targeted missions to accomplish precise tasks. Drug
development used to be called drug discovery, and it literally
was that. If you had a mission like lowering hypertension, you
would try fifty thousand substances and find one that seemed to
lower blood pressure. But we didn't know how it worked or why it
worked, and invariably, because it was really a very crude
application, it would have all kinds of side effects. Whereas
now, we can actually understand these processes very precisely
in biochemical terms—for instance, the whole sequence of
information processes that occur in the development of something
like atherosclerosis, the source of heart disease—and we
can attack them at specific vulnerable points. For example,
there's one enzyme in the body that destroys HDL, the good
cholesterol. If you inhibit that enzyme, people's HDL levels
soar and it stops atherosclerosis. There's a drug now in
phase-three FDA trials, torsotropie, that does exactly that, and
it looks very promising. I wouldn't hang my hat on any one
specific development, but there are thousands of these.
We also have the means now to inhibit gene expression. That's
very important because every major disease—heart disease,
cancer, diabetes, and, of course, viral diseases—uses gene
expression, and if we can inhibit certain carefully selected
genes, we can stop disease. There's a new methodology, RNA
interference, where we put small RNA fragments into a medication
that goes into the cell and blocks the messenger RNA expressing
a gene and then blocks the expression of that gene. It works
very well.