X-Message-Number: 20451 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: "There's no gray area in anti-aging ranks" Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 09:01:43 -0800 http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=12027§ion=LOCAL&year=2002&month=11&day=17 Sunday, November 17, 2002 There's no gray area in anti-aging ranks Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 264? is rally cry By STEPHEN LYNCH The Orange County Register NEWPORT BEACH The first step toward immortality, according to Page 41 of "The Baby Boomers' Guide to Living Forever," is: Don't die. This may seem obvious. But if anti-aging enthusiasts agree on anything, it's that if they can just survive the next few decades, they'll live forever. By 2029 (according to one scientist), we'll have tiny machines in our bodies that will repair all diseases. By 2040 (according to another), doctors will have extended the duration of fertility and pushed the limits of mortality. By 2080 (says a third), only guns, car accidents or one too many lonely Sunday afternoons will kill us. Hence, the not-dying part. This weekend in Newport Beach, at the 5th annual Extreme Life Extension Conference, a bunch of A-list scientists are gathered to discuss a B-movie idea: living long enough to live forever. They've been brought here by the Alcor Foundation, an Arizona company famous for deep- freezing baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams' head. Because if one idea doesn't work, there's always living like a popsicle for the next 80 years. In every conference speech, be it by an award-winning geneticist or pulp scientist, the message was clear: goodbye midlife crisis. "Obviously there's a great deal of optimism," Ralph Merkle, an Alcor board member, said Saturday after listening to another speaker promise that immortality is "just around the corner." "Technological change is accelerating - this is all making sense." Interest is accelerating as well, if only because baby boomers have entered the dark side of 50 without an escape plan. The attitude, summed up by Terry Grossman, the Orange County doctor who wrote the "Guide to Living Forever," is: "The Baby Boomer Generation will either be the first generation to experience the wonders of quasi-immortality, or simply the last generation to live out our lives and die the old-fashioned way." Once, they never trusted anyone over 30. Now they want to be 300. Just how will the retirement age change to 265? Well, for starters, immortality may be a biological possibility, says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at UCI. About a decade ago, researchers discovered that insects actually stopped aging after a certain point. The same is true for humans, Rose says. If you live to be 90, "the death rate stops increasing," natural decay stalls, and you have a better chance to live to, say, 110. The problem is, after three decades of rapid aging, the quality of life at 90 isn't very good. The human body is frail and vulnerable to disease and injury. So Rose has experimented with fruit flies, man aging to increase the age at which the insect can reproduce and live a healthy, active life. He's had fruit flies buzzing around after a month, which, in human terms, is like a 150-year-old salsa dancer. Rose is sticking to insects; he isn't interested in human life extension. But plenty of Ponce de Leons are encouraged by his research. They hope that through drugs, diet and gene therapy, they can live well into their 90s and then just tread water in the Fountain of Youth. To get there, some anti-aging devotees try to rid themselves of "free radicals," the toxins found in tobacco, alcohol and fatty foods. That way they can live long, very boring, lives. Others put their faith in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology, machines so tiny they can live inside human cells, where they can perform noninvasive surgery and correct the effects of aging. Proponents call this "singularity," when man and machine become one. For those who just can't wait - or enjoy free radicals - there is cryonics, putting your body in deep-freeze until it can be reawakened after scientists perfect the fat-free Twinkie. "I don't think they're doing anything more than producing frozen corpses," Rose says. But Merkle says it's too early to judge cryonics, just as it's too early to judge any of the promises of immortality. "We're doing clinical trials. Does it allow us to revive someone in the future so they can live forever? We're conducting an experiment to see if that happens," Merkle says, then smiles. "The question is do you want to be in the experiment or in the control group?" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTACT US: (714) 796-2298 or _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20451