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by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D.
Immortality is Within Our Grasp
Do we have the knowledge and the tools today to live forever? If all science and
technology development suddenly stopped, the answer would have to be no. We do have the means to dramatically slow disease and the aging process far more than most people realize, but we
do not yet have all the techniques we need to indefinitely extend human life. However, it is
clear that far from halting, the pace of scientific and technological discovery is
accelerating.
According to models that Ray has created, our paradigm-shift rate - the rate of technical
progress - is doubling every decade, and the capability (price performance, capacity, and
speed) of specific information technologies is doubling each year. So the answer to our
question is actually a definitive yes - the knowledge exists, if aggressively applied, for
you to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you can be in good health and
good spirits when the more radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies become
available over the next couple of decades.
Longevity expert and gerontologist Aubrey de Grey uses the metaphor of maintaining a
house to explain this key concept. How long does a house last? The answer obviously depends
on how well you take care of it. If you do nothing, the roof will spring a leak before long,
water and the elements will invade, and eventually the house will disintegrate. But if you
proactively take care of the structure, repair all damage, confront all dangers, and rebuild
or renovate parts from time to time using new materials and technologies, the life of the
house can essentially be extended without limit.
The same holds true for our bodies and brains. The only difference is that while we fully
understand the methods underlying the maintenance of a house, we do not yet fully understand
all of the biological principles of life. But with our rapidly increasing comprehension of
the human genome, the proteins expressed by the genome (proteome), and the biochemical
processes and pathways of our metabolism, we are quickly gaining that knowledge. We are
beginning to understand aging, not as a single inexorable progression but as a group of
related biological processes. Strategies for reversing each of these aging progressions
using different combinations of biotechnology techniques are emerging. Many scientists,
including the authors of this book, believe that we will have the means to stop and even
reverse aging within the next two decades. In the meanwhile, we can slow each aging process
to a crawl using the methods outlined in Fantastic Voyage.
In this way, the goal of extending longevity can be taken in three steps, or Bridges.
Fantastic Voyage is intended to serve as a guide to living long enough in good health and
spirits - Bridge One - to take advantage of the full development of the biotechnology
revolution - Bridge Two. This, in turn, will lead to the nanotechnology-AI (artificial
intelligence) revolution - Bridge Three - which has the potential to allow us to live
indefinitely.
This, then, is the premise of Fantastic Voyage and the case we will make throughout: the
knowledge of how to maintain our biological "house" and extend its longevity and vitality
without limit is close at hand. We will tell you how to use the extensive knowledge that we
do have today to remain heathy as the reverse engineering (decoding and understanding the
principle methods) of our biology proceeds.
The 21st Century is Worth Living to Experience
Most of our conceptions of human life in the 21st century will be turned on their head.
Not the least of these is the expectation expressed in the adage about the inevitability of
death and taxes. We'll leave the issue of taxes to another book, but belief in the
inevitability of death and how the perspective will soon change is very much the primary
theme of Fantastic Voyage. As we succeed in understanding the genome and the proteome, many
dramatic advances in treating disease and even reversing aging will emerge. The first two
decades of the 21st century will be a golden era of biotechnology.
Many experts believe that within a decade we will be adding more than a year to human
life expectancy every year. At that point, with each passing year, your remaining life
expectency will move further into the future. (Aubrey de Grey believes that we will
successfully stop aging in mice - who share 99 percent of our genetic code - within 10
years, and that human therapies to halt and reverse aging will follow 5 to 10 years after
that.) A small minority of older boomers will make it past this impending critical
threshold. You can be among them. The authors of Fantastic Voyage are of this generation and
are intent on living through this threshold era in good health and spirits. Unfortunately,
most of our fellow baby boomers remain oblivious to the hidden degenerative processes inside
their bodies and will die unnecessarily young.
As interesting as the first two decades of this century are likely to be, subsequent
decades should lead to even more dramatic changes. Ray has spent several decades studying
and modeling technology trends and their impact on society. Perhaps his most profound
observation is that the rate of change is itself accelerating. This means that the past is
not a reliable guide to the future. The 20th century was not 100 years of progress at
today's rate but, rather, was equivalent to about 20 years, because we've been speeding up
to current rates of change. And we'll make another 20 years of progress at today's rate,
equivalent to that of the entire 20th century, in the next 14 years. And then we'll do it
again in just 7 years. Because of this exponential growth, the 21st century will equal
20,000 years of progress at today's rate of progress - 1,000 times greater than what we
witnessed in the 20th century, which itself was no slouch for change.
The result will be profound changes in every facet of our lives, from our health and
longevity to our economy and society, even our concepts of who we are and what it means to
be human. Within a couple of decades we will have the knowledge to revitalize our health,
expand our experiences - such as full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the
senses, augmented reality, and enhanced human intelligence and capability - and expand our
horizons.
As we peer even further into the 21st century, nanotechnology will enable us to rebuild
and extend our bodies and brains and create virtually any product from mere information,
resulting in remarkable gains in prosperity. We will develop means to vastly expand our
physical and mental capabilities by directly interfacing our biological systems with
human-created technology.
Although human ability to take command of the course of life and death is controversial,
we belive that the ability to broaden our horizons is a unique and desirable attribute of
our species. And we certainly believe that it is worth the effort to remain healthy and
vital today to experience this remarkable century ahead.
Who Is The Enemy?
It is wise to consider the process of reversing and overcoming the dangerous progression
of disease as a war. As in any war, if the enemy is at the gates - or worse, inside the
gates - it's important to mobilize all the means of intelligence and weaponary that can be
harnessed. That's why we'll advocate that key dangers be attacked on multiple fronts. For
example, we'll discuss 10 approaches that should be practiced concurrently for preventing
heart disease, particularly for people with elevated risk factors.
But if fighting disease and extending longevity and vitality is a war, who is the enemy?
At the top of our list we should put ourselves. Of course, health issues get our attention
the moment clinical disease strikes, but most people fail to focus on prevention and health
enhancement in a timely manner before the onset of overt symptoms. Unfortunately, the medial
profession is oriented toward detecting and treating these conditions only after they reach
the point of crisis (symptom-control medicine), so most people receive limited guidance on
disease prevention from their health professionals. You should not wait for others to show
you the path to healing; the only person who can take responsibility for your health is you.
Our second enemy is the disease process itself. Our bodies evolved when it was not
beneficial to the survival of the species for people to live beyond their child-rearing
years and compete for the tribe's or community's limited food and other resources. Only a
century and half ago, life expectancy was 37 years. If we want to remain vital for as long
as possible, we cannot simply rely on the natural order that biological evolution has given
us.
The third enemy is an increasingly vocal body of opinion that opposes extending human
longevity on the basis that it supposedly violates the essence of human nature. Author
Francis Fukuyama, for example, considers research that might extend human longevity beyond
its current fourscore years to be immoral. Opposition to certain biological technologies
such as stem cell research is delaying vital therapies for a wide range of diseases. We
should note that we don't consider these thinkers themselves to be our adversaries but,
rather, their regressive ideas. The essence of the human species is to extend and expand our
boundaries. Ultimately, such opposition will end up being mere stones in a torrent of
innovation, with the continue flow of progress passing around these barriers. But even minor
delays will result in the suffering and death of millions of people.
Bridge Two: The Biotechnology Revolution
As we learn how information is transformed in biological processes, many strategies are
emerging for overcoming disease and aging processes. We'll review some of the more promising
approaches and further examples in Fantastic Voyage. One powerful approach is to start with
biology's information backbone: the genome. With gene technologies, we're now on the verge
of being able to control how genes express themselves. Ultimately, we will actually be able
to change the genes themselves.
We are already deploying gene technologies in other species. Using a method called
recombinant technology, which is being used commercially to provide many new pharmaceutical
drugs, the genes of organisms ranging from bacteria to famyard animals are being modified to
produce the proteins we need to combat human diseases.
Another important line of attach is to regrow our cells, tissues, and even whole organs,
and introduce them into our bodies without sugery. One major benefit of this therapeutic
cloning technique is that we will be able to create these new tissues from versions of our
cells that have been made younger - the emerging field of rejuvenative medicine.
As we are learning about the information processes underlying biology, we are devising
ways of mastering them to overcome disease and aging and extend human potential. Drug
discovery was once a matter of finding substances that produced some beneficial effect
without excessive side effects. This process was similar to early humans' tool discovery,
which was limited to simply finding rocks and natural implements that could be used for
helpful purposes. Now that we can design drugs to carry out precise missions at the
molecular level, we are in a position to overcome age-old afflictions. The scope and scale
of these efforts is vast; the examples in Fantastic Voyage are only a small sampling of the
most promising ideas.
Reversing Human Aging
Our understanding of the principal components of human aging is growing rapidly.
Strategies have been identified to halt and reverse each of the aging processes. Perhaps the
most energetic and insightful advocate of stopping the aging process is Aubrey de Grey, a
scientist with the department of genetics at Cambridge University. De Grey describes his
goal as "engineered negligible senescence" - stopping us from becoming more frail and
disease-prone as we get older.
According to de Grey, "All the core knowledge needed to develop engineered negligible
senescence is already in our possession - it mainly just needs to be pieced together." He
believes we'll demonstrate "robustly rejuvenated" mice - mice that are functionally younger
than before being treated, and with the life extension to prove it - within 10 years, and
points out that this demonstration will have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Showing
that we can reverse the aging process in an animal that shares 99 percent of our genes will
profoundly transform the common wisdom that aging and death are inevitable. Once
demonstrated in an animal, robust rejuvenation in humans is likely to take an additional 5
to 10 years, but the advent of rejuvenated mice will create enormous competitive pressure to
translate these results into human therapies.
Earlier in the evolution of our species (and precursors to our species), survival was not
aided - in deed, it would have been hurt - by individuals living long past their
child-rearing years. As a result, genes that supported significant life extension were
selected against. In our modern era of abundance, all generations can contribute to the
ongoing expansion of human knowledge. "Our life expectancy will be in the region on 5,000
years ... by the year 2100," says de Grey. By following the three bridges described in
Fantastic Voyage, you should be able to reach the year 2100, and then, according to de Grey,
extend your longevity indefinitely.
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