Institute For The Future

From Longevity to Labyrinth in 300 words

 

Human lifespan has doubled in the past 250 years. People today live into their 80’s and die of heart disease, infections, cancer, or stroke. Aging research is progressing, with the arrival of regenerative medicine - stem cells, 3-D organ printing, and custom-designed treatments to activate healing.

Will we double our lifespans again this century? Life extension enthusiasts think we can hit longevity “escape velocity” within the lifetimes of our youngest citizens. They follow caloric restriction diets, sign up for cryonics, take a cocktail of resveratrol, fish oil, vitamin D3 and other supplements - basically hanging in there until more radical therapies are available. Non-enthusiasts don’t want to live forever and question the very desirability of life extension.

How will the extension of healthy human life happen? Current hot areas of research include rapamycin (an immunosuppressant drug causing late-onset rejuvenation in mice), vaccines targeting amyloid beta protein (which builds up in Alzheimer's Disease), generating stem cells from skin cells (and even changing skin cells directly into neurons), printing on-demand organs for transplants, and the controversial WILT telomerase knockout strategy to prevent the body from lengthening telomeres (telomerase is active in most human cancers).

 

What will it mean to live to be 200? First of all, how will we afford to live that long? People will either become increasingly depressed or create new post-reproductive identities. Extreme life extension will be reserved for wealthy, educated people who can pay for expensive therapies, but medical tourism and an underground DIYBio movement will rise up to hack longevity for the masses. Pressure will build up for a public health initiative to equalize access to life extension, and relative scales of life extension will exist for people with different health conditions.

It's a maze of undiscovered territory that we must navigate as longevity technologies become ubiquitous.