UCSF
Gerontology pioneer Leonard Hayflick discusses the biological causes of aging.
At the World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics later this week in Paris, amid sessions on Alzheimer's disease, elderly care, and osteoporosis is a session provocatively titled "Ageing Is No Longer an Unsolved Biological Problem." It's organized by Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco.
In the 1960s, Hayflick discovered that human cells grown in a dish will multiply a finite number of times--a property now known as the Hayflick Limit. These cells later helped ignite the search for the cellular sources of aging, and Hayflick, a former president of the Gerontological Society of America, has since become well known for his skepticism toward claims that human longevity can be significantly lengthened through science.
Hayflick spoke with Technology Review about his theory for the biological causes of aging and explains why he thinks that research directed at the fundamental processes of aging will yield greater returns than studying diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease.
Technology Review: What do you mean when you say "Aging is no longer an unsolved biological problem"?
Leonard Hayflick: What it means is precisely what it says. Several people in this field believe we do understand the biological cause of aging, which is the same as the cause of nonbiological aging. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Like all molecules, biological molecules dissipate energy, losing structural integrity and functional capacity. Our bodies have enormous repair capacity, which evolved to repair dysfunctional molecules until reproductive maturation, after which the accumulation of these molecules exceeds repair capacity. Otherwise, the species would vanish. The accumulation over time of dysfunctional molecules leads to the properties of aging at the clinical level that we all recognize.
TR: So it doesn't imply that there is a solution to aging?
LH: Why would you want to do that?
TR: Some people would like to slow or halt the aging process.
LH: They haven't thought about the consequences. We relate to each other by perceptions of differences in age, which would be destroyed if some chose to increase their longevity and some did not. The social, political, and economic discontinuities that would occur would be enormous. People who say they want extended longevity say they want it to be so when life satisfaction is greatest. Yet they won't know [when that is] until late in life. If you're in your eighties and you decide you want life extended when you were happier, at fifty, it's no longer possible.
TR: So you don't want to extend life span. But do you think it's theoretically possible?
LH: I think it's highly improbable. Let's take something infinitely simpler than your body and mine: automobiles. Even if you put the car in a garage and don't use it, it won't stand there forever. Eventually, it will age and disintegrate. This is an inevitable law of physics. Some people have proposed changing the parts as they wear out. But when is the original no longer the original? Replacing your brain becomes an insurmountable problem.
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There seems to be a great deal of 'faith' in Dr. Hayflick's views on the inevitabililty of ageing...an holistic 'correctness' to death simply because people have always been born, lived and died. He says those who would extend life 'haven't thought it through'. I completely disagree. Just because we can't predict what will happen if people suddenly start to live longer doesn't mean no one has thought about the ramifications. Just because we can't predict the future doesn't mean catastrophe is certain.
Longer life is already causing upheaval; as the retirement savings and medical bills leave old poor people begging for government benefits that the young must pay for. Social Security was designed for us to die about the time we get it. The Economics of "technology success" will be difficult in this transition to immortality and the mobs beat down the doors of the scientist and governments.
It isn't longer life that is causing the upheaval, it is the physical deterioration. If we didn't age, there would be no extra health problems, and there would be no need to retire.
Actually, people already choose keep working more and more, not because they need, but because they can. Google "The Myth of 2016".
When death is removed from the circle, so is the need for birth, leaving the boredom of the same faces, for all eternity.
Sounds like hell..
Guest (andrew_m)
That is ridiculous, removing or drastically slowing death and deterioration has little influence on the desire to procreate. If lucky, it may help stem the trend of overpopulation. Or you could postulate that people living a thousand years might sire hundreds to thousands of children during their lives...hopefully not. With billions of individuals on the planet I hardly think you would grow tired of "the same old faces". Just possibly, you could MOVE once or twice a century and meet a new person or two. You think?
DNA is a chemical machine that carries all the isntructions (recipe) to the precise construction of large functional megamechines(humans, animals etc; it nanostructures matter in an organized way to create the megastructures. The Recipe has isntructions to construct, maintain and to destroy the machine, in an organized way. Different types of organisms(megastructures/machines) have different "instructions" about with regard to the speed of construction and speed of destruction. Compare humans and a sea turtle. Both have the same bio technology of construction, but the "software is progamed, for the some variables, with different "values".
The point is. Is possible, yes, to stop aging, to reverse aging,to reverse to an age of choice, to become a a teeneger again. Its only a question of "programing" the recipe to do so.
The society will never be the same when we discover how to control this "programing" to stop the destruction processes.
The replacement of destroyed megamachines will no longer be an clicle, isntead, will be an eventual activity based on accidents (To die will be very difficult, not the rule). So the replacement processes (procriation)will need to be changed. Kids will be a very rare presence.
And about Inserting knowledge in a dfferent way in our brains. Acceleratig the rate we learn. Why go to school until 23. If we can insert all the knowledge in 1 day.
Humans not dying and learning ultra fast.Where it will lead us?
What is the reason of life? For the other organisms besides humans, can possibly be "to keep life existing". For us, I suspect is to discover all the knowledge to create the universe. Will take time. But the the process is working toward it, taking a thousand, a million years. But the process is here.
Re: Aging is a biological Process
Life without children? You must be joking...
Re: Aging is a biological Process
We can allow ourselves some children... when we begin colonizing space. Couldn't you wait a hundred years knowing it's just the beginning?
We have heard several times as some people prefer aging and death - mostly for moralizing and status quo reasons.
But what about freedom of choice?...
What if some of us do not like aging, and would also want to have a longer life than a mere 8 or 9 decades?
It is very simple, really. Let people choose. If you prefer to age and let go, then just go ahead please. But some of us may want to put up a fight.
As usual, this has been polarized the wrong way. Death is not the original natural way of any thing, not just humans. But we humans can sense that truth. ("He has also set eternity in the hearts of men", Ecclesiastes 3:11) Thus the good desire to eliminate death. However, we cannot eliminate it "bottom up" through reductionist methods. The new life/order is much more grand that incremental progress of humans. These methods are all part of the cursed machinery of the present natural order. We sense the truth of the new order intuitively, not through reductionism. We sense it as children and in the nostalgia that comes with age (not the aging process, but the giving up of the reductionist paradigm). Informational/programmable/reductionistic knowledge can never attain the wisdom of the new order.
"TR: So you don't want to extend life span. But do you think it's theoretically possible?
LH: Even if you put the car in a garage and don't use it, it won't stand there forever."
No one say forever or replace the brain, but it will already be really nice if it adds a few more decades of life and remain young and healthy during that.
Think of this... All current generation guys who prefer death will choose to die. This will slowly reduce their numbers. 21st century kids will be more open to the idea because they will not be brought up assuming death as certainity. As time progresses, will the future mainly only contain pro life people? Has anyone studied such evolutionary trend?
Now comes a complex question: Imagine how terrible the situation would be if half of the government consisted of guys from the 14th century ;-)... Imagine how hard it would be to approve stem cell research if half ur governments were literally run by luddites...
Conquering death represents a kind of technological progress. But once conquered, these long living people who choose not to change may be the biggest hurdle to progress after that.
Isn't it a good thing for gerontology that Hayflick will die ;-)... What an oxymoron... LOL
funny post :))
But people will still die, even if aging is stopped/reduced. Automobile accidents, natural disasters, disease, wars, crimes etc. will kill eventually the "non-aging" people too. So we are not talking about living forever, but living a few centuries, or perhaps a few thousand years.
The positive side effect of a non-aging population will be that religious hogwash will be severely reduced. The negative side effect will be that a certain sub population will live an eternal yet meaningless life...watching TV and being a couch potato for 800 years?...Kind of disgusting, and meaningless too.
I think in 800 years we'll find something more interesting to do. Far more interesting than lying in a fucking coffin and being eaten by fucking worms. Death to the death.
Guest (rafael7)
The prospect of living 'forever' is enticing, but I think it is a short-sighted goal. I think the challenge is in making the life we live as meaningful and productive as we can. Examine your own life; are you living up to your potential? If you are wasting seventy years, what's the point in wasting 800?
Life on all levels is a cycle. It gives it boundaries, and these boundaries define life. What is the point of a race if there is no finish line? Folks wanna just go on living, jes' be lazy longer...yah know?
I am not a religious person, but it's one way of coaxing humans into 'decent' behavior. Two-thirds of humans are a waste of oxygen anyway, and a bane to civilization.
Scoundrels always seem to work themselves into positions of power, so an unlimited lifespan would allow an accumulation of undesireables in the seats of power. The don't call death the 'Sweet Release' for no reason.
Don't you think those fake flowers suck? They look great once, but then they never change and get all dusty, and they have NO smell...hmmmmm.
It seems naive to hear about aging as some kind of thermodynamic inevitability. It's the matter of incoming energy to keep the structure as long as we want. And we consume energy several times a day - or die. So it's not about entropy. The Second Law cannot apply to open systems we are. So it's rather some kind of scientific blindness like that of Lord Kelvin who said people won't probably fly in a million years... and then were Wrights. It is sorry to see such a genius in such a trap of thought. Really deadly kind of pessimistic wishful thinking.
The automobile metaphor is rather stupid. We are not closed in a garage, we breathe, drink, eat, care about ourselves, sometimes get cured. If it was simple entropy, we won't be alive in 5 minutes. As for replacing parts... he forget we are not heaps of certain atoms, or molecules. All our atoms are replaced every 7 years or so. What we really are is systems, structures. So eventually even our brains can be renewed without us losing sense of ourselves. Just like we are renewed in nature.
It is probably true any species wouldn't survive without aging, but we are not "just another species". We are the first species smart enough to read its genetic roots, and once we'll deal with this deadly legacy once and forever. Natural selection loses any sense when we begin to modify our genes directly, and besides, it's just unhuman to continue it when we can stop it. The war on aging is going on.
Guest (rafael7)
All structures move from a state of new to old to gone. Abuse speeds the process, Care slows it. All our cells get replaced, but our scars are forever. We are fuel ourselves, burning fuel to survive, but being consumed in the process. Health is more important than age. Live life to it's fullest, and enjoy the ride. Focus on quality, not quantity.
Do I want to live a long, long time?... yes.
Do I want to be a vibrant, healthy person, who contributes to society?... yes.
Would I like a treatment that miraculously un-aged my body, and gave me a youthful, lithe form, with fluid motion and clarity of mind, and quickness of mind?...sure!
Will I lose a minute of sleep worrying about whether it will ever be possible?...NO!
Humans do not possess the selfless intelligence, compassion or wisdom to be 'Gods'. I anticipate a lot of freaky sh*t to go down while we are figuring that out.
If professor Hayflick needed a procedure to extend his life, would he take it? Has he ever had a vaccination, annual physical exam, treatment, or seen a doctor to prevent an early death? Quantity AND quality of life.
Just a little skeptical about this philosophy to "go gentle into that good night."
If professor Hayflick needed a procedure to extend his life, would he take it? Has he ever had a vaccination, annual physical exam, treatment, or seen a doctor to prevent an early death? Quantity AND quality of life.
Just a little skeptical about this philosophy of "going willingly into that good night."
>>treatment and preventively maintaining your health to live out your normal life is not the same as treatment to extend your life.
Pretty much nothing we do now and any disease we eliminated would extend the human life more than a couple years on average.
About the only Tx that WOULD extend life more than 10 years is castration. Strange as it sounds, research on people in an institute in kansas before the 1960's when they banned this practice proves over 700+ people that the longer you have had reduction in body hormones the longer you live. Somehow I don't think this will become a popular or accepted treatment.
The same applies to women: just as an example of the havoc hormones wreak on the body, female dogs have 33% chance of getting breast cancer in their lives, several times that of human women.
If the dog is fixed, that is reduced to a tiny percent of the original figure.
NOTHING 'in vitro' that causes cells to multiply infinitely will extend life in-vivo. The human cells stop dividing for a reason: to prevent runaway cell divion, i.e. cancer and tumors later in life. In fact programmed death of cells is necessary to the formation of the human body. The cells between your fingers are programmed to die in the womb. If they did not you'd have webbed hands.
We have close to a trillion cells that originate from one cell all specialized into different tissues. If this regeneration of the DNA did not occur regularly, errors would creep in from damage and we'd become sterile. Not only that but parasites - bacteria, viruses, protozoa, etc would become adapted to our immune system and we'd all become chronically infected.
Actually the concept of "normal life span" has no real biological definition. If you consider a "purely natural" life, where no medical prevention and intervention is taken, then it would probably be around 40-50 years.
Yet in our world many sickly people can live beyond 40. And we consider this "natural" or "normal". It is normal to have vaccinations, regular checkups, and it is also normal to have surgeries or other major medical intervention to allow you to live out your "natural life span", which today is supposed to be around 80. Why do we consider this life span "normal" if many people achieve this only via medical intervention?
But many years from now, incremental technical advances will have pushed this "normal life span" way up. Maybe it will be normal for your grand kids to go in for a routine medical checkup when they are 120.
And the point of "falling behind" in evolution is not true, because evolution is not the way it used to be anymore. We will be engineering evolution from now on. We will be in the driving seat, not the bacteria, nor the viruses. It's just a matter of time, but we will get there.
40-50 is correct if you assume no medicine, and death by fighting with your tribal neighbors. Yet people with 'no medicine' can regularly live to 70-80. This happens often in areas such as the andes.
The maximum lifespan is pretty much 110.
What is almost funny, I found when researching aging for a medical class, is that supposedly smart researchers would visit 'primitive paradises' in various parts of the world. There people would tell the researchers that they were 110, 120, 130.. and the researchers, normally smart people would accept this without proof. This included Rodale, of organic gardening fame. When other researchers went back to the same spots years later, they found that, for various reasons these people were lying. For cultural reasons many would take names of elders in the village who had died. Pages would become mysteriously ripped out of church birth logs.
In another funny incident in one of the USSR satellite countries, local newspapers proclaimed as here a man whose birth certificate said he was 121. Once printed, someone else wrote into the paper that the man was only 78, that he was using his father's passport. In countries where documenation is done carefully, maximum age varies little.
Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
There seems to be a very widespread misconception about the differences between treating disease and modulating or even reversing aging.
Our wonderful increase in human lifespan over the last 300 years has come from treating trauma, acute conditions, and chronic disease. I can imagine further, significant increases in lifespan from treating the diseases of old age like senile diabetes, heart disease, etc.. But that is a very different thing than truly reversing aging. Hayflick's point, supported by Robin Holliday, and most other major biogerontologists, is that aging is a systemic wearing out of the entire organism, and that natural selection has synchronized the multiple causes of aging. This makes treating aging itself a very hard problem - probably one that we will never solve.
As Holliday writes in "Aging is No Longer an Unsolved Problem in Biology" (Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci 1067): "Although it may be possible modulate life span, it is unreasonable to assume that all the different causes of aging could be reversed."
The conflation of the treatment of diseases that have extended lifespan with the reversal of aging is a nice rhetorical trick, superficially attractive, and useful to those who want to pretend that real anti-aging science will be easy, or who wish to say that those who oppose anti-aging science are inconsistent or hyprocritcal. It scores easy points. But it's biologically ignorant.
Re: Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
Mr Pontin is correct. He said my criticism of professor Hayflick was a 'rhetorical trick'. Pontin's acumen and insight are astute and accurate. I am guilty, as charged.
I apologize to professor Hayflick and thank Mr Pontin for not using a stronger term than 'biologically ignorant'.
Re: Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
We agree to disagree.
Conflation of diseases with aging is not always a straightforward issue. Indeed, if one cures a childhood disease and therefore extends life, that is not equivalent to solving aging. However, there are quite a number of age related diseases, and in those cases the story is very different. Very few people die of generic "old age" per se. Most die of something specific such as cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's etc. Since there is a very strong correlation between age and these diseases, it has lead some to think of aging as a progressive "disease". Ultimately it is almost an exercise in semantics whether you consider aging a normal phenomenon, or a disease in its own right. Once we will have detailed knowledge (and hopefully cures) for these diseases (cancer, AD etc.), then in fact we will have made an incremental step for treating aging itself. Obviously, many such incremental steps will be required to push lifespan beyond it's current limit.
Re: Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
With respect: the distinction between the diseases of old age (and our growing ability to treat them) and aging (and, so far, our complete inability to reverse aging, and our limited success in extending the lives of c.elegans, flies, and mice) is not semantic - but central to Hayflick, Holliday, et al's conception of aging (and the subject of this Q&A).
Re: Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
* Opposing "aging diseases" to "aging" seems to me like opposing facts that could be checked (diseases) to concepts (aging).
* Won't "aging" concept could be further refined in many sub problems and each one tackle at a time?
Re: Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
I do not think so. Hayflick, Holliday, and most reputable biogertontologists (with the exception of Guarante, Kenyon, and a few others who think that aging may be simple) now believe that aging is a systemic wearing out of entire organism, synchronized by natural selection, that is complex and may be very difficult, if not impossible, to treat. The diseases of old age, like some cancers, senile diabetes, dementia, are symptoms of aging - the results of that wearing out. But even if we could reliably treat all those diseases of aging, we'd still die of old age.
Indeed, Hayflick's famous "Limit" on the number of times a cell can reliably divide is a good example: it is not a disease of old age, but it is a organic boundary on how long we can live.
Re: Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
The "systemic wearing out of entire organism" is basically nothing else than a collection of many accumulated biochemical errors. These are amenable to research questions such as:
- what exactly are these errors?
- how do they happen - what is the mechanism behind them?
- could these errors be prevented?
- if they already happened, could they be fixed?
Nobody said this research would be easy, nor quick. One problem is that some very naive characters as Kurzweil, or de Grey captured the public's imagination with their fairy tales, and this detracts from recognizing the serious research done in several labs. (also, de Grey, Kurzweil et co. don't actually do any research themselves - they just pontificate)
Why not do some interviews with David Sinclair, or Lenny Guarante?...That should counterbalance the "cannot do" attitude of Hayflick.
Re: Diseases of aging vs. modulation of aging
We have covered David Sinclair, and Guarante's work on Sirtuins that underlies Sirtris. In fact, many times, but most expansively here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/19172/
Also, see this description of the current state of anti-aging science:
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/16482/
The human species may become extinct sooner than we fully understand aging if the depreciation in the quantity and quality of human sperms by chemicals such as phthalates and dioxins continued unchecked.
Scientists in Newcastle, England, announced yesterday (July 07, 2009) that they have created human sperms, or more specifically, are in the early stages of creating viable human sperms, from embryonic stem cells. Does this mean that we no longer need men to make babies, or that we no longer need to worry about the damage certain chemicals do to human sperms, among others? Some contend the sperms are not fully developed, others that it is unethical to destroy one life to create another. Legal prohibition of the use of such sperms to fertilize human ova also poses a potential obstacle. The full ramifications of this scientific ‘breakthrough’ remain unknown, but not that we need to urgently address the issues we know seriously endanger our species
hayflick uses superlatives as answers
"Researcher gives absolutely stupid and unsatisfactory answers to questions about aging research" should be the title of this article...ah..yes, Dr. Hayflick, the brain is hopelessly complex, the human body is infinitely more complex than the automobile, etc. Is it important to say Dr. Hayflick is a *qualitative* researcher and any number larger than 10 is "huge"?...
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darwinskernel
1 Comment
Backwardness of Logic
TR: So it doesn't imply that there is a solution to aging?
LH: Why would you want to do that?
# what?!
TR: Some people would like to slow or halt the aging process.
LH: They haven't thought about the consequences. We relate to each other by perceptions of differences in age, which would be destroyed if some chose to increase their longevity and some did not.
# Yes it would, that is what disruptive innovations do. And incidentally, why would you want to keep the status quo?
…
People who say they want extended longevity say they want it to be so when life satisfaction is greatest.
# That's one of the reasons but not the most important one as you picture it here. How about we take the lost of one's loved ones for a reason. Have you given thought to the horrible trauma that people go through as a consequence of losing someone and the enormousness of its impact on people's life?
I think you have got this all backward.
Yet they won't know [when that is] until late in life.
# Backwards again… yes, it is true that nostalgia comes to you when you have lost something but if you never get to lose it then there is no reason to be nostalgic about it. If I never get to be old I would not have any perception of being old and losing my youthfulness and therefore I would not miss it. Why would I? It would not even cross my mind is it will be nonexistence.
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mikey248
1 Comment
Re: Backwardness of Logic
Dr. Hayflick reminds me of Einstein commenting on God not playing dice to discredit quantum physics.
A father of the field tries to "hold your horses."
Also, I didn't like his car analogy. The body is self-repairing. Various human cells have been immortalized. There are all sorts of reasons why that analogy is specious.
Aside from all the many reasons we should try to extend life:
1) People can invest more in achieving and employing great capabilities and skills that may require decades to master, resulting in all the greater realization of human potential
2) There will need no longer be a tradeoff between wisdom and vigour
3) Old folks can be happy and productive, rather than bored and burdensome
4) If we do not respect life to the extent of focusing on its preservation, then what moral claims do we possess?
5) As with Everest, because it is there to be conquered.
Reply
Sanescience
19 Comments
Re: Backwardness of Logic
"Aside from all the many reasons we should try to extend life:"
People need to live longer, with short lives come short memories and mistakes repeated that bring suffering and sadness. Bring the vitality of the young to those with wisdom and experience and humanity will enter a new age.
"Old folks can be happy and productive, rather than bored and burdensome"
Old folks are the number one givers and volunteers for charity. Bored and burdensome may be a popular stereo type with the young navel gazing obsessed trend obsessed, but our society works because of knowledge possessed by middle age and above and the suffering is comforted by their efforts more than anyone's.
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