Immortality: dreaming is not harmful...
Such is eternal youth: when people will be able to live 300-400 yearsDmitry Simonov, Contracts.
ua
People have always dreamed of immortality. And today it seems that the cherished recipe is about to be found. Alexander Vaiserman, Chief Researcher at the Laboratory of Mathematical Modeling of Aging Processes at the D.F. Chebotarev Institute of Gerontology and Contracts.ua tried to look into this bright future.
Some futurologists, including the notorious Raymond Kurzweil, believe that in the foreseeable future, a person's life expectancy may increase dramatically – up to the point that a person will live forever. What do you think about this?– Dreams of making a person immortal have existed throughout civilization.
At various times, interest in this issue has been rising and falling. In the 60-70s of the last century there was the last surge of interest in gerontology, due to the fact that science and technology began to develop at a furious pace, and this inspired optimism in people. Arthur C. Clarke believed that at the beginning of the XXI century, people will be immortal. But recently, almost none of the gerontologists have expressed much optimism on this issue. More recently, interest in this topic has revived again, and it was associated with research in the field of stem cells.
How justified is this optimism?– Now stem cells are used for therapy, for example, for myocardial infarction.
In this way, old or dead cells are replaced with young and healthy ones. Naturally, the idea arose: why not do the same with the whole body at once. There was also an enthusiast of this direction – the Englishman Aubrey de Grey. He works in Cambridge and publishes one of the highest-rated gerontological journals, Rejuvenation Research. His hypothesis is that a person differs little from a machine. Aubrey is not a biologist by education, but a cyberneticist. Therefore, he believes that the same way we replace failed modules in a computer, we can do with a person using stem cells. If an organ cannot be replaced, for example, the brain, we can "clean" it. To do this, he suggests using cadaveric bacteria that will process the accumulated slags in the cells. From my point of view, these are very superficial judgments, rather amateurish than serious scientific ones. But hope is inspired by the fact that science does not fundamentally deny the possibility of immortality. That is, theoretically it is possible. But in practice it is incredibly difficult to achieve.
Today, a new larynx is successfully grown from stem cells for transplantation and, most likely, sooner or later they will learn how to grow some other organs…– If we really manage to replace the worn-out organs, then we will be able to significantly prolong a person's life.
But it is important to understand that in this case we are not talking about the fight against aging as such, but about the fight against diseases that accompany aging, such as, for example, type 2 diabetes. If we can constantly repair the pancreas, then diabetics will live longer. It is difficult to say how soon we will achieve some radical breakthroughs in this direction.
An old person is characterized by so–called polymorbidity - that is, he has many diseases at once. Even if we manage to cure him of one deadly disease, he will most likely die of another in a few years. The problem is also that, theoretically, any exposure that prolongs life increases the likelihood of cancer. When they start offering specific life extension technologies, the main question will be whether it will be possible to bypass the cancer barrier.
How do you assess the prospects of cryonics in terms of prolonging life or achieving immortality?– I am a big opponent of this direction.
Once I was on a talk show dedicated to cryonics, where I represented the point of view of academic science. There was also a young man whose grandmother wished to be frozen after death. He excitedly told how he kept her brain under his bed in dry ice until people arrived with a container. From my point of view, this is complete insanity, but it's not even about that. This young man was comparing a person to a TV. If a person has a broken "capacitor", then it can be frozen and left in a cryopreservation until someone learns how to fix this capacitor, and then the person will work like new again.
But I see a living being in a completely different way! A person is incredibly more complicated than a TV, so using approaches that are used to repair household appliances is pretty crazy from my point of view. And cryonics – they offer it.
The "father" of cryonics, Robert Ettinger, who died this summer, was frozen at his request. Are these people suffering from scientific ignorance, or is there nothing here but banal pumping of money?– Hope is the most profitable product from a commercial point of view.
Religion exploits hope most effectively of all – the hope of an afterlife. There are legends that even in ancient Egypt people staged demonstrations protesting against the fact that the gods unfairly deprived them of immortality. That is, people are very dissatisfied with their mortal nature, so when someone gives them hope for immortality, they are willing to pay a lot for it. The followers of cryonics use this.
To date, it is clear that the brain can be frozen, but it is impossible to defrost, so as not to damage the cells. It is possible to successfully defrost primitive animals, such as newts or frogs, and there are several examples of successful defrosting of mice and rats. But in these cases we are talking about a living organism. And they are engaged in their cryonic activity with a person after the fixation of clinical death – that is, after brain death. But no one has yet been able to unfreeze the dead so that it becomes alive.
Does the restriction of calories consumed really contribute to the prolongation of life?– COR (caloric restriction of the diet) or dosed fasting is currently the only means that can prolong the life of laboratory animals (rats live 30-40% longer).
But on this occasion, I remember one funny case. A few years ago, a world congress on the topic of COR was held, where several hundred of the world's leading experts on this issue gathered. The chairman addresses them: "I ask you – no one will ever know – raise your hand, those who practice the COR in everyday life." Zero hands… It's one thing to know this in theory, another to apply it in practice. As Nabokov once said, a gentleman should always get up from the table a little hungry. If people did this, they would certainly live longer, especially in the modern world.
Do you have an alternative recipe?– I can talk about my own recipes.
The first is that you need to eat tasteless. I don't mean that fried eggs need to be overcooked, but you should use less spices, seasonings and fat. The best way not to eat a whole chocolate bar at a time, which is in the refrigerator, is simply not to buy it. The second is movement. A person can easily achieve to move more. Don't buy a car – buy a bike. When I visit Europe, I am amazed at the ratio of cars and bicycles on the street, especially in Holland. Europe has already realized that we need to move more and use less mechanisms that supposedly help us.
What will happen to society if a person lives forever or several times longer than today?– Today they say that the planet is threatened with overpopulation, and this will mean the death of civilization.
But there are two possible ways out of this situation. First, it is the exploration of other planets. Sooner or later it will start happening. And there is a second option. The higher the degree of civilization development, the more each person wants to save resources for himself personally.
The birth of a large number of children in the XIX century was considered as an economic necessity. They were born simply as assistants. Now it is no longer necessary, because people can already cope with economic problems. But people are constantly being stimulated to have children. The policy of double standards is in effect: on the one hand, they shout that the Earth is overpopulated, there are no resources, water is running out, and on the other hand, they stimulate the birth rate.
If there is no such propaganda, and people will live for a very long time, then the number of the population will remain approximately unchanged. Only the average age of people will not be 70-80 years old, but, let's say, 300-400. Everyone will reach the peak of development – intellectual or spiritual. But at the moment there are no scientific or social prerequisites for all this – there are still a lot of poor countries. And if everything continues like this, then we may come to a global war.
There is also the idea that the contents of the human brain can be backed up and thus achieve immortality in the digital world. How do you feel about this?– Negative.
I think it's from the same opera as cryonics. Man, like all living things, is an incredible mystery. We, scientists, are reproached for criticizing scientific views that were 50 years ago, and, they say, in 50 years our views will be treated exactly the same. This is partly true. But I must say that now science has reached such a level that it asks more questions than it gives answers.
Previously, optimism dominated: it was believed that tomorrow we would build a perpetual motion machine, fly to Mars and find the secret of eternal life. Now it is clear to us that all living things are incredibly more complicated than we imagined the same 50 years ago. Then chemists and physicists dominated, who reached very great heights, made an atomic bomb and thought they could explain everything, including man. It turned out that nothing like that. Wildlife differs from inanimate by its incredible complexity and this complexity is difficult to explain. There are some things whose emergence through evolutionary transformations is difficult to explain. It is very difficult to assume that all this arose from mud and water. Therefore, it is unreasonable to claim that a person is an analogue of a TV or a computer in which a burned–out hard disk can be replaced. A person is a complex formation that is connected to the entire universe in some unexplained ways. And such primitive methods are unlikely to solve anything.
You – a scientist – do not reject the possibility of the existence of a superintelligence, whatever it is called there?– I don't see any theoretical prerequisites to say that this is impossible.
This is one of the possibilities. And then the problem of faith begins. Believe it if you want, but don't believe it if you want.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
05.12.2011