When Aging Becomes Obsolete
A letter to those who revised my longevity research proposal
Living forever is humanity’s most ancient and strongest wish. Still, this may not be what we really want, since living forever will never be the same as being forever young.
Regardless of that, the question remains: will this ever be possible?
Towards the singularity
Well, if we’d asked that question to a scientist 50 years ago, the answer would have been totally negative. Perhaps they would have answered that rejuvenation is only a fantasy found in fairy tales for kids.
Now, if we ask the same question to the right people today, we could start a much more interesting conversation.
When I say the right people, I’m talking about scientists who are globally recognized . For instance, someone who I cite along my research proposal is David Sinclair PhD, a researcher at Harvard Medical School (HMS) who has made possible, at his own lab, to extend mice’s healthspan by giving them certain substances, or even just by modifying their lifestyle.
The longevity economy
Nowadays, longevity economy has an estimated value of more than 17 trillion dollars, according to Forbes. So how is it that what was only a fantasy has turned into a fairly promising reality?
Perhaps a more important fact to be aware of, is that it’s not only academic researchers who are putting their eyes on this field. Google has created Calico: a new company that aims to fight aging and age-related diseases. This company has been funded with more than 2.5 billion dollars.
Despite being one of the most interesting companies to study, just because it is Google’s sibling, doesn’t mean that it is the only one. There are many others such as AgeX Therapeutics, Unity Biotechnology, or Insilico Medicine, that are developing treatments for age-related diseases, or aging itself.
What I’m trying to communicate by saying this, is that these are truly innovative studies, that will be part of the biotechnological revolution that we don’t want to miss in Mexico.
In his book Lifespan, David Sinclair mentions that it will be the first countries to recognize aging as a disease, the ones that will have a significant economic advantage over those who don’t.
Make 100s the new 60s
That is right, aging is not recognized as a disease by any official health institution. Nevertheless, it is a condition that affects 100% of the world’s population. This happens because every second that passes since we’re born, our “biological clock” starts ticking.
Despite the changes being more notorious after a certain age, it will always be different for each person, due to genetics and epigenetics.
This said, a quite frequent question, from the economic viewpoint is: what will happen when we all live more time, and therefore thee global population increases, and as a consequence there is a greater demand of resources?
The first thing we need to know about aging studies and longevity, is that they are not meant to extend humans’ lifespan. The key factor here is “shelf-life” or how much time we can live in a healthy condition. The concept that encompasses this definition is known as “healthspan”.
Romantically said, one of the objectives would be to help people live to be 100 years old, while feeling and looking as if they were 60: “Make 100s the new 60s”.
This way, there won’t be such thing as “maintain the elderly”, since those people wouldn’t have to retire so early from working, and they wouldn’t feel so exhausted about continuing with that lifestyle either.
Conversely, they could enjoy, and if that’s what they want, they could have more quality time with their loving ones, do what they’re most passionate about, and live without pain or problems caused by aging.
The why
To sum up, we all know who are the most vulnerable group of people during the pandemic that we’re currently facing. What would have happened if those who are now older than 40 or 50 years old, were biologically younger?
What if the millions of Mexicans with diabetes who are now more at risk than ever before could get a gene therapy? What if Mexico became a country that’s on the verge of longevity studies?
What I am proposing is innovative because it doesn’t see one only, but many diseases from a very unconventional point of view. “Aging is the mother of all diseases” is one of my favorite quotes related to this topic.
It has been demonstrated that smoking multiplies your risk of getting cancer by 5. Being 50 years old multiplies that times 100, and being 70 years old, by 100.
We can find a similar correlation with diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or heart-related diseases.
Is it that we have been attacking so many problems from the wrong angle? Maybe we had never reached the real root cause of diseases like the ones that I previously mentioned.
Likewise, it is essential to understand that longevity studies, in the context that I am developing my project around, don’t have to do much with facial rejuvenation products or anything alike.
In contrast to these ones, what is proposed in with this project is not to “look better” but to “be better”. While it’s tru that there are some brands that offer the use of stem cells in their products, they don’t get to the genetic level that is suggested in this case.
My proposal
My project is based on one of the 9 causes that have been found for aging as of now: epigenetic alterations.
In order to understand epigenetics, we need to know that certain functions and characteristics in our body, don’t solely depend on our genetics. This is, the values that we could consider as predetermined, are actually regulated by our habits as well.
Sleep, physical activity, diet, and even our emotional state, play a huge role in the expression of certain genes.
In this sense, epigenetics studies the changes in thee expression of all our genes. Anchoring this to biological aging, there is the Epigenetic Theory of Aging, in which the main idea is that, as our habits and the environment shape us, the expression of our genes can change, ultimately manifesting as aging.
We can also think about this in the following way: our DNA is like a CD. As we used it, it gets scratched. When it’s scratched, and we want to read it, the songs won’t be heard well. Even so, there are techniques that allow us to get this disc back to its original state, and make it sound like before.
What would happen if we could do the same with our genome?
This is precisely what I am suggesting in my research proposal. Using the gene editing tool CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) to clean a group of important genes that have an essential role in aging. First off, how does this tool, for which 2 women won the Nobel Prize this year, work?
In a nutshell, there are 3 main components: (said with analogies) the first one is a GPS, or a gRNA (guide RNA). As its name suggests, it is the sequence that will guide the rest of the complex to the site of the genome that we want to edit. The second one is a car, or a dCas9 enzyme, which will park on the established site. Finally, there is a transcriptional activator, which has the mission of activating the gene of our interest.
This is how CRISPR can allow us to activate almost any gene of our interest.
There are some details that I cannot mention for the purpose of this article. However, in short, my proposal is about using CRISPR to activate a set of genes that could extend the lifespan of a given organism.
In the end
Even though this research is only theoretical at the moment, and I haven’t been able to even try to create a prototype due to lack of funds and the current lockdown, I have the certainty that this is something that I want to take beyond words, or ideas.
Cliché but true: this is not the end of a journey, it is only the beginning of something much more exciting. I have continued developing other biotechnology projects, meeting more experts in the field, and learning more about why we age, and why we don’t have to.
Update: I didn’t win the research competition. Somebody working with solar panels did. I didn’t get angry or sad, but I still wonder if an expert in the field had the chance to read about my idea…
Hey! I’m Sofi, a 16-year-old girl who’s extremely passionate about biotech, human longevity, and innovation itself 🦄. I’m learning a lot about exponential technologies to start a company that impacts the world positively 🚀. I love writing articles about scientific innovations to show you the amazing future that awaits us!
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