'Science of Eternal Life' secures 3rd place in the IMPA-SBM Award.

Imagem: Pedro Corrêa/ Reprodução Galileu

Reproduction of the article "Scientists study ways to 'cure' aging", by Marília Marasciulo, Giuliana de Toledo, Pedro Corrêa and Feu; Luiza Veroneze, from Galileu Magazine.

“After securing unprecedented levels of prosperity, health, and harmony, and considering our past history along with our current values, humanity’s next goals will likely be immortality, happiness, and divinity,” wrote Yuval Harari in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow , a bestseller published in Brazil in 2016 by Companhia das Letras. “We have reduced mortality from starvation, disease, and violence; we will now aim to overcome old age and even death,” concludes the history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The first biomedical laboratory in the United States dedicated entirely to researching aging was created in 1999 in Novato, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a few kilometers from Silicon Valley. With the mission of ending age-related diseases, the Buck Institute believes that it is possible for people to enjoy life at 95 as much as they did at 25.

“In these years of research, we have reached two conclusions: the first is that we can change the rate of aging in animals by modifying genetics and diet,” says geneticist Gordon Lithgow, head of research at the institute. “The second is that the aging process is a trigger—or even a cause—of chronic diseases in old age.” The major hypothesis, according to Lithgow, is that medicine may be looking at chronic diseases associated with aging in the wrong way—and, if we can reverse or slow down the process, it may be possible to protect the body from the damage it causes.

Besides Buck, laboratories like Calico and Unity Biotechnology have the explicit goals of "solving death" and "combating the effects of aging" and are funded by billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Peter Thiel of PayPal. But it is the SENS Foundation, created in 2009 by the English computer scientist Aubrey de Grey, among others, that sparks the greatest controversy in the scientific community.

In the view of 56-year-old Aubrey de Grey, aging should be treated as a simple phenomenon, and our bodies seen as machines or contraptions that can be repaired. "The reason we have cars that still run after a hundred years is that we eliminate the damage before the doors even fall off. The same applies to the human body," the Briton states in an interview with GALILEU.

To develop the model he calls SENS, an acronym for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, he looked at the main processes that lead to aging known today: cell loss and degeneration; accumulation of undesirable cells, such as fat or senescent (old) cells; mutations in chromosomes and mitochondria; accumulation of "waste" inside and outside cells, which can cause problems in their functioning; cross-linking of proteins outside the cell, which can lead to loss of elasticity in the tissue in question.

According to De Grey, simply addressing each of these issues would solve the problem: our age-related health issues would disappear—almost as simple as applying and removing a FaceApp filter, an application that has become a social media sensation in recent weeks, with an algorithm that creates a photographic simulation of what we might look like when we're older. "There would be no limit, just as there's no limit to how long cars can run. We would only die from causes unrelated to how long ago we were born. Asteroid impacts, accidents, etc.," he says.

Among the treatments proposed by the scientist — and by proponents of anti-aging — are periodic transfusions of bone marrow cells into tissues where cells are not replaced after death, such as the brain and heart, and the use of drugs or vaccines that stimulate the immune system to fight damage caused by the body's own cells.

A review of studies conducted by Buck researchers and published in July of this year in the scientific journal Nature points to two main substances that have shown promise in slowing aging in animals: rapamycin and metformin. First discovered in the 1970s, rapamycin inhibits the molecular mechanism called mTOR, which controls cell division, multiplication, and aging. In an experiment with rats, the lifespan of rodents that ingested the substance increased by 14%. But it also suppresses the immune system—not surprisingly, it is used as an immunosuppressant to reduce the risk of rejection in organ transplants.

Metformin, in turn, has been used to treat type 2 diabetes since the 1960s. In recent years, some research conducted on animals has identified that it can act on the functions of mitochondria (structures responsible for cellular respiration) to reduce inflammation and slow down cell aging. It is also associated with a decreased risk of tumors. According to the review in Nature, clinical trials in humans specifically focused on the anti-aging effects of rapamycin and metformin should begin soon.

The problem is that there are still unknown risks associated with all these theories and experiments. In one of the first profiles of De Grey and his ideas, published in the MIT Review of Technology in 2005, the American surgeon Sherwin Nuland (1930-2014), author of the text, recalled that “unlike engineers, whose methodologies De Grey considers the main contribution to solving the problems of aging, biologists do not approach physiological events as distinct entities without effects on each other.” He further emphasized that each of the proposed interventions can result in unpredictable and incalculable responses from the biochemistry and physics of cells. “In biology, everything is interdependent; everything is affected by everything else,” wrote Nuland.

And we still don't understand this "everything else." Although science knows the processes that lead to aging, little is still known about why we age at all. One theory is that evolution simply doesn't care what happens to us when we pass reproductive age. From the point of view of natural selection, upon finishing reproduction and overcoming the first years of raising and protecting offspring, the individual loses relevance to the species, since any evolutionary genetic advantage will not be passed on. Some evolutionists, including the British Alfred Russel Wallace, have even flirted with the idea that we are naturally programmed to die to free up resources for younger generations.

Tipping point
The debate then moves into the realm of social and political sciences, even touching on moral dilemmas. After all, we are already living much longer than our ancestors, thanks precisely to advances in science that have allowed us to overcome infant mortality and combat infectious diseases that once devastated entire cities. More than half of the babies born today are expected to live to 65, two decades longer than those born in the mid-20th century. Currently, there are 850 million elderly people in the world—in 2005, there were 670 million—and a projection by the United Nations predicts that by 2050 there will be about 2 billion, or 22% of the total world population.

But society is not yet structured to deal with this change. “As each decade passes, we gain years of life, but not institutions prepared to handle it,” says sociologist Vania Herédia, from the University of Caxias do Sul, who is president of the gerontology department of the Brazilian Society of Geriatrics and Gerontology (SBGG). In Brazil, the first National Policy for the Elderly, which ensures social rights and seeks to create conditions to promote autonomy and participation in society, was regulated in 1996.

It was only in 2003 that the Statute of the Elderly was approved, expanding attention to the needs of this population. The country also has a rather unique condition in the profile of population aging: the speed. While countries like France, Italy, and Japan saw the increase in the elderly population over 150 years, in Brazil this happened in 25 years. This imbalance further aggravates the challenges that come with increased life expectancy, among them the major current debate in Brazilian politics, that of pension reform. After all, with more people living longer and longer lives, public accounts will need to be adjusted accordingly—to give an idea, in the United States in the 1940s, for example, a typical American who reached 65 years of age would live about 17% of their life retired. The percentage today is already 22%, and it continues to rise.

The question then arises: what would a world be like in which people could live to a thousand years old, as De Grey believes? For advocates of slowing down aging, this would actually be the simplest solution to current challenges: forever young and with the health of youth, we could continue working longer and have multiple careers, and there would be no overload on health and elderly care systems.

Just because we can, does that mean we should?
But nothing is as simple as it seems. Talking about unlimited lifespan inevitably raises philosophical questions about the meaning of life itself. What would we do with so much time? The discussion can go in many directions: from possible interstellar travel and endless learning opportunities to a total loss of motivation in the face of a lack of urgency to complete our tasks. In Ancient Greece, Epicurean philosophy already addressed this, viewing life as a banquet: you are satiated, then stuffed, and finally feel repulsed. The fact that we are accustomed to an idea of beginning, middle, and end—like the script of a story—is one of the factors that makes life so special. As another philosopher, the Roman Cicero, who lived between 106 and 43 BC, said in one of his works (adapted into Portuguese by the publisher L&PM under the title *Saber Envelhecer*): old age is the final scene of this play that constitutes existence.

Another concern is access to these treatments, should they ever become available. Anti-aging researchers themselves acknowledge the risk that they will be concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest, which could, in turn, deepen income inequality. By extending life indefinitely, they could accumulate even greater resources and fortunes, destabilizing social relations. However, they argue, this is more or less the current logic. "If you have money, you can pay for better healthcare, so how fair is it right now?" Lithgow asks provocatively. For him, it would be like saying that we can only use new technologies or medical advances when everyone has access to them.

And finally, one of the most delicate ethical questions of all: to what extent should we go in this quest to extend life? There are already quite radical initiatives, such as those of companies that cryogenically freeze bodies. These are people who choose to have their own corpses cooled with liquid nitrogen and kept stored for centuries, in the hope that, in the future, unpredictable and incalculable changes in the biochemistry and physics of cells will be achieved. "In biology, everything is interdependent; everything is affected by everything else," wrote Nuland.

Read the full article.

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