Computational Aging

The ultimate measure of Longevity Technology is how long people live.

One of the great successes in human history is the relatively linear growth of global life expectancy from 30 years pre-1870 to 73 years in 2019[1].

Globally, we increased life expectancy by 143% in 149 years. This is roughly an additional year of average lifespan every 3.5 years.

But that's just a global average. If you focus on specific populations, longevity technology does better. Take Japanese women, for example, with an expected life expectancy of ~89 years. That's great. Further, the top decile of Japanese women are likely expected to live close to 100 years.

Thus, our global measure of Longevity Technology is 73 years of global average life expectancy. Plus, we have pockets of early adopting populations with ~100 year median lifespans.

Are you or I likely to live to 100 years? We don't have good data or models on this (this is a gap). Lifespan is a backward-looking metric because it can take decades or even a century to know what happened.

There are relatively proven Longevity Technologies, and there are ones that are likely coming soon.

Relatively proven technologies:

• Eat a mostly plants, fruits, nuts and legumes vegan diet and avoid added sugar. There was a recent meta study suggesting this would give ~10-13 years of additional expected lifespan vs. a typical (not even a terrible) Western diet. Simply doing a mediterranean diet probably gets you most of those years. 
• Exercise 7+ hours per week. Include some resistance training to reduce muscle and bone loss. 
• Sleep 7-8 hours per night.
• Enjoy life, enjoy work, enjoy family, and have a solid social life.
• Don't smoke or use opiates. Occasional or no alcohol.
• Avoid accidents.

This on its own probably gives an expected lifespan of around 90-100. I try to do all of these, though don't always succeed. They have become part of my routine, and I don't feel like I'm making any compromises on my happiness. That said, we don't really know what doing all the "right" things get us. Once again, we need better data on this.

Technologies that may be coming soon:

• Gene editing to enhance longevity genes and remove deleterious genes. For example, a woman in New Zealand recently had a deleterious cholesterol gene edited out. There is significant, untapped opportunity here. What genes do Japanese women have that might be helpful? What genes do centenarians have that might be helpful?
• New drugs, like Rapamycin or Metformin, that promise
• New treatments for diseases like cancer, stroke, heart attack, dementia, etc.
• New centenarian treatments. The number of centenarians is growing rapidly, and we will likely pass 1 million centenarians globally shortly. This will give us the opportunity to test many new treatments for this age group to help them live longer and healthier. 
  

It's not hard to imagine in 10 or 20 years the early adopters of Longevity Technology will have an expected lifespan of 120 years. Though, it might take a few decades to really know.

References:

[1] Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Hannah Ritchie. "Life Expectancy." Our World in Data. First published in 2013; last revised in October 2019. Accessed July 22, 2022. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

We still know very little about human aging.

For example, how is my liver aging? How is my brain aging? I have no idea.

I am drawn to Prof. Michael Snyder's work on extreme measurement of his body. He has collected petabytes of data about his body physiology and genetics. This kind of data will help us measure aging-related interventions with more detail and personalization.

Prof. Snyder is also involved in the ENCODE project, which has the goal of "developing a comprehensive map of functional elements in the human genome" (Snyder et al, Nature, 2020). Many other large-scale (and small-scale) projects like these are in flight. Taken together, all this new data will give us a better systems-level understanding of biology and aging.

If we can know which genes are likely to contribute to aging, personalized for each individual's unique physiology and genes, then we can change our genes to extend our lives. In fact, we may already be doing this. Recently a volunteer in New Zealand had a cholesterol gene edited with CRISPR to a lower-risk version ("Edits to a cholesterol gene could stop the biggest killer on earth", MIT Technology Review, July 2022). This could be life-extending gene editing, here and now.

We are in the early days of systems biology. We are in the very early days of curing aging. Exponential curves can move quickly. We might be surprised what we can do in 20 years.

Are we making progress in life extension? Will it be in my lifetime?

Here's a signal that we're making real progress in life extension: when we have interventions that allow mice, rats, dogs and monkeys to live much longer and healthier than they currently do.

We're not there yet.

We've seen some incremental evidence of life extension in mice. Still, we can't get a mouse to live reliably to 5 years old and beyond. We can't get a rat to live much beyond 6 or 7, though maybe Harold Katcher's blood factors will change that?

Mice and rats are interesting, especially given the naked mole rat. Naked mole rats can live for 30+ years. They age much more slowly. They have better DNA repair. They get less cancer. They're similar to rats and mice (though more similar to guinea pigs, which live 5-7 years).

One interesting research path would be to make mice and rats (or guinea pigs) more like naked mole rats. Maybe gene editing or drugs to stimulate the same DNA repair pathways?

We also haven't seen much life extension yet in dogs and monkeys. The Dog Aging Project may change this soon. This study is giving rapamycin to older companion dogs.

Epigenetic reprogramming is promising and high-visibility. We'll know it's especially promising when we see mice, rats, dogs and monkeys living longer and healthier because of it. Same with the factors in young blood.

Put another way, if we can't reliably increase lifespan and healthspan in mice, rats, dog and monkeys, we probably not that close to achieving it in humans.