Death-defying research

Is death an inevitability, or a solvable problem? Can science and technology help us live longer, say to 150 years? Ariana Eunjung Cha writes in the Washington Post that PayPal founder Larry Thiel, along with

the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding, regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.

...Prevailing theory among the tech entrepreneurs holds that the federal government is too risk-averse to properly drive medical research. A failed project in Washington is akin to a great tragedy — with managers being called to testify at congressional hearings and Government Accountability Office investigations being launched into why so much taxpayer money was wasted. But in the entrepreneurial world, say tech leaders, failure is regarded as a learning opportunity on the way to the next innovation.

...The tech elite also have embraced as gospel two traditional scientific papers, both critical of the state of medical research. The first, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005, is by John Ioannidis, a Stanford professor who has become the world’s foremost expert on the biases inherent to biomedical research. He argued that scientists, motivated by the pressures to publish and entangled in a web of conflicts of interest, manipulate data so often that it’s impossible to trust the body of scientific literature that assesses the efficacy of hormone-replacement therapy or vitamin E or low-dose aspirin. Of 45 well-accepted journal articles about medical interventions, Ioannidis found, 14, or 31 percent, were later shown to be wrong or exaggerated.

The second, published last year and co-written by Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize winner and former director of both the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, carried an alarming title: “Rescuing U.S. biomedical research from its systemic flaws.” In the opinion piece in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Varmus and the other authors argue that much of the problem comes down to money. In essence, there are too many PhDs chasing too little money.

The entrepreneurs’ efforts are driven by the idea that they have plenty of money, and they can do better.

...For Thiel, death is the “great enemy” of humankind.

He said that in the past 25 years the pace of innovation in the biomedical realm has been demoralizing. “Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, and there has been frustratingly slow progress,” he said. “One third of people age 85 and older have Alzheimer’s or dementia, and we’re not even motivated to start a war on Alzheimer’s. At the end of the day, we need to do more.”

“I’ve always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing,” he said. “I think that’s somewhat unusual. Most people end up compartmentalizing and they are in some weird mode of denial and acceptance about death, but they both have the result of making you very passive. I prefer to fight it.”

...The big challenge of aging research is that to make it work the way people want it to scientists would have to figure out a way to extend all human systems simultaneously and shut them all down at pretty much the same time. Otherwise you would be replacing one way of dying with another. Some argue that the world is already in a crisis of life extension. People are living longer than in the past but for many their final years are painful, as their bodies and minds are ravaged by cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases of aging.

Kenyon, a longtime University of California at San Francisco professor who recently joined Calico, the Google-funded health venture start-up that aims to “cure” death, now is focused on the idea that “there seem to be life-extending processes that exist in nature, and they can be coaxed out of animals,” she said.

Read more here.