Keen On… Why We Are All Going to Live to 100 Years Old (TCTV)

Thanks Andrew.

Sonya, at some point in this interview I am going to ask you how old you are, so you can think about that for a moment. Not yet, though. What are you arguing in this book? Are you really saying that we’re all going to be able to live to a hundred plus this century?

Oh yes. Absolutely. I think we’ll be able to live to a hundred plus during my lifetime, which is shorter than a century at the moment.

I mean is this it’s a scientific revolution? Is it a biological one? A genetic one? I mean how is all this happened?

Its really, I think of it as a technology revolution So I think it is something your viewers will be really interested in, and you can think of it in this way, just like a computer program has ones and zeros? We now know that the human body is made up of code as well. It has the A, C, T, and G of DNA.

And we’ve sequenced the human genome, now we’re working on reverse engineering it, and there is an entirely new field of do it yourself biologists and the open science people and just sort of like there’s a home brew club in early days of the computer, there was now that type of hobbyist culture, hackers of biology if you will, that’s really getting interested in being able to engineer the human body so biology has become an engineering project and because of that, biology is moving so much faster these days.

There’s an entirely new field called tissue engineering, which is very exciting and has had some really powerful affects for humans already, not lab animals because, you know, so so often we hear about great things happening for mice and that’s wonderful for the mice, but not so great for humans, but when it comes to tissue engineering, scientists and bio-engineers have been able to grow brand new human organs for real humans who needed them.

So for instance, a windpipe was grown for a man who had cancer. They took out his cancerous windpipe, put in the new one that was created with his own adult stem cells and now he’s cured of cancer.

He was only thirty-six years old too. So it means he has his whole life ahead of him now and that’s only one example. Other organs have been grown like bladders and, blood vessels and scientists are working, bio-scientists are working on creating other organs like hearts and lungs and of course heart disease is the number one killer in America, so if we we’re able to engineer a new heart to be able to replace that one when it breaks down for people who get heart disease, that would go a long way towards allowing people to live longer and healthier lives.

This is kind of Tim Ferris on steroids, to excuse the pun, right? This is This is a decentralized world in which we’re all hacking our own body. Its not a top down industrial model.

That’s right, that’s right. Its sort of the personalized medicine model, where everybody has a slightly different way of repairing themselves because everybody has a slightly different code.

And how will it work in economic terms? How will it reflect changes in the healthcare economy and the ecosystem?

That’s a good question, actually. I mean because you can look at it from two different perspectives. You can say, “Oh wow, well if we’re constantly replacing body parts, I mean, health care will become really expensive, even more expensive than it is now.” But that might not quite be the case because if you think about how things work today, when somebody has heart problems they tend to go the hospital multiple times for many different problems and we fix them a little bit, but we don’t quite fix them and they keep coming back and that’s very expensive to have the ambulance and all the people who are caring for them every single time, and so in the future if we know that somebody has heart disease and it’s a really big problem that requires fixing the entire heart, we grow them a new heart, replace it, and that’s one trip to the hospital, not 10, or fifteen.

It could be cheaper.

Would it mean that we would have perpetual open-ended insurance? Won’t insurance be so prohibitively expensive that no one will be able to afford it?

No, I don’t think so at all. In fact, I think it may be the case that technology, it may become cheaper to repair humans than it is now because we don’t really repair people. We just fix them up a little bit until they break down even more. And when we get to the point where we’re actually repairing people, then they’re healthier longer.

And there is less risk involved with that.

Well, I need a lot of repairs, so I am very enthusiastic about the revolution that you’re describing. How will it change everything? You said that it’ll impact on our careers, our relationships, our family and our faith, or perhaps our lack of faith. What are the most fundamental changes to the human condition that the revolution you’re describing will change?

Right. So, in the book I take the premise that we’ll be able to extend our health expectancy to 150 years. And by that I mean not just our lifespan. We won’t just be living to 150 and have this huge period at the end of our life where we’re very ill. Health expectancy will be extended too. We’ll be healthier for longer periods of time.

And because of that, things will look a lot different. We’ll be working longer, we’ll be healthier longer, we’ll be energetic longer. That means we’ll be doing all sorts of things longer, things that we do now. So for instance, getting married, right? I mean, can you imagine, you get married at 30, and you have a life expectancy–health expectancy–of 150 years, that marriage is gonna be much longer than you would expect today, of course.

Are you married, Sonya?

I am, yes. How long have you been married?

Five years.

Can you imagine being married fifty years? Wouldn’t that be a bit much?

Well, I have a great husband. So I’d be okay being married that long.

Great after five year, but would it be great after fifty.

I’m sorry.

I mean, I’m sure it’s great after five years. But after fifty, I’m sure you’ll be sick to death of him. Well, maybe so, and I think in that case, society would have to come up with various ways of dealing with that. I mean, maybe there would be sunset clauses on marriage. Maybe we come with an entirely different definition of what marriage means.

How long does a marriage typically last? Maybe, those kinds of things will have to change, I think. I know you have an interesting take on whether or not one hundred fifty year old man will be marrying twenty year old women. What’s your position on that?

Right. So I consider that in the Family chapter of the book, because you could imagine in a world where people live to be 150. You could have a 130-year-old man marrying a 20-year-old woman, and that would be a pretty big age gap.

Not that big from the male point of view, right?

Well, how I try to answer that question, the question is, will we see more of those kind of pairings in the future? And I dug through the literature, both in terms of what happened the last time we doubled our life expectancy, because life expectancy in 1850 was forty-three years. Now it’s 80. We’ve already doubled life expectancy.

So I went back and said, OK, well what happened last time we roughly doubled life expectancy? And it turns out that you didn’t see more pairings with large age gaps. Then I dug into the psychological literature, and it was like, how come? Why not? Why don’t we see big age gaps? And from the sociological point of view and psychological point of view, the explanation is that we tend to want to pair up with people who are more like us.

And one of the things that makes somebody more like us is that they’re in the same age cohort. So they grew up with the same kind of music, and they grew up in a certain cohort. So they share those many different things with us that somebody in another age group wouldn’t. That’s the explanation for, one of the explanations for why you wouldn’t see large age gaps.

The other reason because of course, sometimes those marriages are motivated by youth and beauty. So, the other explanation is, that in the future not only we’ll be healthier and more energetic, but I think we’ll also look better.

Well, how old are you, Sonia? Let me guess. Twenty-one?

Oh, no! I’m one hundred and fifty! Just joking. I’m thirty-nine.

And so, well you don’t look it, though we’re on Skype. So, maybe Skype makes you look better than you actually are. What will this mean though for you in this revolution? When you’re one hundred and twenty, will you still look the same? Will you still have blond hair and sexy skin?

Well, the hair is easy to do, of course first anyone can have one hair. The skin, I think, that technology surrounding cosmetic issues in skin will get better and better over time. We’ve already seen DARPA develop something called re-cell which is for burn victims at the moment. Where they can take some of your own skin cells, clone them, and literally spray them back on you.

And that’s in use right now. I can only imagine that’s only going to get better. So you can buy that spray? Can I go to my local Wallgreens to get that?

Not yet, but I don’t think it will be long before it’ll be in use in the cosmetic industry.

I hope I haven’t been making too much light of this because it’s very entertaining. At the turn of the twentieth century all those Huxley, English writer, wrote a book called, Brave New World, in which he imagined the world that you are laying out. But I think Huxley had a much more much darker version of what this would like.

You seem to be unrelentingly optimistic. Is there anything about this world that we should be worrying about? Could it turn into a brave new world, where we, where life is extended for so long that we become incredibly bored and boring? Well, I suppose that’s always a possibility, but then there’s always a way out, isn’t there?

Most people, I find don’t tend to have enough time. There’s never enough time in the day. There’s never enough time to do everything you want to do, and I think that just as we’ve filled up our time when we extended our our life expectancy from forty-three to eighty years, I mean, we’re much busier now, actually, than we probably were back then, or at least we have more things to do, and there’s more entertainment and so there’s much more variety in our lives now than there was back in eighteen fifty when we had less time.

So I think that it won’t only be technologies to extend our health span that continue to grow of course. It’s going to be other technologies as well, like virtual environments, and other things that you can’t even predict right now