Antiaging treatments and the quest for Eternal Youth ...

One day, saying that he had known Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, he described minutely the governor’s h

ouse and listed the dishes served at supper. Cardinal de Rohan, believing these were fantasies, turned to the Comte de Saint-Germain’s valet, an old man with white hair and an honest expression. “My friend,” he said to the servant, “I find it hard to believe what your master is telling us. Granted that he may be a ventriloquist; and even that he can make gold. But that he is two thousand years old and saw Pontius Pilate? That is too much. Were you there?’ “Oh, no, Monsignore,” the valet answered ingenuously, “I have been in M. le Comte’s service only four hundred years.” - Colin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, Paris, Meiller, 1844, p. 434

Monica Bellucci played a wicked 500-year old witch in the movie `The Brothers Grimm’ (pic) just at the time when botox injections are being bettered by more promising ways to fight impermanence. Like in the character of the colourful and mysterious alchemist Count Saint-Germain, who arrived at a much earlier age, the quest for immortality and eternal youth resonates with increasing urgency in the minds of men and women in our times.

Not very long ago we saw the ageless Rekha (pic) give Mallika Sherawat a run for her front-stall

whistles in movie screens across the country. Dev Anand (though a bit battered at 80) continues to baffle with his youthful flavour. In the affluent circles of this country and the next, men and women are bracing to fight back the slow onset of oblivion that is aging. The beauty industry has naturally joined hands with them in this quest for remaining forever young with skin polish and photo rejuvenation and collagen creams. It has been churning out newer antiaging products therapies and treatments at a matching speed. Already there are `Hyaluronic acid fillers' like hylaform and restylane which promise lower allergy risks compared to botox. Then there is the laser which does not break the skin but stimulates collagen producing fibroblast cells to fill out the wear and tear of years. Finally there are the drugs sold by the quack or the chemist.

Already in the west there are longevity companies like Alteon or Biomarker Pharmaceuticals focused on antiaging treatments and therapies while in India the VLCCs and Kaya Skin Clinics are propagating the mantra of stretchable youth. So the battle against decay has been joined and leading the charge are the bravest of men and women, those who for ages, by various means and methods and perhaps for vastly different ends, had been keeping alive human being’s ultimate desire – the quest for immortality.

The Bible tells us of Methuselah whose age spanned centuries. He is said to have lived 969 years. Adam died when he was 930 years old while his son Seth and his grandson Enos lived 912 and 905 years respectively. The oldest epic of the world which comes from Sumeria, relates the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who crossed the Waters of Death and found the plant of immortality but it was taken away by the Serpent before he could eat it. In Hindu religious mythology we find the devtaas and the ashurs churning the celestial ocean to get amrita – the nectar of immortality. Often we hear of yogis deep in the caves of the Himalayas who have lived far more years than the longest recorded life span generally accepted. And then there is the funny story of the bluffing false-prophet Birinchi baba, by the modern Bengali author Parashuram, who claimed to have met Jesus.

And so from mythology to fiction, from epic to the latest experiments with lab mouse, the march of these seeker-afters is ever evident. Cleopatra is said to have bathed in the milk of asses to remain young while the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, preferred the blood of virgins. Today scientists are putting fruit-flies on low-calorie diets or creating nanorobots (microscopic robots) that can swim around inside our bodies to scavenge cell debris, in their experiments to find a `cure for death.'

Aubrey de Grey a bio-gerontologist at the University of Cambridge and one of the glowing faces of the anti-ageing movement says that "Aging is fundamentally barbaric, and something should be done about it….. It shouldn't be allowed in polite society." He is one of the founders of the Methuselah Mouse Foundation which offers prizes to scientists who develop techniques that allow phenomenal increases in mouse longevity. The first such prize was awarded in November last year to Dr Stephen Spindler. Dr Spindler’s work involved middle-aged mice and it achieved a high 15% increase in their lifespan. Besides the experiments also achieved notable early reductions of deaths from cancer. His research has been reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

So what is happening at the cutting-edge of research in this challenging field? What are the flanks of attack against the slow and sure advance of death? Some of the approaches to anti-ageing research being tried out by experts have been clubbed under the acronym of SENS or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. Various methods in isolation or combination are being experimented including low-calories anti aging diet, organ transplant, stem cell reseeding, cryogenics freezing and de-freezing and much more. One of these is through the genetic engineering route:

Gatekeeper genes on the road to eternity

A group of researchers working with the C Elegans roundworm (pic) reported in a paper in Nature that a certain mutation in a gene of that insect unleashes processes that lead to a sizeable increase in the worm’s lifespan. This gene called daf-2 however does not act alone but is a kind of coordinator or gatekeeper which puts other genes into action that have influences on longevity. Humans too have similar genes and scientists are now thinking of ways to make these genes deliver their desirable effects or unleash processes similar to that which the long-life gene in the earthworm triggers. Resveratrol, a chemical present in red wine has been shown to positively affect these life-preserving processes, in worms to begin with!

Stemming the tide of mortality

Stem cells as we know are the original cells from which organs and bodily-systems arise. Promise has also been shown in stem-cell research in recent times and foreseeable developments point to their use in the battle against ageing and death. Our bodies have what scientists call reservoirs of adult stem cells that perform various functions like repairing tissue, forming new memory and producing immune cells. As years pass these cells in the reservoirs age.

It is expected by scientists that it would be possible to reseed stem-cell reservoirs in adults with youthful cells to preserve health and prolong life. Interestingly, an anti-cholesterol drug that is used to reduce risks of heart disease has been found to have the effect of greatly increasing the number of such stem cells.

Replacement organs in the quest for permanence

We age, we fall ill and we die. And most of the time it is our ageing organs that push us on towards our graves. The heart pumps hundreds of litres of blood around our bodies day after day and suddenly one day, it is too old to pump anymore or it is choked into silence. Soon, very soon say scientists, developments in stem cell research will allow organs to be grown aplenty in laboratories and replacements will become common. Just as we keep on replacing parts in a car and keep it going for ages in the same way the future possibility of easily replacing old or diseased organs in our body will be a surefire insurance against obsolescence.

Methuselah machines

Robert Freitas is a Research Scientist at Zyvex, a nanotechnology company who believes that `natural death is the greatest human catastrophe’ has pioneered conceptual designs for medical nano-robots (or nanobots) which could swim about inside our bodies and would be smaller than blood cells.

Such Methuselah machines would one day move about our bodies repairing damaged DNA or cleaning out the accumulated junk in our cells that make us grow old. His machines include microbivores that are supposed to play the role of white blood cells and respirocytes that will, more efficiently, replace red blood cells.

The Count and the yogi’s secret

Everyone who knew him agreed in saying that though he liked sitting down to table with a numerous company, he never touched the dishes. He was fond of offering his intimate friends the recipe of a purge made of senna pods. His principal food, which he prepared himself, was a mixture of oatmeal.

So goes one more of the stories about the enigmatic Count Saint-Germain quoted by Reginald Merton. Many are the stories in this country too of the yogis who eat little or nothing and live healthily for ages. Modern science has tumbled over the same secrets of what we may call natural antiaging. Clive McCay, Cornell University nutritionist discovered in the 1930s that underfed rats had longer lives. A thirty percent calorie reduction with a balanced diet phenomenally increased their life spans.

Similar results have been proved for other species like fish and fleas. In fact calorie reduction (CR) in diet according to many experts along with lifestyle changes (like quitting smoking) has till date shown the maximum potential in the battle against aging. A study of Japanese Okinawans - who generally live long and who could raise an army of centenarians at the snap of a finger - found their diet to be rich in nutrients and low in calories. Scientists are now on the lookout for drugs that may mimic the effects of calorie reduction achieved by natural anti aging diet without its associated strains.

The Telomere Tangle

No discussion about the science of aging is complete without a mention of `telomeres’ the so-called time-clocks in our cells. Telomeres are structures that cap the ends of our chromosomes. Short telomeres have been correlated with shorter life-expectancy in humans. Our telomeres shorten with age while some of us may have short telomeres to begin with but in either case one possible way to deal with aging is to lengthen the telomeres. This could be done outside the body by bringing out stem cells and lengthening their telomere caps and returning them back. However lengthening telomeres has been associated with increased risk of cancer. (If you are interested please also read about the Nobel Prize for medicine, 2009) Scientists are working on this tangle.

So the march of this science to conquer death continues. Some anti-ageing experts argue that directly dealing with ageing is a better option than dealing with individual diseases that come with the onset of age. This is because expected increases in life-expectancy gained by controlling individual diseases are not that much. Instead if aging is taken head-on and controlled it will automatically put off the onset of these age-associated and other illness.

But there are those who would say that aging and death are natural. Tennyson writes in Tithonus:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapors weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Here the poet seems to say that passing away is akin to other natural processes, a point that scientists like de Grey would not agree. We are reminded also of the novel by Aldous Huxley – After Many a Summer Dies the Swan - which invoked the above lines from Tennyson. In that interesting little story the character Charles Hauberk lives on to two centuries but when he is finally discovered in his dungeon there is little of the human left in him. Who knows what would be the effect of death-defying drugs on people? How would man cope with living for centuries?

What about boredom? Would there be enough excitement left in the world for the triple or quadruple centenarians of the future? This anecdote about the deathless Count provides one perspective: "He spoke with an entire lack of ceremony to the most highly placed personages and was fully conscious of his superiority,” said Gleichen, of the first time he met Saint-Germain: "He threw down his hat and sword, sat down in an armchair near the fire and interrupted the conversation by saying to the man who was speaking: 'You do not know what you are saying! I am the only person who is competent to speak on this subject, and I have exhausted it. It was the same with music, which I gave up when I found I had no more to learn.”

What would happen if there was no more to learn, or would the world throw up enough meat at the ageless to chew over the eons? It is difficult to answer this question in a straight yes or no. It is our experience that human beings survive on an endless array of excitements. From the birth of a son or daughter to bungee-jumping, from staring wide-eyed at El Greco’s Adoration of the Shepherds to fornication, from listening to Chaurasia’s flute or beholding the snow-clad Kanchanjunga by moonlight, to watching a well-fought football match; there is quite a menu to choose from. Drugs like ecstasy, alcohol or nicotine also create artificial excitement or elation in the user. These punctuations of reality are, one believes, an essential pre-condition to maintaining sanity and letting off steam. However in the coming age of the deathless, this menu would slowly be exhausted by long-living individuals. As happened with the alchemist Count they will get bored of music or tired of white-water rafting and feel burdened rather than happy with another baby boy or girl! A gradually bigger section of the menu of ecstasies and excitements will no longer work for them. It is presumed that chemicals and poisons will still work as would perhaps Kanchanjunga or the Kamasutra. With a drastically reduced menu of excitements that keep reality manageable these men and women may turn out to be bored and disgusted with their `immortality.’ Let us return briefly to Tennyson in Tithonus:

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold

Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet

Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam

Floats up from those dim fields about the homes

Of happy men that have the power to die,

And grassy barrows of the happier dead.

Release me, and restore me to the ground;

`Of happy men that have the power to die.’ That death will come at the end makes life interesting; many have said and we tend to agree. Without death and with a gradually shortening menu of excitements the world in the next one thousand years may turn into a menagerie of melancholics – grey perpetual men teetering on the border between sanity and madness. Would we like to live in such a world?

What is of even greater import about a possible future world peopled with the `deathless’ has to do with societal and environmental pressures. First of all, will these miracle `cures for death’ be easily accessible? Most probably not and this will create some immensely powerful people who have access and their deathless status may make them play more games with the material world and their fellow-mates which they otherwise would not. Furthermore if we assume that rich nations would have better access to these costly death-defying drugs and treatments then this will further exacerbate the gap between them and the developing and poor nations where life expectancies at birth are already quite low. And one more point which springs to our minds – would we like some brutish dictator to survive for a millennium?

Even ignoring such specific causes for alarm we can foresee no possible solutions to the immense pressures on infrastructure, job-markets, food and environment that a rising number of the deathless will bring to bear. Environmentalists point out that we are already doing more harm to the world’s resources and ecosystems than what can be repaired through natural processes. Global warming today is a looming reality, which is putting climate systems around the world haywire. The Millennium Ecosystems Assessment (MEAS) found that 60% of the ecosystem services of the world are being degraded or used unsustainably. Also researchers have pointed out that people in many rich countries are consuming much beyond sustainable limits while consumption in countries like India and China is rising steadily. We can easily imagine the pressures on sustainability and environment that these long-living individuals (when their numbers increase) will bring to bear. Surely our little planet won’t be able to cope with such an assault.

Our optimists of course would point at science as a panacea. They will say that science will take care of everything. Among their brigades would be those supporting genetically modified crops as a guarantee against any increases in demand for food in future. This inspite of several warnings from experts who agree that these genetically modified crops are fraught with risks for the consumer’s health among other things. Others would suggest colonizing the moon or digging for oil in the Arctic to power the engines of the future. Between pipedreams and dangerous prescriptions we don’t see much to assure ourselves with.

And still there would be hundreds of questions left unanswered? How would new treatments and drugs that counter ageing affect reproductive life, how would inter-personal interactions shape out when we will have teenagers and tercentenaries sharing the same social space, what effects will such long lives have on the nature and temperament of people, will those advances against death dry out man’s belief in God and strike the death knell for religion. There is a need to debate and ponder on such points as these anti-ageing miracle treatments that would make men and women live hundreds of years, slip slowly out of laboratories.

Though some of this may sound like science fiction the future is not that far. University of Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey believes that the first person who will live to 1000 years because of these advances in science is already alive. In the United States the National Institute of Health has funded a three-year project bringing together experts from various disciplines to ponder on the potential problems that the future will hold if ageing can be slowed down or reversed by the advances in science. This group of experts consists of a medical philosopher, a lawyer, an Alzheimer’s expert, a religious scholar and a political scientist. A literature professor who specializes in myths is among the advisors to this group.

There are important decisions to be taken by all nations sometime very soon. The possible ramifications and impacts of the advances in this science could have far greater consequences for humanity than cloning of humans could ever have. In spite of the mythical aura and glamour attached to deathlessness the real living of an endless life may not be so rosy after all. We need to learn that death is a just and proper culmination of life and our focus should perhaps be more on how to make our years beautiful for us and others. Beyond that we ask no more, unless like the Count we want to brag about the past:

Albert Vandam in his memoirs - An Englishman in Paris – writes of a certain person whom he knew and whose life bore a strange resemblance to that of the Comte de Saint-Germain. This was during the end of Louis Philippe’s reign. This man "called himself Major Fraser,” wrote Vandam,"lived alone and never alluded to his family. Moreover he was lavish with money, though the source of his fortune remained a mystery to everyone. He possessed a marvelous knowledge of all the countries in Europe at all periods. His memory was absolutely incredible and, curiously enough, he often gave his hearers to understand that he had acquired his learning elsewhere than from books. Many is the time he has told me, with a strange smile, that he was certain he had known Nero, had spoken with Dante, and so on."

Do we need to romanticise and strive for a life like that of the enigmatic Count? No, perhaps not, for most of us believe that the powers of science are better employed tackling more immediate suffering and deprivation. In a lifetime that stretches thousands of years even truth soaks up a myriad hues! The theosophists and other occultists say that Saint-Germain was a master of the White Lodge of the Himalayas. According to legend these masters are adepts who live in lamaseries in inaccessible regions of Tibet and possess ancient secrets. They sometimes send messengers to their `imperfect brothers’ to teach and guide. Even Krishna, Jesus and Buddha are said to be such messengers. Count Saint-Germain is considered to be one such obscure messenger about whom Voltaire said, `A man who knows everything and who never dies.’ We note here without comment how this legend comes close to the stories of our deathless yogis in the mountains and forests of India who could perform amazing feats and defy death for centuries.

Leaving aside the adepts and the masters, the carriers of the secret or the yogis of the Himalayas, for us simple earthbound folk the promise of permanence presents an enigma. While many are its attractions our rational minds can easily contemplate what problems it could bring to bear. So though some will vouch for science to take care of all ills and morph us to an imagined future where glowing octo-centenarians smile and play golf and swim and ride about across a green green earth, we will prefer the small pleasures of impermanence – gazing into my daughter’s eyes and knowing that I will live on and see the world through her, fighting for the cause of the less privileged, going out on a pub crawl with the old boys, letting Chaurasia’s flute calm our hassled egos and always and always, ever so slowly preparing to make place and move on.

I leave the last words to W B Yeats:

Through winter-time we call on spring,

And through the spring on summer call,

And when the abounding hedges ring

Declare that winter's best of all:

And after that there's nothing good

Because the spring time has not come--

Not know that what disturbs our blood

Is but its longing for the tomb.

Rekha's photo courtesy despardes.com

Brothers Grimm poster courtesy All Movie

Saint Germain's photo courtesy Sacred Connections