A Better Option for Aging

I just returned from an extended trip to see my parents in Colombia. Their health has deteriorated this last year and by the time I arrived my father was in the hospital looking extremely thin and having difficulty breathing. As he puts it, in nine months he went from feeling 60 to turning 80.

My mother meanwhile is coping with her own ailing health caused by arthritis and degenerative osteoarthritis combined with an unhealthy dose of defeatism and depression. Her mind is still as sharp and quick as ever but her body is unable to respond as it used to -- she cannot take a walk more than a few blocks nor open a bottle of water. “I wish for you to never get old,” she told me repeatedly.

Every time she uttered that phrase, I wondered what kind of desire is that? Are my options to die early or discover the Fountain of Youth? It was yet another of my mother's wishes I could not satisfy.

By odd coincidence, while my parents and I obsessed over their infirmities, I received a review copy of a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Kane Pappas, “To Age or Not to Age”, which opens next month in New York City. The film tells the story of a group of molecular biologists that began exploring the seemingly inescapable causes of aging some 20 years ago. It describes in particular the work of Professor Lenny Guarente and the students in his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It was there, in 1995, where the gene SIR2 was found to protect cells from damage caused during the aging process. One of Guarente's students, David A. Sinclair, discovered that SIR2 could be activated with drugs and that, after screening thousands of molecules, its most potent activator was resveratrol, an antimicrobial substance commonly found in red wine.

In 2006, a study published in Nature revealed that high dosages of resveratrol extended the lifespan of lab mice between 10 and 20 percent and that their health and physical endurance improved even when on a high fat diet. Since then medical trials on humans have begun and researchers hope to develop a drug that produces the same effects safely for humans. (Those who self-medicate beware: a human would have to drink more than 100 glasses of wine daily to get similar results.)

That a single gene can improve the health and lifespan of an organism in a lab is “a paradigm shift in our understanding of aging,” according to Sinclair, author of the Nature study and now with the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School.
“Before this discovery,” Sinclair said in an interview, “the prevailing view was that we would need a thousand different drugs to slow (the aging process) down.”

But now, as medicines target the very mechanism that ages us and become more effective at repairing damage that leads to illness, it may not be inconceivable, as Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey asserts in Pappas's film, that people could live to a thousand.

While it is likely that none of these discoveries will serve my parents or even me in any tangible way, I can’t help but imagine what life would be like for them with the drug Sinclair hopes to develop. Would life be better if they lived well beyond 73, the life expectancy for Colombians, without their current afflictions? Physically, there is no doubt that it would. My father’s heart would be stronger and he would have much more energy throughout the day. If a drug could slow down the effects of my mother's arthritis, she would be able to do much more than she can today.

But would the drug increase their desire to live and enjoy what they have? I don’t know. I think we’ll be stuck with that kind of question for a lot longer than it will take scientists to further extend our lifespan. After all, even if we can employ scientific advances to tweak nature and manage to live a bit longer and healthily, we all need something meaningful to live for and that is true whether you are disease ridden or disease free.

It is clear to me that as grandparents to my child and my brother's children my parents have a lot to live for. Their stories and connection to a rapidly fading age are invaluable and irreplaceable.

On their good days, I think they believe that. But they don’t believe it all the time and I can't make them. Perhaps that is the most frustrating thing as a daughter – to see how much they have yet to give and be unable to convince them of it.