Springfield resident David Gobel and his colleague, English theorist Aubrey de Grey, are now eight times closer to realizing their dream, but the finish line may still be a long way off.
In mid-September, Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of Paypal, made a $3.5 million pledge to the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit that was co-founded by Gobel and de Grey and is headquartered in Springfield. The donation brings the foundation's funds to nearly $4 million.
The Methuselah Foundation, named for the oldest man whose age is recorded in the Bible, sponsors a prize for increasing the life span of mice, with the goal of finding a way to extend the human life span indefinitely.
Gobel is an entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded several business ventures, including the educational software company Knowledge Adventure, and the Starbright Foundation, a multimedia program for children with disabilities. He met de Grey, a former Cambridge University geneticist, in an online forum. "I was interested in initiating a prize awarding life extension or the reversal of aging," said Gobel. "This attracted Aubrey's interest."
De Grey's thinking was along similar lines. "I think that aging is a bad thing," he said. "It kills people really, really horribly, and I'm against anything that kills people really, really horribly."
"We had a private dialogue to make sure we were both, shall we say, stable individuals," said Gobel. The two then consulted other biogerontologists and decided the prize money, now called the Mprize, would be awarded for long-living mice.
The foundation offers two prizes de Grey explained. One is for an individual mouse of exceptional age, and the other, more important category is for groups of mice with extended life spans. Prizes are awarded according to how soundly the previous record is beaten. The competition and the foundation started in 2002, with small awards for setting a benchmark, said de Grey. Those benchmarks have not yet been beaten, he said.
The oldest single mouse was raised by a researcher in Springfield, Ill. and lived almost five years. The prize for a group of mice went to a team in California that caused several mice to live to ages of almost 4 by simply reducing their calorie intake. The average life span for a mouse, said de Grey, is two to three years.
If a contestant achieves the "Rejuvenation Mprize" by starting with mice two-thirds through their natural life span and causing them to live for the equivalent of an entire additional life span, that contestant will win the entire pot, said Gobel. The only upper limit to the prize is the amount of money donated to the foundation, he said. "It just depends how badly people want to have this problem fixed."
DE GREY SAID HE thinks the problem can be solved methodically. "We already know quite a lot about what aging is," he said. "What we don't know a lot about is how it happens." He said he hopes to sidestep this ignorance by observing the effects of aging at a cellular level and finding ways to counter those changes, rather than worrying about why they happen.
De Grey has compiled a list of the effects of aging on cells in the body, including cell loss and cell atrophy, mutations in nuclei and mitochondria, extra-cellular crosslinks, "junk" that accumulates inside and outside cells, and, ironically, death-resistant cells.
Treating these symptoms, he said, would not only extend the human life span but would prevent gray hair, wrinkles and other cosmetic effects of aging, as well as age-related diseases. Cancer, for example, is a result of aging, said de Grey. Cancer could, therefore, be prevented without the discovery of a cure, by negating the effects of age. De Grey calls this program "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS).
Gobel pointed out that some turtles live for 150 years, while bowhead whales can live up to 200 years and bristlecone pine trees over 4,500 years. If their cells can endure that long, he said, it is not unrealistic to think human cells could last beyond their current life expectancy?
He offered the example of the historical prize that inspired him to start the Mprize. Shortly before 1800, he said, the only ways to preserve food were smoking, salting and drying, all of which have their limitations. "As a result of that, people regularly died from famine," said Gobel. "Nobody had tried — in sufficient numbers — to fix the world's nastiest problem."
In 1795, a French chef named Nicholas Appert discovered the secret of canning because he was determined to win the prize Napoleon Bonaparte was offering for a way to preserve food on the battlefield. The prize was 12,000 francs. "What a tiny investment for such an enormous stride forward," said Gobel.
OTHER RESEARCHERS in the field share de Grey's goals but have questioned his credibility. Dr. Steven Austad, a professor of biogerontology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has spent about 20 years researching the biology of aging. He said De Grey's SENS program "has no credibility at all within the legitimate scientific community."
"It's just a theory, without any evidence whatsoever," said Austad. He said de Grey "just theorizes. He has ideas for research, but he doesn't do any research."
Austad noted that about 100 biogerontologists around the country are doing research on combating the effects of aging and have met with some success in altering the life spans of animals such as flies and mice. How much of this research will prove relevant to humans, he said, remains to be determined. Austad noted that the best experiments on mice to date have extended life spans by about 75 percent. However, he said, this was accomplished by mutating a gene very early in the creatures' lives and then limiting their calorie intake.
"Right now, any of the treatments that we know of, in lab animals, if they're applied late in life, they're going to have a very limited effect, if any," he said, referring to the Methuselah Foundation's rejuvenation prize.
But he added that the prize itself could yield positive results. "Potentially, if somebody comes up with something, it would be very exciting," he said.
An essay signed by Austad and 17 other scientists raised concerns that de Grey's claim that a human life span "many times what we reach today" could soon be attainable may discredit a field of research that is "only just emerging from a reputation for charlatanry."
"I have nothing personally against Aubrey," said Austad, in an e-mail. "I've been to many meetings with him, and we've even gone out drinking together on occasion." He said that what he considers to be "deluded and fantastical" statements from de Grey have encouraged himself and others in the field to distance themselves from the theorist.
QUESTIONED ABOUT THE EFFECTS of indefinite life spans on civilization — especially in terms of population growth — de Grey said, "I think it's really strange that some people make excuses for aging." He acknowledged that such a change could pose potential problems, "but not such serious problems that we shouldn't try."
"People think in terms of concepts, not of individuals who are potentially housed in very comfortable death rows," said Gobel, referring to rest homes. "That's what inspired me, was visiting nursing homes." As far as the question of population problems, he said, "In countries where medicine is more advanced, population is decreasing." Therefore, he said, life span does not have a direct correlation with population. In any case, he said, "my concern is about persons, not populations."
Gobel said he and de Grey are not trying to abolish death. "I'm not thinking about 10,000 years [life span]," he said.