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Reprogramming your Biochemistry for Immortality
An Interview with Ray Kurzweil by David Jay Brown
Scientists are now talking about people staying young and not aging. Ray Kurzweil is taking it a step further: "In addition to radical life extension, we’ll also have radical life expansion. The nanobots will be able to go inside the brain and extend our mental functioning by interacting with our biological neurons."
Interview conducted by David
Jay Brown on February 8, 2006. This interview will be published
in Brown's upcoming book Mavericks of Medicine (2006).
Published on KurzweilAI.net March 8, 2006.
Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, software developer, inventor,
entrepreneur, philosopher, and a leading proponent of radical life
extension. He is the coauthor (with Terry Grossman, M.D.) of Fantastic
Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which is one of
the most intriguing and exciting books on life extension around.
Kurzweil and Grossman’s approach to health and longevity combines
the most current and practical medical knowledge with a soundly-based,
yet awe-inspiring visionary perspective of what’s to come.
Kurzweil’s philosophy is built upon the premise that we now
have the knowledge to identify and correct the problems caused by
most unhealthy genetic predispositions. By taking advantage of the
opportunities afforded us by the genomic testing, nutritional supplements,
and lifestyle adjustments, we can live long enough to reap the benefits
of advanced biotechnology and nanotechnology, which will ultimately
allow us to conquer aging and live forever. At the heart of Kurzweil’s
optimistic philosophy is the notion that human knowledge is growing
exponentially, not linearly, and this fact is rarely taken into
account when people try to predict the rate of technological advance
in the future. Kurzweil predicts that at the current rate of knowledge
expansion we’ll have the technology to completely conquer aging
within the next couple of decades.
I spoke with Ray on February 8, 2006. Ray speaks
very precisely, and he chooses his words carefully. He presents
his ideas with a lot of confidence, and I found his optimism to
be contagious. We spoke about the importance of genomic testing,
some of the common misleading ideas that people have about health,
and how biotechnology and nanotechnology will radically affect our
longevity in the future.
David: What inspired your interest in life extension?
Ray: Probably the first incident that got me on this path
was my father’s illness. This began when I was fifteen, and
he died seven years later of heart disease when I was twenty-two.
He was fifty-eight. I’ll actually be fifty-eight this Sunday.
I sensed a dark cloud over my future, feeling like there was a good
chance that I had inherited his disposition to heart disease. When
I was thirty-five, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and the
conventional medical approach made it worse.
So I really approached the situation as an inventor, as a problem
to be solved. I immersed myself in the scientific literature, and
came up with an approach that allowed me to overcome my diabetes.
My levels became totally normal, and in the course of this process
I discovered that I did indeed have a disposition, for example,
to high cholesterol. My cholesterol was 280 and I also got that
down to around 130. That was twenty-two years ago.
I wrote a bestselling health book, which came out in 1993 about
that experience, and the program that I’d come up with. That’s
what really got me on this path of realizing that—if you’re
aggressive enough about reprogramming your biochemistry—you can
find the ideas that can help you to overcome your genetic dispositions,
because they’re out there. They exist.
About seven years ago, after my book The Age of Spiritual Machines
came out in 1999, I was at a Foresight Institute conference. I met
Terry Grossman there, and we struck up a conversation about this
subject—nutrition and health. I went to see him at his longevity
clinic in Denver for an evaluation, and we built a friendship. We
started exchanging emails about health issues—and that was 10,000
emails ago. We wrote this book Fantastic Voyage together,
which really continues my quest. And he also has his own story about
how he developed similar ideas, and how we collaborated.
There’s really a lot of knowledge available right now, although,
previously, it has not been packaged in the same way that we did
it. We have the knowledge to reprogram our biochemistry to overcome
disease and aging processes. We can dramatically slow down aging,
and we can really overcome conditions such as atherosclerosis, that
leads to almost all heart attacks and strokes, diabetes, and we
can substantially reduce the risk of cancer with today’s knowledge.
And, as you saw from the book, all of that is just what we call
‘Bridge One.’ We’re not saying that taking lots of
supplements and changing your diet is going enable you to live five
hundred years. But it will enable Baby Boomers—like Dr. Grossman
and myself, and our contemporaries—to be in good shape ten or fifteen
years from now, when we really will have the full flowering of the
biotechnology revolution, which is ‘Bridge Two.’
Now, this gets into my whole theory of information technology. Biology
has become an information technology. It didn’t used to be.
Biology used to be hit or miss. We’d just find something that
happened to work. We didn’t really understand why it worked,
and, invariably, these tools, these drugs, had side-effects. They
were very crude tools. Drug development was called drug discovery,
because we really weren’t able to reprogram biology. That is
now changing. Our understanding of biology, and the ability to manipulate
it, is becoming an information technology. We’re understanding
the information processes that underlie disease processes, like
atherosclerosis, and we’re gaining the tools to reprogram those
processes.
Drug development is now entering an era of rational drug design,
rather than drug discovery. The important point to realize is that
the progress is exponential, not linear. Invariably people—including
sophisticated people—do not take that into consideration, and it
makes all the difference in the world. The mainstream skeptics declared
the fifteen year genome project a failure after seven and half years
because only one percent of the project was done. The skeptics said,
I told you this wasn’t going to work—here you are halfway
through the project and you’ve hardly done anything. But the
progress was exponential, doubling every year, and the last seven
doublings go from one percent to a hundred percent. So the project
was done on time. It took fifteen years to sequence HIV. We sequenced
the SARS virus in thirty-one days.
There are many other examples of that. We’ve gone from ten
dollars to sequence one base pair in 1990 to a penny today. So in
ten or fifteen years from now it’s going to be a very different
landscape. We really will have very powerful interventions, in the
form of rationally-designed drugs that can precisely reprogram our
biochemistry. We can do it to a large extent today with supplements
and nutrition, but it takes a more extensive effort. We’ll
have much more powerful tools fifteen years from, so I want it to
be in good shape at that time.
Most of my Baby Boomer contemporaries are completely oblivious of
this perspective. They just assume that aging is part of the cycle
of human life, and at 65 or 70 you start slowing down. Then at eighty
you’re dead. So they’re getting ready to retire, and are
really unaware of this perspective that things are going to be very
different ten or fifteen years from now. This insight really should
motivate them to be aggressive about using today’s knowledge.
Of course all of this will lead to ‘Bridge Three’ about
twenty years from now—the nanotechnology revolution—where
we can go beyond the limitations of biology. We’ll have programmable
nanobots that can keep us healthy from inside, and truly provide
truly radical life extension.
So that’s the genesis. My interest in life extension stems
primarily from my having been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I
really consider the diabetes to be a blessing because it prodded
me to overcome it, and, in so doing, I realized that I didn’t
just have an approach for diabetes, but a general attitude and approach
to overcome any health problem, that we really can find the ideas
and apply them to overcome the genetic dispositions that we have.
There’s a common wisdom that your genes are eighty percent
of your health and longevity and lifestyle is only twenty percent.
Well, that’s true if you follow the generally, watered-down
guidelines that our health institutions put out. But if you follow
the optimal guidelines that we talk about, you can really overcome
almost any genetic disposition. We do have the knowledge to do that.
David: What do you think are some of the common misleading
ideas that people have about health and longevity?
Ray: One thing that I just eluded to is the compromised recommendations
from our health authorities. I just had a lengthy debate with the
Joslin Diabetes Center, which is considered the world’s leading
diabetes treatment and research center. I’m on the board, and
they’ve just come out with new nutritional guidelines, which
are highly compromised. They’re far from ideal, and they acknowledge
that. They say, well, we have enough trouble getting people to follow
these guidelines, let alone the stricter guidelines that you recommend.
And my reply is, you have trouble getting people to follow your
guidelines because they don’t work. If people followed your
guidelines very precisely they’d still have Type 2 diabetes.
They’d still have to take harsh drugs or insulin.
If they follow my guidelines the situation is quite different. I’ve
counseled many people about Type 2 diabetes, and Dr. Grossman has
treated many people with it, and they come back and they have completely
normal levels. Their symptoms are gone, and they don’t have
to take insulin or harsh drugs. They feel liberated, and that’s
extremely motivating. In many ways it’s easier to make a stricter
change. To dramatically reduce your high Glycemic index carbs is
actually easier than moderately reducing them, because if you moderately
reduce them you don’t get rid of the cravings for carbs. Carbs
are addictive, and it’s just like trying to cut down a little
bit on cigarettes. It’s actually easier to cut cigarettes out
completely, and it’s also easier to largely cut out high Glycemic
index starches and sugars, because the cravings go away and it’s
much easier to follow. But, most importantly, it works along with
a few supplements and exercise to overcome most cases of Type 2
Diabetes.
However, this doesn’t seem to be the attitude our health authorities.
The nutritional recommendations are consistently compromised. There’s
almost no understanding of the role of nutritional supplements,
which can be very powerful. I take two hundred and fifty supplements
a day, and I monitor my body regularly. I’m not just flying
without instrumentation. Being an engineer, I like data and I monitor
fifty or sixty different blood levels every few months, and I’m
constantly fine-tuning my program. All of my blood levels are ideal.
My Homocysteine level many years ago was eleven, but now it’s
five. My C-reactive protein is 0.1. My cholesterol is 130. My LDL
is about 60, and my HDL—which was 28—is now close to sixty. And
so on and so forth.
I’ve also taken biological aging tests, which measure things
like tactile sensitivity, reaction time, memory, and decision-making
speed. There are forty different tests, and you compare your score
to medians for different populations at different ages. When I was
forty I came out at about thirty-eight. Now I’m fifty-seven—at
least for a few more days—and I come out at forty. So, according
to these tests, I’ve only aged two years in the last seventeen
years. Now you can dispute the absolute validity of these biological
aging tests. It’s just a number, but it’s just evidence
that this program is working.
David: Why do you think that genomic testing is important?
Ray: Our program is very much not a one size fits all. It’s
not a one-trick pony. We’re not saying that if you lower your
carbs, lower your fat, or eat a grapefruit a day then everything
will be fine. In fact, our publisher initially had a problem with
this, but they actually got behind it enthusiastically, because
it fundamentally differs, as you know, from most health books that
really do have just one idea. We earnestly try to provide a comprehensive
understanding of your biology and your body, which does have some
complexity to it. Then we let people apply these principles to their
own lives.
It is important to emphasize the issues that are concerns for yourself.
We use an analogy of stepping backwards towards a cliff. It’s
much easier to change direction before you fall off the cliff. But,
generally, medicine doesn’t get involved until the eruption
of clinical disease. Someone has a heart attack, or they develop
clinical cancer, and that’s very often akin to falling off
a cliff. One third of first heart attacks are fatal, and another
third cause permanent damage to the heart muscle.
It’s much easier to catch these conditions beforehand. You
don’t just catch heart disease or cancer walking down the street
one day. These are many years or decades in the making, and you
can see where you are in the progression of these diseases. So it’s
very important to know thyself, to access your own situation. Genetic
testing is important because you can see what dispositions you have.
If you have certain genes that dispose you to heart disease, or
conversely cancer, or diabetes, then you would give a higher priority
to managing those issues, and do more tests to see where you are
in the progression of those conditions. Let’s say you do a
test and it says you have a genetic disposition to Type 2 diabetes.
So you should do a glucose-tolerance test. In fact, we describe
a more sophisticated form of that in the book, where you measure
insulin as well, and can see if you have early stages of insulin
resistance.
Perhaps you have metabolic syndrome, which a very substantial fraction
of the population has. If you have these early harbingers of insulin
resistance, that could lead to Type 2 diabetes, so obviously the
priority of that issue will be greatly heightened. If you don’t
have that vulnerability then you don’t have to be as concerned
about insulin resistance, and so on. But if you do have insulin
resistance, or you have a high level of atherosclerosis, then it
really behooves you to take important steps to get these dangerous
conditions under control—which you can do. So genomic testing is
not something you do by itself. It’s part of a comprehensive
assessment program to know your own body—not only what you’re
predisposed to, but what your body has already developed in terms
of early versions of these degenerative conditions.
David: What are some of the most important nutritional supplements
that you would recommend to help prevent cancer and cardiovascular
disease?
Ray: We spell all that out in the book. Coenzyme Q10
is important. It never ceases to amaze me that physicians do not
tell their patients to take coenzyme Q10 when they prescribe
Statin drugs. This is because it’s well known that Statin drugs
deplete the body of coenzyme Q10, and a lot of the side-effects
such as muscle weakness that people suffer from Statin drugs are
because of this depletion of coenzyme Q10. In any event,
that’s an important supplement. It is involved in energy generation
within the mitochondria of each cell. Disruption to the mitochondria
is an important aging process and this supplement will help slow
that down. Coenzyme Q10 has a number of protective effect
including lowering blood pressure, helping to control free-radical
damage, and protecting the heart.
A lot of research recently shows the Curcumin, which is derived
from the spice turmeric, has important anti-inflammatory properties
and can protect against cancer, heart disease, and even Alzheimer’s
disease.
Alpha-Lipoic acid is an important antioxidant which is both water
and fat-soluble. It can neutralize harmful free radicals, improve
insulin sensitivity, and slow down the process of advanced Glycation
end products (AGEs), which is another key aging process.
Each of the vitamins is important and plays a key role. Vitamin
C is generally protective as a premier antioxidant. It appears to
have particular effectiveness in preventing the early stages of
atherosclerosis, namely the oxidizing of LDL cholesterol.
In terms of vitamin E, there’s been a lot of negative publicity
about that, but if you look carefully at that research you’ll
see that all of those studies were done with alpha-Tocopherol, and
vitamin E is really a blend of eight different substances—four
tocopherols and four Tocotrienols. Alpha-Tocopherol actually depletes
levels of gamma-Tocopherol, and gamma-Tocopherol is the form of
vitamin E that’s found naturally in food, and is a particularly
important one. So we recommend that people take a blend of the fractions
of vitamin E, and that they get enough gamma-Tocopherol.
There are a number of others that are important to take in general.
If you have high cholesterol, Policosanol is one supplement that
is quite effective, and has an independent action from the Statin
drugs. Statin drugs actually are quite good. They appear to be anti-inflammatory,
so they not only lower cholesterol but attack the inflammatory processes,
which underlie many diseases, including atherosclerosis. But as
I mentioned it’s important to take coenzyme Q10
if you’re taking Statin drugs.
There are others. Grape seed proanthocyanidin extract has been found
to be another effective antioxident. Resveratrol is another. We
have an extensive discussion of the most important supplements in
the book.
David: What sort of suggestions would you make to someone
who is looking to improve their memory or cognitive performance?
Ray: Vinpocetine, derived from the periwinkle plant, seems
to have the best research. It improves cerebral blood flow, increases
brain cell TP (energy) production, and enables better utilization
of glucose and oxygen in the brain.
Other supplements that appear to be important for brain health include
Phosphatidylserine, Acetyl-L-Carnitine, Pregneneolone, and EPA/DHA.
The research appears a bit mixed on Ginkgo Biloba, but we’re
not ready to give up on it.
We provide a discussion in the book of a number of smart nutrients
that appear to improve brain health. There are also a number of
smart drugs being developed, some of which are already in the testing
pipeline, that appear to be quite promising.
David: What do you think are the primary causes of aging?
Ray: Aging is not one thing. There’s a number of different
processes involved and you can adopt programs that slow down each
of these. For example, one process involves the depletion of phosphatidylcholine
in the cell membrane. In young people the cell membrane is about
sixty or seventy percent phosphatidylcholine, and the cell membrane
functions very well then—letting nutrients in and letting toxins
out.
The body makes phosphatidylcholine, but very slowly, so over the
decades the phosphatidylcholine in the cell membrane depletes, and
the cell membrane gets filled in with inert substances, like hard
fats and cholesterol, that basically don’t work. This is one
reasons that cells become brittle with age. The skin in an elderly
person begins to not be supple. The organs stop functioning efficiently.
So it’s actually a very important aging process, and you can
reverse that by supplementing with phosphatidylcholine. If you really
want to do it effectively you can take phosphatidylcholine intravenously,
as I do. Every week I have a I.V. with phosphatidylcholine. I also
take it every day orally. So that’s one aging process we can
stop today.
Another important aging process involves oxidation through positively-charged
oxygen free radicals, which will steal electrons from cells, disrupting
normal enzymatic processes. There are a number of different types
of antioxidants that you can take to slow down that process, including
vitamin C. You could take vitamin C intravenously to boost that
process.
Advanced Glycation end-products, or AGEs, are involved in another
aging process. This is where proteins develop cross-links with each
other, therefore disrupting their function. There are supplements
that you can take, such as Alpha Lipoic Acid, that slow that down.
There is an experimental drug called ALT-711 (phenacyldimenthylthiazolium
chloride) that can dissolve the AGE cross-links without damaging
the original tissues.
Atherosclerosis is an aging process, and it’s not just taking
place in the coronary arteries, of course. It can take place in
the cerebral arteries, which ultimately causes cerebral strokes,
but it also takes place in the arteries all throughout the body.
It can lead to impotence, claudication of the legs and limbs, and
like most of these processes, it’s not linear but exponential,
in that it grows by a certain percentage each year.
So that’s why the process of atherosclerosis hardly seems to
progress for a long time, but then when gets to a certain point
it can really explode and develop very quickly. We have an extensive
program on reducing atherosclerosis, which is both an aging process
and a disease process. We cite a number of important supplements
that reduce cholesterol and inflammation—such as the omega-3 fats
EPA and DHA—as well as the Statin drugs. Supplements like Curcumin
[Tumeric] are helpful. Supplements that reduce inflammation will
reduce both cancer and the inflammatory processes that lead to atherosclerosis.
There are a number of supplements that reduce Homocysteine, which
appears to encourage atherosclerosis. These include Folic Acid,
vitamins B2, B6, and B12, magnesium,
and trimethylglycine (TMG).
So you can attack atherosclerosis five or six different ways, and
we recommend that you do them all, so long as there aren’t
contraindications for combining treatments. But generally these
treatments are independent of each other. If you go to war, you
don’t just send in the helicopters. You send in the helicopters,
the tanks, the planes, and the infantry. You use your intelligence
resources, and attack the enemy every way that you can, with all
of your resources. And that’s really what you need to do with
these conditions, because they represent very threatening processes.
If you are sufficient proactive, you can generally get them under
control.
David: What are some of the new anti-aging treatments that
you foresee coming along in the near future, like from stem cell
research and therapeutic cloning?
Ray: It depends on what you mean by “near future,”
because in ten or fifteen years we foresee a fundamentally transformed
landscape.
David: Let’s just say prior to nanotechnology, and then
that will be the next question.
Ray: is the next frontier is biotechnology. We’re really
now entering an era where we can reprogram biology. We’ve sequenced
the genome, and we are now reverse-engineering the genome. We’re
understanding the roles that the genes play, how they express themselves
in proteins, and how these proteins then play roles in sequences
of biochemical steps that lead to both orderly processes as well
as dysfunction—disease processes, such as atherosclerosis and
cancer—and we are gaining the means to reprogram those processes.
For example, we can now turn genes off with RNA interference. This
is a new technique that just emerged a few years ago—a medication
with little pieces of RNA that latch on to the messenger RNA that
is expressing a targeted gene and destroys it, therefore preventing
the gene from expressing itself. This effectively turns the gene
off. So right away that methodology has lots of applications.
Take the fat insulin receptor gene. That gene basically says ‘hold
on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work
out so well.’ That was a good strategy, not only for humans,
but for most species, thousands of years ago. It’s still probably
a good strategy for animals living in the wild. But we’re not
animals living in the wild. It was good for humans a thousand years
ago when calories were few and far between. Today it underlies an
epidemic of obesity. How about turning that gene off in the fat
cells? What would happen?
That was actually tried in mice, and these mice ate ravenously,
and they remained slim. They got the health benefits of being slim.
They didn’t get diabetes. They didn’t get heart disease.
They lived twenty percent longer. They got the benefits of caloric
restriction while doing the opposite. So turning off the fat insulin
receptor gene in fat cells is the idea. You don’t want to turn
it off in muscle cells, for example. This is one methodology that
could enable us to prevent obesity, and actually maintain an optimal
weight no matter what we ate. So that’s one application of
RNA interference.
There’s a number of genes that have been identified that promote
atherosclerosis, cancer, diabetes and many other diseases. We’d
like to selectively turn those genes off, and slow down or stop
these disease processes. There are certain genes that appear to
have an influence on the rate of aging. We can amplify the expression
of genes similarly, and we can actually add new genetic information—that’s
gene therapy. Gene therapy has had problems in the past, because
we’ve had difficulty putting the genetic information in the
right place at the right chromosome. There are new techniques now
that enable us to do that correctly.
For example, you can take a cell out of the body, insert the genetic
information in vitro—which is much easier to do in a Petri dish—and
examine whether or not the insertion went as intended. If it ended
up in the wrong place you discard it. You keep doing this until
you get it right. You can examine the cell and make sure that it
doesn’t have any DNA errors. So then you take this now modified
cell—that has also been certified as being free of DNA errors—and
it’s replicated in the Petri dish, so that hundreds of millions
of copies of it are created. Then you inject these cells back into
the patient, and they will work their way into the right tissues.
A lung cell is not going to end up in the liver.
In fact, this was tried by a company I’m involved with, United
Therapeutics. I advise them and I’m on their board. They tried
this with a fatal disease called pulmonary hypertension, which is
a lung disease, and these modified cells ended up in the right place—in
the lungs—and actually cured pulmonary hypertension in animal tests.
It has now been approved for human trials. That’s just one
example of many of being able to actually add new genes. So we’ll
be able to subtract genes, over-express certain genes, under-express
genes, and add new genes.
Another methodology is cell transdifferentiation, a broader concept
then just stem cells. One of the problems with stem cell research
or stem cell approaches is this. If I want to grow a new heart,
or maybe add new heart cells, because my heart has been damaged,
or if I need new pancreatic Islet cells because my pancreatic Islet
cells are destroyed, or need some other type of cells, I’d
like it to have my DNA. The ultimate stem cell promise, the holy
grail of these cell therapies, is to take my own skin cells and
reprogram them to be a different kind of cell. How do you do that?
Actually, all cells have the same DNA. What’s the difference
between a heart cell and pancreatic Islet cell?
Well, there are certain proteins, short RNA fragments, and peptides
that control gene expression. They tell the heart cells that only
the certain genes which should be expressed in a heart cell are
expressed. And we’re learning how to manipulate which genes
are expressed. By adding certain proteins to the cell we can reprogram
a skin cell to be a heart cell or a pancreatic Islet cell. This
has been demonstrated in just the last couple years. So then we
can create in a Petri dish as many heart cells or pancreatic Islet
cells as I need, with my own DNA, because they’re derived from
my cells. Then inject them, and they’ll work their way into
the right tissues. In the process we can discard cells that have
DNA errors, so we can basically replenish our cells with DNA-corrected
cells.
While we are at it, we can also extend the telomeres. That’s
another aging process. As the cells replicate, these little repeating
codes of DNA called telomeres grow shorter. They’re like little
beads at the end of the DNA strands. One falls off every time the
cell replicates, and there’s only about fifty of them. So after
a certain number of replications the cell can’t replicate anymore.
There is actually one enzyme that controls this—telomerase,
which is capable of extending the telomeres. Cancer actually works
by creating telomerase to enable them to replicate without end.
Cancer cells become immortal because they can create telomerase.
As we’re rejuvenating our cells, turning a skin cell into a
kind of cell that I need, making sure that it has it’s DNA
corrected, we can also extend it’s telomeres by using telomerase
in the Petri dish. Then you got this new cell that’s just like
my heart cells were when I was twenty. Now you can replicate that,
and then inject it, and really rejuvenate all of the body’s
tissues with young versions of my cells. So that’s cell rejuvenation.
That’s one idea, or one technique, and there’s many different
variations of that.
Then there’s turning on and off enzymes. Enzymes are the work
horses of biology. Genes express themselves as enzymes, and the
enzymes actually go and do the work. And we can add enzymes. We
can turn enzymes off. One example of that is Torcetrapib, which
destroys one enzyme, and that enzyme destroys HDL, the good cholesterol
in the blood. So when people take Torcetrapib their HDL, good cholesterol
levels, soar, and atherosclerosis dramatically slows down or stops.
The phase 2 trials were very encouraging, and Pfizer is spending
a record one billion dollars on the phase 3 trials. That’s
just one example of many of these paradigm: manipulating enzymes.
So there’s many different ideas to get in and very precisely
reprogram the information processes that underlie biology, to undercut
disease processes and aging processes, and move them towards healthy
rejuvenated processes.
David: How do you see robotics, artificial intelligence,
and nanotechnology affecting human health and life span in the future?
Ray: I mentioned that we talk about three bridges to radical
life extension in Fantastic Voyage. Bridge One is aggressively
applying today’s knowledge, and that’s, of course, a moving
frontier, as we learn and gain more and more knowledge. In Chapter
10 of Fantastic Voyage I talk about my program, and at the
end I mention that one part of my program is what I call a positive
health slope, which means that my program is not fixed.
I spend a certain amount of time every week studying a number of
things—new research, new drug developments that are coming out,
new information about myself that may come from testing. Just reading
the literature I might discover something that’s in fact old
knowledge, but there’s so much information out there, I haven’t
read everything. So I’m constantly learning more about health
and medicine and my own body and modifying my own program. I probably
make some small change every week. That doesn’t mean my program
is unstable. My program is quite stable, but I’m fine-tuning
at the edges quite frequently.
Bridge Two we’ve just been talking about, which is the biotechnology
revolution. A very important insight that really changes one’s
perspective is to understand that progress is exponential and not
linear. So many sophisticated scientists fail to take this into
consideration. They just assume that the progress is going to continue
at the current pace, and they make this mistake over and over again.
If you consider the exponential pace of this process, ten or fifteen
years from now we will have really dramatic tools in the forms of
medications and cell therapies that can reprogram our health, within
the domain of biology.
Bridge Three is nanotechnology. The golden era will be in about
twenty years from now. They’ll be some applications earlier,
but the real Holy Grail of nanotechnology are nanobots, blood cell-size
devices that can go inside the body and keep us healthy from inside.
If that sounds very futuristic, I’d actually point out that
we’re doing sophisticated tasks already with blood cell-size
devices in animal experiments.
One scientist cured Type 1 diabetes in rats with a nano-engineered
capsule that has seven nanometers pores. It lets insulin out in
a controlled fashion and blocks antibodies. And that’s what
is feasible today. MIT has a project of a nano-engineered device
that’s actually smaller than a cell and it’s capable of
detecting specifically the antigens that exist only on certain types
of cancer cells. When it detects these antigens it latches onto
the cell, and burrows inside the cell. It can detect once it’s
inside and then at that point it releases a toxin which destroys
the cancer cell. This has actually worked in the Petri dish, but
that’s quite significant because there’s actually not
that much that could be different in vivo as in vitro.
This is a rather sophisticated device because it’s going through
these several different stages, and it can do all of these different
steps. It’s a nano-engineered device in that it is created
at the molecular level. So that’s what is feasible already.
If you consider what I call the Law of Accelerating Returns, which
is a doubling of the power of these information technologies every
year, within twenty-five years these computation-communication technologies,
and our understanding of biology, will be a billion times more advanced
than it is today. We’re shrinking technology, according to
our models, at a rate of over a hundred per 3-D volume per decade.
So these technologies will be a hundred thousand times smaller than
they are today in twenty-five years, and a billion times more powerful.
And look at what we can already do today experimentally. Twenty-five
years from now these nanobots will be quite sophisticated. They’ll
have computers in them. They’ll have communication devices.
They’ll have small mechanical systems. They’ll really
be little robots, and they be able to go inside the body and keep
us healthy from inside. They will be able to augment the immune
system by destroying pathogens. They will repair DNA errors, remove
debris and reverse atherosclerosis. Whatever we don’t get around
to finishing with biotechnology, we’ll be able to finish the
job with these nano-engineered blood-cell sized robots or nanobots.
This really will provide radical life extension. The basic metaphor
or analogy to keep in mind is to ask the question, How long does
a house last? Aubrey de Grey uses this metaphor. The answer is,
a house lasts as long as you want it to. If you don’t take
care of it the house won’t last that long. It will fall apart.
The roof will spring a leak and the house will quickly decay. On
the other hand, if you’re diligent, and something goes wrong
in the house you fix it. Periodically you upgrade the technology.
You put in a new HVAC system and so forth. With this approach, the
house will go on indefinitely, and we do have houses, in fact, that
are thousands of years of old. So why doesn’t this apply to
the human body?
The answer is that we understand how a house works. We understand
how to fix a house. We understand all the problems a house can have,
because we’ve designed them. We don’t yet have that knowledge
and those tools today to do a comparable job with our body. We don’t
understand all the things that could wrong, and we don’t have
all the fixes for everything. But we will have this knowledge and
these tools. We will have complete models of biology. We’ll
reverse-engineered biology within twenty years, and we’ll have
the means to go in and repair all of the problems we have identified.
We’ll be able to indefinitely fix the things that go wrong.
We’ll have nanobots that can go in and proactively keep us
healthy at a cellular level, without waiting until major diseases
flare up, as well as stop and reverse aging processes. We’ll
get to a point where people will not age. So when we talk about
radical life extension we’re not talking about people growing
old and becoming what we think of today as a 95 year old and then
staying at a biological age 95 for hundreds of years.
We’re talking about people staying young and not aging. Actually,
I’m talking about even more than that, because in addition
to radical life extension, we’ll also have radical life expansion.
The nanobots will be able to go inside the brain and extend our
mental functioning by interacting with our biological neurons. Today
we already have computers that are placed inside people’s brains,
that replace diseased parts of the brain, like the neural implant
for Parkinson’s disease. The latest generation of that implant
allows you download new software to your neural implant from outside
the patient—and that’s not an experiment, that’s an FDA
approved therapy.
Today these neural implants require surgery, but ultimately we’ll
be able to send these brain extenders into the nervous system noninvasively
through the capillaries of the brain, without surgery. And we’ll
be using them, not just to replace diseased tissue, but to go beyond
our current abilities—to extend our memories, extend our pattern
recognition and cognitive capabilities, and merge intimately with
our technology. So we’ll have radical life expansion along
with radical life extension. That’s my vision of what will
happen in the next several decades.
David: What are you currently working on?
Ray: I spend maybe forty or fifty percent of my time communicating—in
the form of books, articles, interviews, speeches. I give several
speeches a month. Then there’s my Web site: KurzweilAI.net.
We have a free daily or weekly newsletter; people can sign up by
putting in their email address (which is kept in confidence) on
the home page.
Then I have several businesses that I’m running, which are
in the area of pattern recognition. I’ve been in the reading
machine business for thirty-two years. I developed the first print-to-speech
technology for the blind in 1976, and we’re introducing a new
version that fits in your pocket. A blind person can take it out
of their pocket, snap a picture of a handout at a meeting, a sign
on a wall, the back of a cereal box, an electronic display, and
the device will read it out loud to them through a earphone or speaker.
We’re developing a new medical technology, which is basically
a smart undershirt that monitors your health. There will be a smart
bra version for women. It takes a complete morphology EKG and monitors
your breathing. So, for example, if you’re a heart patient
it could tell you whether your atrial fibrillation is getting better
or worse. When you’re exercising it can tell you if you’re
getting a problem situation. So it gives you diagnostic information.
It can also alert you if you should contact your doctor. So basically
your undershirt is sending this information by Bluetooth to your
cell phone, and your cell phone is running this cardiac evaluation
software. So that’s another project.
Then we have Ray and Terry’s longevity products at RayandTerry.com,
which goes along with Fantastic Voyage. We have about 20
products available now, and we’ll have about fifty within a
few months. Basically all the things we recommend in the book will
be available. We also have combinations. So, for example, if you
want to lower cholesterol we have a cholesterol-lowering product,
and you don’t have to buy the eight or nine different supplements
separately. We put all of our recommendations together in one combination
to make it easy for people to follow. There’s a total daily
care, that has basic nutritional supplements, like vitamins and
minerals, and coenzyme Q-10, and so on. We have a meal-replacement
shake that is low carbohydrate, has no sugar, but actually tastes
good, which is actually very unique, because if you’ve ever
tasted a low-carb meal-replacement shake you know that there in
general the taste is not desirable. This might sound promotional
but that was the objective, and it’s actually made up of the
nutritional supplements that we recommend. So that’s another
company, and those are the companies that we’re running.
©2006 David
Jay Brown. Reprinted with permission.
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