Should We Still Age?

Summer movies usually mean blockbusters. But the new film To Age or Not to Age belongs more in the realm of myth busters.

The documentary, opening today in New York and soon to a little indie movie house near you (or add it to you NetFlix queue), explores the science behind aging the and the breakthroughs that are happening, faster and faster, that lead some to believe that our life spans can be significantly extended.

So while everyone else is standing in line to see Inception, I traded in Leonardo DiCaprio for Dr. Leonard Guarente talking about the accidental discovery of the yeast gene.

I don’t know about you, but over the years I’ve found scientists more and more sexy (which would stun my high school chemistry teacher, whom I still don’t find sexy and never will). You can keep your Tom Cruises and Johnny Depps. Give me the gleaming bald pate of Dr. Guarente -- like a light bulb in a dark room  --  illuminating unexpected possibilities.

That isn’t to say that I want to live to 1000, or even 100, and the film explores the  myriad facets that delaying aging and living longer, much longer, entails. “It’s huge,” writer/director Robert Kane Pappas admits to me during our brief conversation. “I had to do a sort of Cliff’s Notes to touch on everything.”

And he does; it’s a deceptively simple film that encompasses the health care system, big pharma, disease prevention, financial impact, and religion/existential questions -- to wit, one of the scientists who made a breakthrough discovery has become a priest.

A departure point at the beginning of the film suggests we should question everything we know. I liked that, having just picked up the book Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us – And How To Know  When Not To Trust Them by David Freedman. I told Pappas about it, because he interviews scores of experts in the film. “Very fair,” he responded, “that’s why I included  lots of real people too.”

These groups are charmingly identified as 20-somethings, 40-somethings, and so on.  One 50-something woman remarked that this country is obsessed with beauty and aging. One salient comment was by an artist in Southampton, who mused that people only want to live longer if they haven’t accomplished all that they hoped, but it “doesn’t mean they would do it if they were given another 200 years.”

Aging was not considered a valid line of scientific inquiry because it was assumed people were like cars -- you got older, you wore out, you died. But in the 1980s, people started to ponder the process in a different light. I would posit, around the time that Baby Boomers started to get inklings of their mortality.

Turns out it’s easier to change lifespan than previously thought. Cellular biologist Dr. Stephen Austad says we can already make animals live 25-40% longer. Gerontology expert Aubrey De Grey, long seen as a maverick the field, talks about how to “fix aging” (including an excerpt of his TED talk) and is beginning to be considered more mainstream, believes that even longer  is soon going to be possible.

The film explores how our environment, stress levels, even attitude have an impact on how long we live. Research on cancer cells that didn’t die, calorie restriction in monkeys, and the popular discovery of resveratrol -- a compound from grape skin that’s been touted as a sort of Fountain of Youth by the press -- are all spotlighted. The latter was a trigger for the documentary itself.

Are you taking resveratrol now, I asked Pappas. “Yes.”

So I posed the same question to Dr. Guarente. “I’m about to,” he said, “if I can find where to get it.” Good grief. If a scientist at MIT who experiments with the stuff doesn’t know, what chance to do the rest of us have? “Well, it’s a plant extract -- a natural product. If it’s not properly treated, it could be inactivated,” he explained and pointed me to the Healthy Lifespan Institute which he was considering. He believes that drugs to address our repair mechanisms will be available in the next 5 years. 

So I asked him about the debunking of experts. “Well, there are things we know and things we think we know,” he said sagely. “That the Earth revolves around the sun is not going to change.” But lifespan, he suggested,  is an open question…

The 60-somethings who were interviewed were not opposed to longer life -- as long as "I'm like I am now, not decrepit…” The 40-somethings wondered how they’d look; 95-year-old Madelyne said if she was going to die, she wanted to die on the dance floor.

So there you have it: live forever, or die dancing? This film is the first stop on an exciting unfolding question.