Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (Hardcover)

~ Aubrey de Grey (Author), Michael Rae (Author)
Key Phrases: robust mouse rejuvenation, lysosomal failure, allotopic expression, United States, Survival of the Slowest, Methuselah Foundation (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“(Dr.) de Grey is hardly just another fountain-of-youth huckster. His it-might-work ideas are based on existing, published, peer-reviewed research. He thinks more like an engineer than a scientist. If even one of his proposals works, it could mean years of extended healthy living.”
—Paul Boutin, The Wall Street Journal

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description

MUST WE AGE?
      A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity’s greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging.
      Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely—technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future—is now within reach.
 
In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage.  As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars.  We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage.  By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (September 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312367066
• ISBN-13: 978-0312367060
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #47,808 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just Undo the Damage!, October 23, 2007

By	Wakka - See all my reviews

This book might be a steep read for most lay-people who aren't all that interested in cell biology or molecular chemistry, even as a passing fancy. But, the flipside of the author's depth of detail is that it allows you a glimpse into the kinds of complexities and even paradoxes that occur in the human metabolism (and how different those reactions can be even from those taking place in mice and monkeys).

DeGrey's major beef, in a nutshell, with the R&D community is that they are spending waaay too much time and energy trying to "understand" the complexities of why aging, cell damage, dysfunction, and diseases arise over time as bi-products of simply living life. He argues that we need a more targeted engineering approach -- simply FIND the damage after it has occurred, define what that damage is, and then GO FIX IT. These are much simpler problems to solve. As an analogy, look at what we do to preserve any machine or system. You can see a 100-year old house has holes in the roof; go patch them. While you're at it some new caulking around the windows, maybe some more insulation in the attic, some anti-termite spray, and there you go, good for another 100 years.

DeGrey envisions periodic therapies, say once per decade or so (similar to immunization schedules, for example) where individuals would receive viral injections and/or gene therapy to kill cancer cells, untangle proteins that cause alzheimers and the like, and remove calcification and stiffening from arteries and veins, generally restoring the body to a state of youthful vitality.

It is not nearly as "crazy as it sounds", but the fact remains that the large amounts of govt. and even private funding of such activities are not directed at "aging" per se, but rather at specific foundations devoted to one disease or another -- in other words, massive investment into cryptic treatments directed at helping a very very small percentage of the population. A paradigm shift is needed.

To his credit, and despite wild claims if 1,000-year "potential lifespans" and the like, DeGrey and Rae do not balk at frank discussions of the complexity that some of these treatments entail, or the failures that have plagued researchers along the way. The point is that progress IS being made now, and much more will come in the future, but at a pace that will be determined by focus, funding, and technological progress.

This book ties in well with books on nanotechnology and futurism. As others have said, we are about to enter a golden age of engineering *applications* that were undreamed of a century ago. We discovered quantum physics 100 years ago, but people are now building quantum computers. We first described the human DNA double-helix in 1953, have already sequenced many entire human genomes, and are well on the way to engineering with genetics, even building machines made from DNA.

We can now touch each individual molecule and cell in the body, so why can't we repair enough of them to keep the body functional indefinitely as a whole? It really isn't crazy at all.

59 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wake-up call, September 14, 2007

By	Timothy D. Lundeen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The basic strategy is to bootstrap: figure out how to repair the age-related damage that we know about today, and use the extra lifetime this gives us to learn how to repair the damage that will develop as we live longer and longer lives. So if you reach the age of 200, say, the damage that has to be repaired is the damage that occurs to get to 100, plus whatever becomes an additional problem between 100 and 200, and so on.

I think the basic strategy is quite sound, given the exponential progress in technology and especially bio-tech that we are seeing today. It is pretty common to hear researchers say that they can do more in a year today than they could do in 10 years previously, because the tools and our knowledge are both so much better. So once we can get to a point where we can extend current lives by 20+ years, there is a good chance that no one will die of old age ever again (except by choice).

When I talk about this, one of the immediate concerns I hear is for the planet and running out of resources. Personally, I am convinced that when this problem arrives we will solve it, and that there are a variety of ways that this could be done (much lower birth rates, higher density on this planet, moving into space and/or to other planets), so I am much more concerned with curing aging. I don't want to see any more of my friends or family die, and I would like to enjoy life as long as I want. So I am all in favor of this program!

The book is divided into three sections. One that talks about the problem of aging and treating it as an engineering problem to be solved; one that talks about the known issues that have to be solved and possible solutions; and one that talks about what each of us can do to contribute to solving the problem.

The central section of the book is excellent, a superb treatise on why we age and the damage that causes age-related problems. It was also extremely encouraging to see the progress we've made in understanding these processes, and the progress we've made in finding ways to repair them.

I hope this book will help more people realize what is possible, and that we need to push on this to get it to happen sooner rather than later.

Highly recommended.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Only if you're interested, February 27, 2008

By	Mr. Stephen R. Grensky - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After reading several, emotionally-charged, negative reviews, I felt I should write something rational to try to help someone who might be interested in reading this book.
If you're truly interested in the reasoning behind de Grey's optimism about human rejuvenation, you should DEFINITELY read this book.
If you're looking for lightweight entertainment, this book is not for you.
Also, let's be real: unless you're a qualified, competent, current, medical scientist, there's no way for you to decide whether de Grey's reasoning is sound.
It's hard to believe that all the reviews found here on Amazon.com were written by such scientists. I'm not even going to try to tell you if I agree with de Grey's science or not since I am not a scientist and truly have no idea if he's correct.
Nevertheless, if you're interested in the topic and have a strong desire to learn how de Grey thinks, this is the book for you. It is lengthy and detailed and covers a lot of ground. I enjoyed reading it. That's why I gave it 5 stars.
Frankly, I doubt that one person in 1000 (if that!) could truly understand and evaluate what de Grey is talking about so, unless you happen to be that person, don't expect to go to work in gerontology after reading this book and don't write a review that makes blanket statements about the claims in this book.
If you like to read and have an interest in these topics, you'll find it worthwhile. If you enjoy reading Ray Kurzweil's books, you'll probably enjoy this book.
Also, if you just want to encourage people like de Grey and Kurzweil to keep exploring, buy this book.
If you believe de Grey, Kurzweil and other 'futurists' are evil hucksters, then you should provide some evidence of it and don't buy their books. Ad hominem attacks against the authors of books don't help people decide if they want to read the book.
If you're so knowledgeable about science that you can shred the premise of this book, then you should be writing your own book on the topic and working in the field.
If you're not qualified to make that analysis or if you're so biased against futurists that you can't think straight, then there's not much point in writing a nasty review. It only reveals your own failings.