A Manhattan Project For Aging?

To so many who struggle with disease, and their families, it seems like business as usual. Many new scientific discoveries have not yet trickled down into clinical application, for one reason or another. But behind the scenes, there’s a big push to tackle disease cures, and extend lives.

For instance, there’s the involvement of platforms like OpenAI in promoting longevity and disease research. There’s Sam Altman’s personal involvement in Retro Biosciences, and the promise of massive funding from Stargate, a project with international private sector backing, in which Altman has suggested that many lives will be saved through related research applications. Or take Google DeepMind’s legacy of Alphafold, where Demis Hassabis, one of those credited with this kind of research, insists that many diseases that stumped the medical community pre-AI will soon be cured.

There’s also a lot of thought leadership making the rounds, in conferences, in Ted talks, and wherever people gather to contemplate the fruits of AI in our societies. We see professionals talking about their experiences in different domains, showing how a new framework for longevity could succeed.

Stanford psychiatrist Laura Carstensen works on the science of emotional and mental health – and sees the impact of longevity, of century-long lives, as one with positive potential.

“As life expectancies approach the century mark, my hope is that we come to appreciate each stage of life while we’re in – from what’s good to what’s challenging – and that we can look forward to being older and more emotionally balanced,” she says as quoted in the Stanford Report. “Just like no day in life is perfect, no stage in life is perfect either. If we can come to appreciate the good things about the stage we’re in, we’ll be happier about all the stages.”

Investment and Attention

Many of those who are on the vanguard of pursuing and funding this kind of research are driven by lofty goals.

“Imagine a world (in which) when you turn 30 years old, you don’t need to message your friend’s group chat about how much your back hurts, and your knees hurt,” says Alex Colville, who started a longevity investment firm called age1 with cofounder Laura Deming. “Imagine a world (in which) when you turn 30 years old, you don’t need to start wondering with every passing year how much your cognition is dropping year to year. Imagine a world in which when you turn 80 years old, you don’t have to suddenly expect a dramatic decline in quality of life – that you could potentially go on for a decade or more, being able to lift your grandchildren, one day, lift your great grandchildren. This is really the exciting promise of studying the biology of aging.”

Colville, in his lectures on his topic of expertise, makes a surprising prediction: that we will have some kind of “longevity pill” in just a few years. This, he suggests, will be a big boon for patient care.

“Over a billion people worldwide suffer from age-related diseases right now,” he says, “and yet our medical system ignores this fact. Our medical system is set up in a way where we don’t enable preventive medicine, and we focus on treating individual diseases in a silo. And I think that really has to change.”

Calling for a “Manhattan project for aging,” Colville points to existing successes and ongoing projects. For instance, the firm Loyal, affiliated with age1, has done a study of 1300 dogs to evaluate longevity treatments. He mentions projects like one where Opal Sandy, a toddler with hearing difficulties, received related gene therapy, and where a man got a pig’s kidney transplanted.

“I (at a younger age) just would not have believed the results that we are seeing today,” he says, asking for renewed interest in studying the process of aging, on behalf of all humans. “We can do something about this. We have the opportunity. The science is advancing very fast. It needs societal support. It needs societal investment… we’ve done amazing things as a civilization, and as a country. We’ve brought men to the moon. We’ve mapped the human genome. It’s time for a huge, concerted, focused effort to target the biology of aging. We need a Manhattan Project for aging. And the answer isn’t someday, the answer is now.”

That’s a clear call for more digging into what AI could do for us as a society, when it comes to extending our lives. How is AI related? Most of this research benefits from insights delivered through automation. AI in medicine is uncovering those patterns that were so difficult for human medical researchers to discover just a few years ago. So maybe that Manhattan project on longevity actually is on the way.

Forbes