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Interview: S. Jay Olshansky. Sage advice for a long journey.
Stuart Jay Olshansky has at times been a pariah among the community of extreme life-extensionists. Which is a shame, considering he has been in the field of aging research for nearly 30 years. During that time, he has seen more “miracle” anti-aging therapies, supplements, and devices come-and-go than most of us, and is justifiably skeptical.
As evidence of his continued interest in slowing aging, Dr. Olshansky recently helped initiate one of the world’s most ambitious funding efforts for dedicated aging research, asking the U.S. congress for 3 billion dollars to achieve the Longevity Dividend. The following is the transcript of an interview I conducted with Dr. Olshansky in the Fall of 2007 discussing the finer points of the history of aging research and the Longevity Dividend.
You can also find some interesting thoughts on life extension in the following chats:
Dr. Olshansky’s 2005 interactive text chat and forum discussion with Imminst.org
Dr. Olshansky’s 2007 interactive text chat with Imminst.org
2007 Interview
Justin (Mind): How did you become interested in the field of anti-aging?
Olshansky: My interest in the field of aging began in 1979 when I took a course from Bernice Neugarten (sp) at the University of Chicago when I was a graduate student there, and at the time the term anti-aging wasn’t used and would have been totally inappropriate.
Justin: What was the preferred terminology?
Olshansky: The terminology was slowing aging. “Anti-aging” to Bernice Neugarten would have been an ageist terminology. It would have been viewed in a very very negative light. It is that very question (the question of slowing aging) that led me into this field to begin with. Bernice had asked me to write a manuscript on the demographics of what would happen if we could slow aging in people. My masters thesis was the end result of that which was published in 1982.
Justin: When I first encountered you in the Institute forums a couple years back you seemed to be very cautious or even skeptical of aging interventions and the more recent hype surrounding the field. Since last year, and the push for the Longevity Dividend it seems your optimism has increased. Is that correct?
Olshansky: I have not changed my general view which goes way back to 1979. All you are seeing now is the other side of the same coin. A few years ago I published an article entitled No truth to the fountain of youth. It is important to distinguish between the genuine scientific effort to slow aging in people, and the effort by some to make money selling alleged anti-aging products to the public with false claims that they have some intervention that works. So what you have interpreted as pessimism is nothing more than a realistic view of false claims made by some trying to sell products. If you look at our 1990 article in science In Search of Methuselah. Our language is crystal clear. We said the only way we can get these much higher life expectancies is if we find a way to slow aging in people. That manuscript was not about how to slow aging, or whether we should do so, but that it is required in order to get these much higher life expectancies. So now what you are seeing is the other side of that coin. Now that we know that the only way to get these much higher life expectancies is to slow aging, the question is, is it worth pursuing. Whether it is worth pursuing is the question that brought me into the field in 1979. My response in 1979 was that we need to be cautious because if we succeed, it would radically alter patterns of population growth. Remember, back in 1979 it was the time of “The Population Bomb”. Fertility rates were still high and so if we had achieved the equivalent of much longer lifespans in the late 70s it would have been a disaster demographically. Since then, birth rates have declined radically and death rates have continued to decline, and we now know that the elimination of all mortality entirely would have a fairly nominal effect on growth rates of the population. So the central question then is “why are we pursuing this”. The answer is…at least my answer is… to make us healthier longer. That’s always been the goal in my field – those of us who study health during aging – it is to alleviate suffering and make us healthier longer. So what you are seeing now in the Longevity Dividend, is more or less a new paradigm for achieving what we have always said we need to achieve which is the extension of healthy life. It is just that science has now presented itself with enough avenues to pursue this in the most recent decade or so that now my colleagues an I are suggesting it is not just an interesting area, it is a necessary area for us to pursue.
Justin: Which brings us to the current state of the Longevity Dividend. Late last year you presented the idea to a group of lawmakers on capitol hill. Could you give me an idea of how it was received and if there is anything new going on with the Longevity Dividend?
Olshansky:
It was extremely well received. We had a personal meeting with Senator Harkin afterwards. There were about a half a dozen of us who met with him and he was very intrigued by the idea. So much so that he said he would very much like to support this. He said “I can’t of course commit three billion dollars because that is not what we do here, but what we can do is put language into the newest appropriations bill saying that we need to invest a considerably larger sum of money into this kind-of work”. He asked us for language to put into the appropriations bill which we gave to him. This was Dan Perry, Rich Miller, Bob Butler, a couple of others, and myself. We gave them the language and it indeed made it into the 2008 appropriations bill. I presented that language at the meeting in Chicago where we discussed the Longevity Dividend and this is now going to be debated in congress and hopefully make its way up to the president and if the president signs it into law you are going to see a significant increase in investment in the Longevity Dividend and government efforts to slow aging in people. It will make any current monetary effort pale by comparison if we succeed in getting anything close to the 3 billion we asked for.
Justin.In your view, what is the most promising ongoing area of research into slowing aging in people?
Olshansky:
The work that I have found the most interesting and I always believed had the greatest potential is the study of supercentenarians and centenarians, particularly the genetics of long-lived people. Here you have concrete examples of individuals, sub-groups of the population, who clearly posses genes that confer protection on them that the rest of us don’t have. It is already here. We can see it. We know what the consequences are. I think there is great potential already existing within the human genome. Of course, there are lots of other avenues; caloric restriction, the search for compounds that have the potential to extend human life, and so on, however it doesn’t really matter to me. Any type of research that is out there that has the potential to achieve a deceleration in the rate of aging is worth pursuing. I don’t think anyone knows what the right or best approach to take is and actually, we don’t need to know the answer to that question to know in advance that this is worth pursuing (slowing aging). When the time came to make the decision to attack cancer, we didn’t know how to attack cancer, but we knew it was a desirable goal. Same thing with infectious diseases. We are in the same boat today. In this scenario we don’t know the exact avenues to pursue nor do we have to know in order to invest in this type of research.
Justin:What do you do, if anything, to extend your own life?
Olshansky: I have been running since I was about 20 years old. Exercise has been critical but lately I have cut down on my running and replaced about three quarters of it with walking, which doesn’t really work as well, but I am particularly concerned with protecting my joints. I am 53 and I have no problem with my joints and I want to keep it that way. I know that when we get older, particularly past the age where I am at now, then you start to have problems with your joints if you overuse them. So, I have moved it to a mode of protecting them. I do not take any supplements. With regard to caloric restriction, I have actually within the last 5 years or so, I have increased the frequency of my meals and decreased the size.
Any word of advice for the Immortality Institute and all of the life extension advocates? Based on all of your years of experience, how can we be most effective?
Olshansky: If your goal is radical life extension, if the 100, 500, and 1,000 years lifespans that Aubrey is talking about is your goal, then I think you would probably be better off resetting your goals. I just think it is the wrong goal to have. Also, I think it would be wise to spend some time with some older people and also it might be worthwhile to look inside and older human body during an autopsy, if you haven’t done so. Many of these viewpoints about extreme longevity are often held by very very young people who have no concept of either their own mortality or what changes with the passage of time. I remember that youthful enthusiasm and I understand it completely. My youthful enthusiasm for science has not changed since I was a kid, however it is important to be realistic as well and realize the types of constraints that we have with our bodies. If the goal is something that is just so far out there as to be, in my opinion, unrealistic, then you are better off setting your sights for something that is, which is precisely why I think the Longevity Dividend is exactly that, and besides, even if you have greater goals, whatever those might be, like much greater life extension, it is unlikely you are going to get it all at once. You are probably going to get it piecemeal, in which case the Longevity Dividend is the very first thing you should be pursuing. You have to get 1 year before you get 2 before you get 7, and you have to get 7 before you get immortality. You have to choose something other than infinity, in order to get anyone to take you seriously. The achievable goals can be achieved really in the end only with sufficient funding for science. If you want to look for a way to stop the flow of money into the pursuit of achievable goals…then set an unachievable goal. You will stop the flow immediately. I know Aubrey has been able to get somebody to invest a few million dollars, which we know isn’t really going to do the trick. If we are to have an investment to help achieve anything close to what we want to achieve, it will have to be a rather sizeable investment and a continuous one. There has to be a commitment. One or two or three million dollars here and there just isn’t going to do it. There has to be a commitment relatively quick. We can’t wait 10 or 20 years for this because the baby boom generation is going to hit in 3 or 4 years. It is an investment that needs to be made relatively soon at a relatively large level.
Justin: So you tend to think that with the baby boomers hitting retirement age, it will focus more attention on slowing aging and funding for the Longevity Dividend.
Olshansky: Yes. I think so. I think that Congress is aware of it. If they pass this bill then your going to see tangible evidence of a moving of a mountain. The mountain has always been firmly planted on diseases. The focus has always been on specific diseases. There is this other mountain out there which are efforts to slow aging, I would not use the term “anti-aging”. The mountain has moved! Or at least there is evidence that it is movable and if this bill gets passed the mountain will have been moved and you will now see members of congress saying we need to slow aging which is in my view a remarkable transformation in a relatively short time period. We do have a follow up to the Longevity Dividend manuscript that is now under review that is intended to carry this line of reasoning further than we did before. It is a stellar cast of authors. It is under review now and we’ll know more in the next month or two.