I've been googling him ( too bad I don't speak Russian ) and it seems Prof Vladimir Petrovich is not some total nobody in the Russian science community judging from the number of
at least, I wonder what Dr Leonid Gavrilov would have to say about his creds.
, but he doesn't dive into hard details too much. In the last paragraphs comrade Skulachev turns out to be pretty transhumanistically concsious. Read and critisize, guys :
Old age is curable. Moreover, this is just “vestige of the past”, inherited by humans from the animals. This is how it is considered by the Academician Vladimir Skulachev, the director of research institute of physics-chemical biology at Moscow State University. A few years ago an ambitious project, titled “Skulachev’s ions”, was started there. The goal of the project is struggle with aging, and attempt of extension the lifetime.
Q: Vladimir Petrovich, you have completed the 5-year stage of experiments. Have your expectations come true?
A: Yes, sure, though the results turned out to be rather unexpected in many aspects. When beginning our experiments, we supposed that the synthesized by us matter, that “struggles” with poisonous forms of oxygen in the cell, is capable of promoting extension of life term greatly. However, the effect was quite different. The lifetime did not extend too much, the physical process of aging got slower and sometimes it even stoppped. The animals, given our preparation, lived to old age staying in active and healthy condition, and then they died in a few days and even hours. You know, it looks like fulfillment of the prayer for easy death.
The outcomes are amazing. I wouldn’t speak about that, but it was repeated in other places, in particular, in Sweden, in the laboratory of the vice president of the Sweden academy of sciences, Barbara Cannon. Those experiments were done with an interesting subject – a kind of quickly aging mice. They live three times as less as the common ones, that’s about 9 months, and nevertheless they go all the life cycle through, including old age with all the signs of this period of life.
So, it has been proved that our substance, first, makes mouse’s life longer approximately for 50% and it helps avoiding many signs of the old age – baldness, grey hair, degeneration of retina, cataract, lowered immunity and others. For example, old mice are featured with a kind of stupor – they just sit and shiver, and they are interested in nothing. As for the experimental animals, they were active till the last day.
Q: But as I remember, when you were beginning your work, you had other kind of hopes. Have you given up the idea of dramatic extension of life term?
A: You don’t understand that we got even more than we counted for! It’s journalists to imagine that we struggled for immortality. In the meantime, our main task was prolongation not of life, but of youth. We struggle with humiliating condition of aging where the organism’s functions give up working one by one. One can put it that we would be happy with any result, but what we got is just amazing – that’s canceling many senile diseases.
Q: Has your project gone beyond the academic borders?
A: Not yet. At the moment all that is just scientific research. However, we have introduced it already into the veterinary practice. We have started treating the senile eye problems with animals. After we got final data of experiments with the lab animals, we got in touch with the ophthalmologists from the Veterinary Academy after K.A.Skryabin. The chair of the department Evgeny Pavlovich Kopenkin is a real devotee; he has placed the work on the broad footing and has cured hundreds of dogs, cats and horses.
At the time being we are preparing the documents to the ministry of health care and social development so that to get permission to start experiments with people. First, there was a problem: in some cases we could not find our substance in the organism of our lab animals. We even had suspicions that the preparation was given to the animals. So we had to buy the most sensitive equipment for 400,000 Euro; it is capable of detecting the minute doses of the substance in the solution. The question was settled, however, organization of clinical tests is a complicated procedure, and we are getting ready for that.
Q: And how does the nature “look” on all that? Are there any natural analogs with the action similar to that by your preparation?
A: Such cases are known in the nature. For example, there are big sea birds that live up to 50 years old without getting aged, and then die quickly. With mammals it is noticed that the duration of their life is in inverse ration to forming the poisonous forms of oxygen in mitochondria. The weaker this process is, the longer animals live. That was studied broadly in the world, but the best work was done in England two years ago by Professor Lambert who checked 12 different species – from baboons to mice. For 11 cases out of 12 the above mentioned rule works, and the exception was about so called “naked blesmol”. This mole rat was discovered in equatorial Africa in the middle of 19th century. Those beasts have strict hierarchy headed by a female that has up to three “husbands”, while others are “workers” or “soldiers” protecting her against snakes, the main enemy. Soldiers live no more than three years, getting killed in struggle with snakes, while the “queen” lives ten times as long. For some reasons, the poisonous forms of oxygen do not cause the suicide by cells, like it happens with other animals, and do not reduce the lifetime.
That’s a remarkable confirmation of my hypothesis that aging is a mechanism accelerating the evolution; when a creature has no enemies, aging becomes senseless. I always adduce an example of fox and hares. While hares are young they can just escape from the fox. With time, that becomes more difficult as the number of cells in the muscles gets reduced. Then the “smart” hare would manage to escape, while the “silly” one would be eaten. That way the hare’s species gets a chance to get “smarter” within one generation. But if not for the fox, the hares would not need to acquire new properties and they would not need aging, as its only function is making the organism look for new ways of survival.
Q: How would that “evolution hypothesis” look about the man?
A: Humans are not interested in their own evolution. If we need to fly, we build a plane. We adjust the environment to ourselves; we do not conform to it. This is why the biological evolution of the mankind has stopped. The necessity of specialized mechanisms disappears gradually with the man. The aging as a mechanism accelerating the evolution is not only unneeded, it is just harmful for us. All that worked while people lived in the woods and could not adjust environment to themselves. Now the aging is an atavism, an unproductive program, profitable for the human race, and disadvantageous for individuals. Our task is to place the man in the category of non-aging animals. Besides the blesmol, this is about giant crabs that have no enemies. This is about the pearl oyster that sits on the river bottom and no one troubles it. This is about giant turtles. Recently a turtle was found marked by Darwin during his famous trip to Galapagos Islands on the Beagle. That animal is still alive! The nature has a strict rule: when there are no enemies, then aging just disappears.
The synthesized by us substance kills exactly the human “enemies”; that’s the poisonous forms of oxygen causing the aging process. As a first approximation, this is one of the key moments and possibly there are several links in the chain through which the signal for aging is passed. However, the poisonous forms of oxygen appearing in mitochondria appear to be the “samurai sword” that executes the command to die.
There is a simple hypothesis that the poisonous forms of oxygen oxidize the albumen, the DNA. It resembles the process of staining of the car’s bottom. However, in our case, the process is selective and more complicated: heart, liver and kidneys get affected gradually. And the process looks quite different with the animals that were given our preparation. With them it’s usually one of vital functions to fail abruptly.
Q: Are you going to continue experiments and to find out what happens in that case?
A: Sure, now we are analyzing the reasons of death in each particular case. In relation to that, we are approaching another problem, the problem of sudden death. I have a hypothesis of why it happens; I call it the “Bais principle”. That’s one of the Moliere’s characters, with a nickname Barking. That doctor said “it’s better dying in accordance with the rules, then surviving against any rules”. That’s a striking sentence! If we talk of genome of this or that species, then it would be much safer and advantageous if individuals die in accordance with the rules, because in case an individual has had a grave disease, that may affect the genome, and when then a survived individual breeds, that may harm the whole race.
Q: But how is all that related to sudden death, when people die from cardiac arrest at the background of good state of health?
A: The matter is that sudden death very seldom comes to healthy people. Either those people are ill and are unaware of that, and then the sudden death “saves” their genome from the consequences dangerous for the whole species. Or that might be a consequence of some grave disease or shock, got over by a person, but that still might pose a danger for genome. “Bais principle” works mercilessly and it appears to be triggered with same mechanism that causes aging. All that is a mechanism invented by the nature so that the genome does not get spoiled.
Q: So, you try to cancel the useless for us mechanism, called aging. And what is going to happen next?
A: I would proclaim a slogan “From Homo Sapiens to Homo Sapiens-Descatenatus”. “Catena” is translated from Latin as “chains”. The man must not only be wise but also free from the “chains”, put on him by evolution. Incidentally, Ilia Mechnikov was the first to proclaim the idea. He considered that the man has many features inherited from animals, and they are not only useless, they are harmful for the man.
Q: What humans would be like?
A: They would be like those sea birds, which live long and die suddenly.
Q: And from psychological point of view?
A: That’s to be explained by other specialists. My task is to give a choice opportunity to the man. At the time being, humans do not have a choice. The paradox is that they have opportunities potentially. The mankind excels all the animals, but still keeps “faithful” to some principles of animal existence. To my mind, that’s quite absurd.