Ageless Quest for Fountain of Youth Is Alive and Well
It’s a world where Peggy Fleming could skate against Tara Lipinski, where the Wright brothers could blast off in the space shuttle, and where George Washington could teach Bill Clinton the dangers of foreign entanglements.
And more to the point, it’s a world where you could live to be 250 years old. Maybe even 300.
This isn’t the world of make-believe. It’s the brave new world of human longevity that evolutionary biologist Michael Rose says is entirely possible.
“It’s a matter of time and money,” said Rose, a professor at UC Irvine. “When it happens, it will change the way you, your children and your grandchildren live. And it’s all sitting here, literally on my [lab] bench.”
Traditionally, such fountain-of-youth claims have been the province of carnival hucksters, medical charlatans and incense-burning mystics. And perhaps because of this longtime association with the snake-oil peddlers of yesteryear, one expects more of a grand production upon hearing the news--something like an announcement from the Wizard of Oz.
But Rose, who certainly possesses his own flair for the dramatic, delivers his observation matter-of-factly as he goes about feeding his laboratory fruit flies a revolting cocktail of yeast, molasses, sugar and bananas.
Certainly to the public, and to many gerontologists, the 42-year-old professor’s predictions about aging sound as likely as walking on water. While more people are living longer these days, the extreme range of human life has had an iron ceiling of about 120 years for hundreds, and probably thousands, of years.
“Michael is certainly reasonably well thought of. He’s done a lot of very interesting work,” said David Finkelstein, head of the pathobiology program at the National Institute of Aging. “But to many of us, some of his ideas sound a little crazy.”
Among other well-respected scientists, however, Rose is no mad scientist. Rather, he’s a bold and pioneering researcher who’s arguably done more than anyone in the past two decades to push the idea of age postponement from science-fiction toward scientific fact.
“He’s clearly shown you can modify the aging process,” said Caleb Finch, a neurobiologist at USC who specializes in aging. “He’s a brilliant theoretician and thinker with extraordinary gifts.”
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Twenty years ago, as a graduate student in genetics at the University of Sussex in England, Rose’s considerable intellectual gifts told him that defying mortality was insane. His gifts, speaking in their usual candor, also informed him that his advisor, who wanted to test a new theory of aging that could unlock the mysteries of aging, must be on opium.
But his advisor’s claims inspired Rose to develop his own experiments, which are now famous within evolutionary biology circles. Rose began with 200 fertilized female fruit flies and a drive to challenge the notion of a fixed maximum age. The idea was to breed fruit flies that outlived their cousins in hopes of increasing longevity.
Generation after generation was bred in this manner. Gradually, the specially bred flies began to surpass their normal life span of about 60 days.
The implications were as exciting as they were provocative: Age may not have a ceiling after all. That is, if one life form can push past its maximum genetic age barrier, why not another--namely, humans?
For Rose, who was known to spend 21 hours straight in a lab, the breakthrough was intoxicating. He was permanently hooked.
“Science is my lifelong obsession,” said Rose, the son of a Canadian army officer. “As scientists, we worry and we replicate. We worry some more, and we replicate some more. It can be a merciless existence.”
Today, Rose’s Steinhaus Hall lab is home to more than 50 students and anywhere from half a million to a million fruit flies, some 500 generations removed from their University of Sussex forebears. Today’s fruit flies are different from their ancestors in many ways, but the most important is they live at least twice as long.
Of course, selective breeding for “dinky organisms”--as Rose calls his fruit flies--is relatively simple, but it’s obviously not an option for humans. So, what’s the value of this research for humans?
By calling into question the notion of an unalterable life span, the fruit fly research opened the door to the real possibility of extending human life. When combined with scientific advances in genetic and molecular research, scientists can now better examine the genetic and cell makeup of normal fruit flies and their longer-lived cousins.
More answers may come from similar experiments already underway on mice, which are much closer to humans in terms of genes, cell types, organs and diseases. Modeled after Rose’s fruit fly research, initial results show that mice are living longer, too, but it’s still too early for researchers to draw any firm conclusions.
The knowledge gained from understanding the genetic differences between longer-lived and normal mice and flies will provide vital clues in human age research, scientists said. For instance, longer-lived species may produce more or less of a certain hormone or protein than normal-aged ones.
But the daunting mystery still before science will be discovering the technological means to rearrange those delicate genetic balances to enable humans to live longer.
Should the biological clock of mice be successfully reset, as it appears it may eventually, the results stand an excellent chance of being duplicated in humans, Rose believes.
“It can be applied to humans. All that has to be done is to scale it up,” said Rose, a regular contributor to some of the nation’s most prestigious science journals. “It’s like [Robert Hutchings] Goddard’s small rockets leading to the Apollo space program.”
When scaled up, longevity will probably come in the form of many daily pills or perhaps periodic IV infusions, said Rose. The medications might keep people physiologically in their mid-30s for 100 years or more by manipulating the genes that control aging, Rose added.
“When the end comes, [the quality of life] would certainly be no worse than it is now,” said Rose, whose book “Darwin’s Spectre” is being published by Princeton University Press later this year. “And probably it will be better.”
While even critics applaud Rose’s research, they differ sharply with him over his forecasts for prolonged human life. It’s too far a leap to suggest human life can be doubled or tripled based upon experiments on flies, they contend.
Thus far, restricting caloric intake has shown the most promise in slowing down the aging process, Finkelstein said. The strategy has worked with laboratory mice and is being tested on monkeys at the National Institute of Aging.
Even if these experiments are wildly successful, humans still wouldn’t reap the benefits of this research for decades, Finkelstein said. And even then, the most optimistic predictions are that dietary improvements could extend human life by only 30 to 35 years, Finkelstein added.
“[Rose] needs to be more cautious about his extrapolations to humans,” he said. “Two points can describe a straight line, but they also can describe a circle.”
If anything reveals a glimpse into Rose’s character, it’s his reaction to criticism. He doesn’t like it.
He doesn’t fly off the handle, and he certainly doesn’t sit and stew about it. Instead, the quick-minded professor launches an immediate counterattack, armed with a mix of science, logic and brutal sarcasm.
In the case of Finkelstein, Rose summarizes the scientific implications of his fly research. Then, he points out that as an evolutionary biologist, he must talk about the big picture.
Conversely, he continues, critics like Finkelstein are often overwhelmed by the details of their scientific discipline, which understandably limit their vision. In a final sarcastic volley, he adds that a “main concern” of the National Institute of Aging is “to make sure people don’t live too long.”
“I don’t have a weird diet. I don’t exercise like a madman. Whatever the particulars, any of those things won’t make a big difference,” Rose added. “It’s a buggy whip debate. I’m going to build an internal combustion engine.”
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Apparently, Rose has been winning friends and influencing people in this manner for decades. His wit and sarcasm seem a logical defensive adaptation to a lifelong predilection for quixotic causes and ideas.
“My whole career has been defined by doing experiments that no one else has been crazy enough to try,” he said.
But crazy and unusual things have been popping up in Rose’s life for a long time. At age 5, he was correcting teachers for their poor pronunciations. At 15, he had graduated from high school and had moved more than 20 times because of his father’s military career.
“He was the kind of student his teachers wanted to murder,” recalled his mother, Julia Rose. “He was incredibly precocious as a child.”
If anything, Rose’s youth seemed to prepare him more for leading a political or social revolution than a scientific one. He devoured the works of Marx and Lenin, hung out with the student radicals and participated in his share of protests.
“I was definitely left-wing,” said Rose. “But I was [also] a complete nerd with thick glasses and baggy corduroys.”
Oddly, there appears to be little in his background that would cause him to devote his professional career to beating back death. There’s no Dr. Frankenstein-like story of a premature natural death befalling anyone in his family. (Though open about his parents, Rose is intensely private about his marriage and his children and would not talk about them.)
In fact, longevity seems to run in the family genes. Three of his four grandparents lived past 90, and two great-grandmothers nearly reached 100.
“They all smoked and drank too, as far as I know,” added Julia Rose, who, with husband Barry, divides her time between La Jolla and a home in upstate New York.
Most surprising, given his manner of making a living, are Rose’s views on dying.
“A large fraction of people in my field never want to die,” he said. “I’m not desperate to fight off my mortality. I’m quite happy to die under the right circumstances.”
He credits his father’s military career for shaping his unusually tranquil outlook on his own eventual demise.
“The most important thing in the military is to die when you’re told to,” Rose said. “The ethos was death was something appropriate, not something weird. Am I afraid to die? No.”
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But if the shadow of death isn’t driving him, what is?
“Almost no one would ever give you an honest answer to that question, but I will,” Rose said. “It’s vanity.”
“You stake your reputation on a certain kind of thing, and you want to bolster your case. It’s like Steve Young or Brett Favre. Why do they do it? Sometime ago, it was clear they didn’t need the money, and they both won Super Bowls. They have nothing to do with it.”
Such candor typifies Rose. He rarely hesitates in firing off about a wide range of topics, scientific and otherwise.
On Generation X: “I knew people with low IQs growing up, but they were never able to act this dumb.”
On universities: “Academics like me are driven by vanity, pomposity and an affection for political correctness.”
On altruism: “I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about how I can help mankind.”
On the meaning of life: “It’s not truth, not beauty, not Jehovah. It’s all to reproduce. Of course, to reproduce we may have to talk about truth, beauty or Jehovah. But that’s all a means to an end.”
His comments, which reveal a hint of “revenge of the nerd,” have understandably earned him his share of critics--even among other ex-nerds.
“He’s got a real reputation for being quite cocky and arrogant,” said a colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I think it’s more of a self-confidence thing really, but he has to tell you every single little thing he’s done.”
But others find Rose’s blunt manner refreshing in a world often filled with stuffiness and pretense.
“Michael always expresses himself frankly, and he’s pushed a lot of buttons by exposing gaps in [other scientists’] thinking,” said Finch, who coauthored a paper on the genetics of aging with Rose. “But I’ve found him a delightful intellectual partner.”
Whatever his ego’s true dimensions, Rose nevertheless exhibits a great humility about early researchers. In particular, he credits his former advisor at the University of Sussex, Brian Charlesworth, for a good amount of his successes.
“We all discover things thanks to the sweat and luck of our predecessors,” Rose said. “I’m armed with a fantastic theory that I had nothing to do with developing.”
“It’s like being an apostle,” Rose added. “You feel armed with the truth, and that’s a powerful feeling.”
