Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Immortality
An Interview with Ray Kurzweil by David Jay Brown
by Ray Kurzweil
Kurzweil’s philosophy is built upon the premise that we now have the
knowledge to identify and correct the problems caused by most unhealthy
genetic predispositions. By taking advantage of the opportunities afforded
us by the genomic testing, nutritional supplements, and lifestyle
adjustments, we can live long enough to reap the benefits of advanced
biotechnology and nanotechnology, which will ultimately allow us to
conquer aging and live forever. At the heart of Kurzweil’s optimistic
philosophy is the notion that human knowledge is growing exponentially,
not linearly, and this fact is rarely taken into account when people try to
predict the rate of technological advance in the future. Kurzweil predicts
that at the current rate of knowledge expansion we’ll have the technology
to completely conquer aging within the next couple of decades.
I spoke with Ray on February 8, 2006. Ray speaks very precisely, and he
chooses his words carefully. He presents his ideas with a lot of confidence,
and I found his optimism to be contagious. We spoke about the
importance of genomic testing, some of the common misleading ideas
that people have about health, and how biotechnology and
nanotechnology will radically affect our longevity in the future.
I wrote a bestselling health book, which came out in 1993 about that
experience, and the program that I’d come up with. That’s what really got
me on this path of realizing that—if you’re aggressive enough about
reprogramming your biochemistry—you can find the ideas that can help
you to overcome your genetic dispositions, because they’re out there.
They exist.
About seven years ago, after my book The Age of Spiritual Machines
came out in 1999, I was at a Foresight Institute conference. I met Terry
Grossman there, and we struck up a conversation about this subject—
nutrition and health. I went to see him at his longevity clinic in Denver for
an evaluation, and we built a friendship. We started exchanging emails
about health issues—and that was 10,000 emails ago. We wrote this book
Fantastic Voyage together, which really continues my quest. And he also
has his own story about how he developed similar ideas, and how we
collaborated.
There are many other examples of that. We’ve gone from ten dollars to
sequence one base pair in 1990 to a penny today. So in ten or fifteen
years from now it’s going to be a very different landscape. We really will
have very powerful interventions, in the form of rationally-designed drugs
that can precisely reprogram our biochemistry. We can do it to a large
extent today with supplements and nutrition, but it takes a more
extensive effort. We’ll have much more powerful tools fifteen years from,
so I want it to be in good shape at that time.
David: What do you think are some of the common misleading ideas that
people have about health and longevity?
However, this doesn’t seem to be the attitude our health authorities. The
nutritional recommendations are consistently compromised. There’s
almost no understanding of the role of nutritional supplements, which can
be very powerful. I take two hundred and fifty supplements a day, and I
monitor my body regularly. I’m not just flying without instrumentation.
Being an engineer, I like data and I monitor fifty or sixty different blood
levels every few months, and I’m constantly fine-tuning my program. All
of my blood levels are ideal. My Homocysteine level many years ago was
eleven, but now it’s five. My C-reactive protein is 0.1. My cholesterol is
130. My LDL is about 60, and my HDL—which was 28—is now close to
sixty. And so on and so forth.
I’ve also taken biological aging tests, which measure things like tactile
sensitivity, reaction time, memory, and decision-making speed. There are
forty different tests, and you compare your score to medians for different
populations at different ages. When I was forty I came out at about
thirty-eight. Now I’m fifty-seven—at least for a few more days—and I
come out at forty. So, according to these tests, I’ve only aged two years
in the last seventeen years. Now you can dispute the absolute validity of
these biological aging tests. It’s just a number, but it’s just evidence that
this program is working.
Ray: Our program is very much not a one size fits all. It’s not a one-trick
pony. We’re not saying that if you lower your carbs, lower your fat, or eat
a grapefruit a day then everything will be fine. In fact, our publisher
initially had a problem with this, but they actually got behind it
enthusiastically, because it fundamentally differs, as you know, from
most health books that really do have just one idea. We earnestly try to
provide a comprehensive understanding of your biology and your body,
which does have some complexity to it. Then we let people apply these
principles to their own lives.
It’s much easier to catch these conditions beforehand. You don’t just
catch heart disease or cancer walking down the street one day. These are
many years or decades in the making, and you can see where you are in
the progression of these diseases. So it’s very important to know thyself,
to access your own situation. Genetic testing is important because you
can see what dispositions you have. If you have certain genes that
dispose you to heart disease, or conversely cancer, or diabetes, then you
would give a higher priority to managing those issues, and do more tests
to see where you are in the progression of those conditions. Let’s say you
do a test and it says you have a genetic disposition to Type 2 diabetes.
So you should do a glucose-tolerance test. In fact, we describe a more
sophisticated form of that in the book, where you measure insulin as well,
and can see if you have early stages of insulin resistance.
Ray: We spell all that out in the book. Coenzyme Q10 is important. It
never ceases to amaze me that physicians do not tell their patients to
take coenzyme Q10 when they prescribe Statin drugs. This is because it’s
well known that Statin drugs deplete the body of coenzyme Q10, and a lot
of the side-effects such as muscle weakness that people suffer from
Statin drugs are because of this depletion of coenzyme Q10. In any event,
that’s an important supplement. It is involved in energy generation within
the mitochondria of each cell. Disruption to the mitochondria is an
important aging process and this supplement will help slow that down.
Coenzyme Q10 has a number of protective effect including lowering blood
pressure, helping to control free-radical damage, and protecting the
heart.
A lot of research recently shows the Curcumin, which is derived from the
spice turmeric, has important anti-inflammatory properties and can
protect against cancer, heart disease, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
There are a number of others that are important to take in general. If you
have high cholesterol, Policosanol is one supplement that is quite
effective, and has an independent action from the Statin drugs. Statin
drugs actually are quite good. They appear to be anti-inflammatory, so
they not only lower cholesterol but attack the inflammatory processes,
which underlie many diseases, including atherosclerosis. But as I
mentioned it’s important to take coenzyme Q10 if you’re taking Statin
drugs.
There are others. Grape seed proanthocyanidin extract has been found to
be another effective antioxident. Resveratrol is another. We have an
extensive discussion of the most important supplements in the book.
Ray: Vinpocetine, derived from the periwinkle plant, seems to have the
best research. It improves cerebral blood flow, increases brain cell TP
(energy) production, and enables better utilization of glucose and oxygen
in the brain.
Atherosclerosis is an aging process, and it’s not just taking place in the
coronary arteries, of course. It can take place in the cerebral arteries,
which ultimately causes cerebral strokes, but it also takes place in the
arteries all throughout the body. It can lead to impotence, claudication of
the legs and limbs, and like most of these processes, it’s not linear but
exponential, in that it grows by a certain percentage each year.
David: What are some of the new anti-aging treatments that you foresee
coming along in the near future, like from stem cell research and
therapeutic cloning?
David: Let’s just say prior to nanotechnology, and then that will be the
next question.
For example, we can now turn genes off with RNA interference. This is a
new technique that just emerged a few years ago—a medication with
little pieces of RNA that latch on to the messenger RNA that is expressing
a targeted gene and destroys it, therefore preventing the gene from
expressing itself. This effectively turns the gene off. So right away that
methodology has lots of applications.
Take the fat insulin receptor gene. That gene basically says ‘hold on to
every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.’
That was a good strategy, not only for humans, but for most species,
thousands of years ago. It’s still probably a good strategy for animals
living in the wild. But we’re not animals living in the wild. It was good for
humans a thousand years ago when calories were few and far between.
Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity. How about turning that gene
off in the fat cells? What would happen?
That was actually tried in mice, and these mice ate ravenously, and they
remained slim. They got the health benefits of being slim. They didn’t get
diabetes. They didn’t get heart disease. They lived twenty percent longer.
They got the benefits of caloric restriction while doing the opposite. So
turning off the fat insulin receptor gene in fat cells is the idea. You don’t
want to turn it off in muscle cells, for example. This is one methodology
that could enable us to prevent obesity, and actually maintain an optimal
weight no matter what we ate. So that’s one application of RNA
interference.
For example, you can take a cell out of the body, insert the genetic
information in vitro—which is much easier to do in a Petri dish—and
examine whether or not the insertion went as intended. If it ended up in
the wrong place you discard it. You keep doing this until you get it right.
You can examine the cell and make sure that it doesn’t have any DNA
errors. So then you take this now modified cell—that has also been
certified as being free of DNA errors—and it’s replicated in the Petri dish,
so that hundreds of millions of copies of it are created. Then you inject
these cells back into the patient, and they will work their way into the
right tissues. A lung cell is not going to end up in the liver.
In fact, this was tried by a company I’m involved with, United
Therapeutics. I advise them and I’m on their board. They tried this with a
fatal disease called pulmonary hypertension, which is a lung disease, and
these modified cells ended up in the right place—in the lungs—and
actually cured pulmonary hypertension in animal tests. It has now been
approved for human trials. That’s just one example of many of being able
to actually add new genes. So we’ll be able to subtract genes, over-
express certain genes, under-express genes, and add new genes.
Well, there are certain proteins, short RNA fragments, and peptides that
control gene expression. They tell the heart cells that only the certain
genes which should be expressed in a heart cell are expressed. And we’re
learning how to manipulate which genes are expressed. By adding certain
proteins to the cell we can reprogram a skin cell to be a heart cell or a
pancreatic Islet cell. This has been demonstrated in just the last couple
years. So then we can create in a Petri dish as many heart cells or
pancreatic Islet cells as I need, with my own DNA, because they’re
derived from my cells. Then inject them, and they’ll work their way into
the right tissues. In the process we can discard cells that have DNA
errors, so we can basically replenish our cells with DNA-corrected cells.
While we are at it, we can also extend the telomeres. That’s another
aging process. As the cells replicate, these little repeating codes of DNA
called telomeres grow shorter. They’re like little beads at the end of the
DNA strands. One falls off every time the cell replicates, and there’s only
about fifty of them. So after a certain number of replications the cell can’t
replicate anymore. There is actually one enzyme that controls this—
telomerase, which is capable of extending the telomeres. Cancer actually
works by creating telomerase to enable them to replicate without end.
Cancer cells become immortal because they can create telomerase.
As we’re rejuvenating our cells, turning a skin cell into a kind of cell that I
need, making sure that it has it’s DNA corrected, we can also extend it’s
telomeres by using telomerase in the Petri dish. Then you got this new
cell that’s just like my heart cells were when I was twenty. Now you can
replicate that, and then inject it, and really rejuvenate all of the body’s
tissues with young versions of my cells. So that’s cell rejuvenation. That’s
one idea, or one technique, and there’s many different variations of that.
Then there’s turning on and off enzymes. Enzymes are the work horses of
biology. Genes express themselves as enzymes, and the enzymes
actually go and do the work. And we can add enzymes. We can turn
enzymes off. One example of that is Torcetrapib, which destroys one
enzyme, and that enzyme destroys HDL, the good cholesterol in the
blood. So when people take Torcetrapib their HDL, good cholesterol
levels, soar, and atherosclerosis dramatically slows down or stops. The
phase 2 trials were very encouraging, and Pfizer is spending a record one
billion dollars on the phase 3 trials. That’s just one example of many of
these paradigm: manipulating enzymes. So there’s many different ideas
to get in and very precisely reprogram the information processes that
underlie biology, to undercut disease processes and aging processes, and
move them towards healthy rejuvenated processes.
Bridge Two we’ve just been talking about, which is the biotechnology
revolution. A very important insight that really changes one’s perspective
is to understand that progress is exponential and not linear. So many
sophisticated scientists fail to take this into consideration. They just
assume that the progress is going to continue at the current pace, and
they make this mistake over and over again. If you consider the
exponential pace of this process, ten or fifteen years from now we will
have really dramatic tools in the forms of medications and cell therapies
that can reprogram our health, within the domain of biology.
This really will provide radical life extension. The basic metaphor or
analogy to keep in mind is to ask the question, How long does a house
last? Aubrey de Grey uses this metaphor. The answer is, a house lasts as
long as you want it to. If you don’t take care of it the house won’t last
that long. It will fall apart. The roof will spring a leak and the house will
quickly decay. On the other hand, if you’re diligent, and something goes
wrong in the house you fix it. Periodically you upgrade the technology.
You put in a new HVAC system and so forth. With this approach, the
house will go on indefinitely, and we do have houses, in fact, that are
thousands of years of old. So why doesn’t this apply to the human body?
We’ll be able to indefinitely fix the things that go wrong. We’ll have
nanobots that can go in and proactively keep us healthy at a cellular
level, without waiting until major diseases flare up, as well as stop and
reverse aging processes. We’ll get to a point where people will not age.
So when we talk about radical life extension we’re not talking about
people growing old and becoming what we think of today as a 95 year old
and then staying at a biological age 95 for hundreds of years.
We’re talking about people staying young and not aging. Actually, I’m
talking about even more than that, because in addition to radical life
extension, we’ll also have radical life expansion. The nanobots will be able
to go inside the brain and extend our mental functioning by interacting
with our biological neurons. Today we already have computers that are
placed inside people’s brains, that replace diseased parts of the brain, like
the neural implant for Parkinson’s disease. The latest generation of that
implant allows you download new software to your neural implant from
outside the patient—and that’s not an experiment, that’s an FDA
approved therapy.
Today these neural implants require surgery, but ultimately we’ll be able
to send these brain extenders into the nervous system noninvasively
through the capillaries of the brain, without surgery. And we’ll be using
them, not just to replace diseased tissue, but to go beyond our current
abilities—to extend our memories, extend our pattern recognition and
cognitive capabilities, and merge intimately with our technology. So we’ll
have radical life expansion along with radical life extension. That’s my
vision of what will happen in the next several decades.
Then I have several businesses that I’m running, which are in the area of
pattern recognition. I’ve been in the reading machine business for thirty-
two years. I developed the first print-to-speech technology for the blind
in 1976, and we’re introducing a new version that fits in your pocket. A
blind person can take it out of their pocket, snap a picture of a handout at
a meeting, a sign on a wall, the back of a cereal box, an electronic
display, and the device will read it out loud to them through a earphone
or speaker.