Reading Ageless: treat ageing, not the diseases

From my archive, written February to May 2024 while I was reading Ageless by Andrew Steele. These are my impressions at the time.

I’ve been reading Ageless by Andrew Steele on my Kindle. It starts with the sad truth about ageing: no matter what shape you’re in, your chance of developing diseases rises every year, and as you medicate each one, it only takes one to kill you. Your risk of death doubles every 8 years. At 30 it’s less than 1 in 1,000; by 90 it’s a 1 in 6 chance each year. There’s some evidence the risk levels off after 105, but by then it’s still around 50% a year.

The part that stuck with me is senescent cells; they build up as we age and are linked to loads of age-related diseases. The book argues that to stop death in old age, we shouldn’t focus on individual diseases like cancer and heart disease, because more will always appear, along with the frailty and forgetfulness that come with old age. We should go after the cause, which so far seems to be these cells. They were removed in mice in 2011, and human trials started in 2018. Since 1840, average life expectancy has risen about three months every year.

It also covers where caloric restriction came from: a 1930s rat study that has since been repeated on everything from bacteria to dogs. Whether it works in humans isn’t understood. The consensus is that if it had a big effect we’d know by now, so it might add a little. To me, a restricted diet for your whole life isn’t worth the chance of a few extra years.

Nobody seemed to care much about longevity in old age for a long time. Proper research only started in the 90s, because ageing was too complicated to study. Solving every age-related disease one by one would take decades, the biggest priority is to find a way for the body to repair itself and get closer to biological immortality rather than chase each cancer and illness individually.

The way I see it, our best bet for immortality is the billionaires putting money into life extension. They don’t want to leave their wealth behind, so they’ll do everything possible to avoid dying. It may take decades for the average person to get access, but I think it’ll happen before the 22nd century.