Solving the conflict between the Christians and the Buddhists at the refugee camp is one of the experiences that taught me that I could set goals that some may think are unattainable and achieve great things with help from others and a little bit of luck. Without this knowledge, I may not have thought to take on the uphill battle to prove that the hallmarks of aging can be targeted to delay aging and its diseases. While I was full of hope when I began my journey into the biology of aging, very few people shared my enthusiasm, and many people thought that my goal was unachievable. Early studies provided clues that were encouraging, though, and within a decade, the new field of geroscience was thriving, and my colleagues and I have shown through a variety of research studies that aging can, in fact, be targeted. Today, we’re focused on making this knowledge applicable for the general public by exploring and developing new treatments and drugs that target the causes of aging.
My journey parallels the evolution of this discovery. Along the way, I’ve studied animal models and discovered mechanisms for exceptional longevity in humans. To shorten the time line between research and human application, I have also taken on a leadership role in solving the challenges involved with proving that targeting aging can prevent an array of age-related diseases.
In a very short period of time, geroscientists have revolutionized the discipline: to think of aging not as a certainty but as a phenomenon—like many other difficult conditions—that can be targeted, improved, and even cured as if it were a disease. To that end, we are creating biotech companies and other ventures so that as soon as our nationwide double-blind human clinical trial produces the evidence needed by the FDA, more treatments, new drugs, and combinations of drugs that slow aging and increase health span will become available.
After decades of direct research as well as nationwide and worldwide collaborative projects that brought previously isolated researchers together, we are finally able to say that aging, as we know it, is over.
One
ONE HUNDRED YEARS YOUNG
Have you heard the one about the woman who asked her eighty-year-old husband, “Want to go upstairs and make love?”
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I can’t do both.”
In the near future, the punch line may not work. Having overcome these limitations, we will be enjoying a new reality of being healthy and vital in our nineties and beyond. We are on the leading edge of a revolution that will dramatically change the way we age. It may sound like science fiction, but I promise you it’s science. To be exact, it’s geroscience, an interdisciplinary field that studies the relationship between aging and age-related diseases. This collaboration has built a bridge between the interests of biologists exploring the basic mechanisms that drive aging and geriatricians trying to improve elderly patients’ quality of life. And I’m delighted to report that the future is very bright.
This new reality is made possible by what we’re learning from centenarians like the Kahn siblings—Irving, Helen, Peter, and Leonore. The four children had been born during the first decade of the twentieth century, when the average life expectancy at birth was only forty years. They’d seen each other through wars, deaths, and divorces and celebrated together at the birth of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Leonore and Helen had joined the first Girl Scout troop in New York, and as an adult, Leonore became a troop leader and trained volunteers for more than fifty years. Helen enjoyed a long career as a magazine writer, which she began in 1936. Peter was a cameraman on such movies as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz and a photographer with Frank Capra in the Pacific theater of World War II. He also helped to develop Technicolor and worked in video technology at HBO until retiring at eighty-one. Irving first went to work on Wall Street in 1928, before the Great Depression. Everything imaginable had changed over the course of their lives, but in a physical sense, time seemed to be standing still for these four siblings.
Yes, they’d aged. But the changes we associate with aging—lost mobility, lost intellect, lost excitement, lost energy—had been delayed for decades. They lived more than two and a half times as long as most of their peers, and instead of declining, they each continued to thrive. Leonore was still giving tours at an environmental learning center well into her nineties. Irving continued to work at the family investment firm at 108, bossing around his son and grandson who also worked there. Peter remarried at seventy-three and was happy with his new wife for more than thirty years. Helen drank Budweiser, went to Manhattan museums and trendy restaurants, and smoked for more than ninety years.
That’s what makes the Kahns so extraordinary. They weren’t eating anything special, exercising outside their daily routines, drinking extra water, napping, or doing anything else that we tend to think of as healthy, life-extending habits. They didn’t strive to keep their bodies whole and their minds nimble—they just, somehow, were.
Like many centenarians, the Kahns simply aged more slowly than most of the population—meaning they, in effect, aged later. But why? That’s the question I’ve been studying for almost two decades, and I have encouraging news. Scientific advances are making the sandwich generation a thing of the past. Instead of being pulled in two directions by needing to care for our aging parents while we raise our children, we can watch our healthy parents play active roles in their grandchildren’s lives.
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Later in the book, you’ll learn more about Irving Kahn, along with some of our other centenarians, including:
Ervin Adam, ninety-seven, my uncle and one of the most resilient people I have ever known. After surviving six concentration camps during World War II and fleeing Czechoslovakia as the Soviets invaded in 1968, he bounced back again after losing everything to Hurricane Harvey in 2017. And after finally retiring from the Baylor College of Medicine at ninety-four, he still attends lectures every week.
My wife’s grandmother Frieda, another centenarian who defied the medical texts. Remarkably active and determined to keep enjoying life, she broke her ankle at age one hundred, and she insisted on having surgery even though her doctor thought a wheelchair would be a safer option.
And this new frontier isn’t just exciting from the standpoint of slowing aging and the onset of disease—it also has other profound implications. People who undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatment age rapidly, and that places them at higher risk for another disease or a second cancer. And the children who survive after having these treatments start having age-related diseases, such as hypertension and cardiovascular disease, at much younger ages than we see in the general population. These people desperately need our help, as do people with HIV. The treatment they receive to survive may be aging them faster than the virus, and on average, they get all the age-related diseases about ten years sooner than people who do not have HIV. Another large group of people who need interventions against rapid aging are those with physical disabilities and permanent injuries who cannot exercise as much as others can and tend to become obese, which accelerates aging. All these people can benefit from the new treatments and drugs that are being developed, so targeting the causes of aging truly benefits many more groups than the elderly. And the benefits of these new developments even extend beyond our sick and suffering. They will be vitally important in our quest to reach new frontiers, on the planet and off. When astronauts make the voyage to Mars, they will be exposed to radiation for years, and the discoveries we make with genetic testing and research will also lead to revolutionary approaches to protecting people when they leave Earth’s atmosphere.