Conference Matters 144

SPEAKER

'If we could cure all cardiovascular diseases, people would only live 2.5 years longer'

Do people want that? “Many people say they don’t want to, because they think that they’ll be in a wheelchair after 90. However, the goal of combatting and reversing ageing is not just to get older, it’s to stay young and healthy for longer.” This all sounds wonderful, but don’t you think that having everyone live such long lives has ethical drawbacks as well? “Yes, there certainly are. A drawback we hear often is overpopulation, but that doesn’t really seem to be a long-term problem. In fact, if you look ahead further than a century, we’re heading for massive underpopulation. Critics also wonder, when it is still medicine and when does it become human enhancement? With new gene technology such as CRISPR, you can edit genes quickly and easily. What if you switch off a receptor in the cells so that people can no longer get HIV? Or change one gene so that people have an 80 percent lower risk of heart attacks? Is that still medicine, or is it giving people an upgrade? These are questions we’ll have to ask ourselves in the future. But I also ask the question the other way around: how unethical would it be to not address ageing, given that it’s the biggest driving factor for life-threatening diseases? How unethical would

it be to let people suffer heart attacks, so they can live another five years with heart failure, and then die? Given that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the West, I often start my lectu res by asking, ‘What if I waved a magic wand and no one ever got another heart attack? How much longer do you think people would live on average?’ And then they often start thinking about big num bers. But the answer is disappointing, because if we could cure all cardiovascular diseases, people would only live 2.5 years longer.’” Why such a short time? “If people don’t die of a heart attack, they will die relatively quickly of another ageing disease, such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, or pneumonia caused by old lungs. It’s so unfortunate that governments spend billions of euros on just curing all those individual diseases. Since people would then die from other ageing diseases, it barely provides a solution. That’s one of the reasons why healthcare needs a drastic transformation. Healthcare now only acts when it’s too late. I believe that the solu tion lies in much more preventive healthcare - proactive and much more personalised, because everyone is different.

Actually, it’s the long-term aging process that causes cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, osteoporosis, macular degeneration, and the like. Keeping people healthy for as long as possible and fighting and preventing diseases can be done by slowing down the aging process. A disease like cancer is not just something insur mountable. Nature can regulate the risk of it very well. Mice get cancer after two years of life, while whales only develop it after 200 years.” “Yes, that’s right, because at the end of life, everything goes wrong due to ageing. You’re always getting older as an organism. And then, as you say, cancer develops. Alzheimer’s risk also rises enormously, as does the risk of car diovascular disease. Of course, there are also children who get cancer. However, the older we get, the greater the risk of all these diseases starts to increase. If you can slow down the rate of ageing, you will also postpone these diseases for much longer. And then you’ll live both longer and healthier.” But in both cases, it seems to happen at the end of life Some scientists think that humans can eventually live even 500 years, as you said in a TED talk “Yes, there are scientists who predict that. I’m not going to make any claims about exactly how old we can get, but I do know that life expectancy increa ses by 2.5 years every 10 years. So, for every four days you get older, you get one extra day. At this moment in time, we think that the biological plateau of the maximum age is about 120 years. But if you look at technologies that can reverse ageing, you might be able to push through that biological plateau and let people live much longer.”

IS IT VERY DIFFICULT FOR YOU TO COMPRESS YOUR WHOLE STORY INTO SUCH A SHORT AND CONCISE SPEECH? “The more time I have for a lecture, the more fun it is. I always tell organisers that. But I have also given an eight-minute lecture once. And I think one of the reasons why my lectures are always well received, is that it’s a lot of knowledge in a short time. Some speakers can take a long time to explain obvious things. For me, it’s the opposite. I very much enjoy surprising and overwhelming my audience with new insights that provide food for thought. So, during my lecture you receive many educational insights in a short time.”

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