de Grey Aubrey
Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Stud Health Technol Inform. 2005;118:209-19.
It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially no progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two aspects of human aging combine to undermine this assessment. The first is that aging is happening to us throughout our lives but only results in appreciable functional decline after four or more decades of life: this shows that we can postpone aging arbitrarily well without knowing how to prevent it completely. The second is that the typical rate of refinement of dramatic technological breakthroughs is rather reliable (so long as public enthusiasm for them is abundant) and is fast enough to change such technologies (be they in medicine, transport, or computing) almost beyond recognition within a natural human lifespan. Here I explain, first, why it is reasonable to expect that (presuming adequate funding for the initial preclinical work) therapies that can add 30 healthy years to the remaining lifespan of healthy 55-year-olds will arrive within the next few decades, and, second, why those who benefit from those therapies will very probably continue to benefit from progressively improved therapies indefinitely and thus avoid debilitation or death from age-related causes at any age.
在延缓人类衰老方面甚至尚未取得实质性进展之时，讨论有效消除人类衰老这一死亡原因的方法，可能显得为时过早。然而，人类衰老的两个方面使这种评估站不住脚。第一个方面是，衰老在我们一生当中持续发生，但只有在过了四十多年或更长时间后才会导致明显的功能衰退：这表明我们能够很好地任意延缓衰老，却无需知道如何完全阻止它。第二个方面是，重大技术突破的典型改进速度相当可靠（只要公众对它们有足够热情），而且快到足以在自然的人类寿命范围内使此类技术（无论是医学、交通还是计算领域的技术）几乎面目全非。在此，我首先解释为什么有理由预计（假定对初始临床前工作有足够资金投入），能够让健康的55岁人群剩余寿命再增加30个健康年头的疗法将在未来几十年内出现；其次解释为什么受益于这些疗法的人很可能会无限期地继续受益于不断改进的疗法，从而在任何年龄避免因衰老相关原因而衰弱或死亡。
