Aug 30, 2023
When people hear that research is making progress on aging, they frequently ask this question. “If you live forever will you run out of money?”
People are living longer already, and some nations are adjusting their retirement programs accordingly. Recently in 2023, one million Frenchmen protested a rise in retirement age from 62 to 64 [1]
In the United States the retirement age has been creeping upwards from 65 to 67, and will likely go up again, since the US retirement system in question is not on an actuarially sound basis. In other words, the government isn’t doing as good a job on social security as for-profit insurance companies do with their policies.
In the meantime billions are being pumped into rejuvenation research and applying cellular reprogramming methods for the treatment of age-associated diseases and potentially rejuvenation of tissues, organs, and even whole humans. These companies include Turn Biotechnologies, YouthBio Therapeutics, NewLimit, AgeX Therapeutics, Iduna Therapeutics, Shift Bioscience, and Google’s Calico. Also Altos Labs was established with $3 billion in funding to pursue this, supported partly by one of the world’s richest people, Jeff Bezos. [5]
And these investments in research are beginning to pay off. They have rejuvenated a rat in multiple ways. Note that I said rejuvenate, not ‘slowed-down-aging’. The rats literally became younger rats. (unfortunately this used a genetic trick that wouldn’t work on you and me, but it does demonstrate that age is reversible)
Also cells can be rejuvenated, including human cells, and biological clocks can be reset using cellular epigenetic reprogramming with Yamanaka factors. [2][3] ShinyaYamanaka won the nobel prize for the discovery of these factors in 2012 [4] A growing number of companies now aim to use this cellular reprogramming to develop therapies for rejuvenating human beings.[2][3] And one of these companies has hired Yamanaka to work on this as well as many other leaders in this field.
So… if these billions in research in aging and rejuvenation works out, and there are aging treatments or rejuvenation treatments, then people will be living longer. Will the retirement systems still work, or will they need to raise the retirement age again and again?
This may depend of course on the cost of these treatments. If they turn out to be a genetic therapy, then it may be out of reach for most people, as these types of treatments tend to be over 1 million dollars currently. So, that is yet another financial problem for the wanna be immortal. If the cost is $1M that will stop a lot of people from joining the club.
As George Church at Harvard pointed out, the price for gene therapies can come down with volume, as it did with the COVID vaccines which were arguably a similar type of technology. So, is it possible that we will ever see affordable aging treatments in the next few years? 10 years? 20 years? Stay tuned.
One other point about gene therapies is that they are not currently very safe, and are only used for dangerous illnesses.
But the financial question that amuses me, is that this is the classic dilemma that vampires have - how do you get long term income, if you live a really really long time, and you can’t do the normal government retirement?
For both cases, I think the answer is that you have to save up some money, and invest it. Maybe CDs, annuities? I don’t know, but this is what you will have to get good at.
There are annuities that you can buy and they pay out for ‘life’ but I’m sure they are figuring this on current maximum lifetimes, so what happens if this changes? And what happens when your financial institute starts to wonder why you haven’t died yet? If the technology is mainstream that surely won’t be odd to them, but if the technology is suppressed and made illegal (like human cloning for example) then this could become an issue. You will then truly have the same dilemma as the legendary vampire.
References
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64309155
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00451-9
[3] https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31664-6
[4] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2012/yamanaka/facts/
[5] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-labs-silicon-valleys-jeff-bezos-milner-bet-living-forever/