LS8 - Dr. Charles Tandy Talks About Human Health and Life Span

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Welcome to the Longevity Show, Informing listeners on the important aspects of health, wealth and happiness to ensure you live life to its fullest. With fascinating interviews with top authors and gurus in the field, along with the latest news in the science and technology of longevity, we're going to reveal expert advice and amazing secrets of living a longer, happier life. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Charles Tandy to the show. He is a retired associate professor of humanities and senior faculty Research Fellow in Bioethics at Fuyin University in Taiwan, and he's coming to us today from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Charles, welcome. How are you?

I'm fine, thank you, Jason.

Good. Well, it's great to have you on the show. And you were studying some stuff way back in the 60s. That was probably, probably before anybody else was doing it. Tell us about that, will you?

Yes, I was an undergraduate college student in the mid-1960s, in the 1960s, and I came across the book the Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger, who today is known as the father of cryonics. And actually the book was listed on an alternative reading list for one of my courses. I don't really remember which course it was, but it wasn't a required book. But in the course, I was supposed to write basically a book review or a critical analysis of one of the books listed by the professor. Again, I don't really remember what course it was, but anyway, I chose one of the alternative books rather than the main list and discovered the Prospects of Immortality by Robert Ettinger and immediately started looking at the possibility that you could preserve the body at the point of pinnacle death or legal death, or at that approximate time and preserve it pretty well. And if you could preserve it pretty well, then you would be, you might say, freshly dead, or you would be only clinically dead, meaning that, of course, from clinical death we revive people all the time today using cpr, et cetera.

Back then, that happened occasionally as well.

The idea made a lot of sense to me that you could, if you went low enough with the temperature, you could preserve the basic identity of the organism extremely well. Roughly speaking, extremely well. And then it would be very dependent, of course, on future technology as to whether they could infer what the healthy tissue was like and then repair the healthy tissue and then not only then, bring you back to life. But then if you have that level of technology, you would be Actually much better in terms of what you're physically like as an organism than we would experience as mere human beings. It would be a step beyond human beings. So it seemed to me that.

Based on the idea that at something like the level of liquid nitrogen temperature, that if you could preserve those tissues.

Long enough time. Now, at that time, I thought maybe it would be hundreds or thousands of years, but that doesn't present a problem. Once you reach that level.

Then there's no additional damage. Now, there might be damage reaching that temperature, but once you reach the level of roughly something like liquid nitrogen, there's virtually no further damage or deterioration for many thousands of years. So my thinking was that it might take perhaps hundreds or thousands of years before the technology would be up to reviving me, if ever, because it's an experiment. We don't really know. And that was part of the book, too. He said he was optimistic, but it was obviously an experimental procedure. But if it was successful, it might mean that it would take hundreds or thousands of years.

So has there really been any advancement in this field since the 60s, or is it sort of the same rules of physics that we're still, you know, battling?

Well, there have been some improvements, yes. One of which is that we've come a pretty long way in terms of microtechnology and beyond that, what's known as nanotechnology.

In that respect. It looks like that the repair mechanisms at the other end are going to be much sooner, not hundreds or thousands of years in the future, but maybe 100 years or maybe even decades in the future. That's one change, the advancement in terms of what we project future technology.

We used to think that the future technology would be hundreds or thousands of years in the future. It now looks like with the beginnings of the developments in nanotechnology, for example, what comes to mind there is the book by K. Eric Grexler. His original book was called Engines of Creation. And then just this past year, he's one of his latest books, which I don't recall the title, but Kerry Grexler is sometimes called the father of nanotechnology. And then he has a book out just this past year as well.

And that.

Seemed to create great interest among scientists. And so in the last few decades, nanotechnology has developed so that it looks like the future technology that we were talking about is going to come much sooner than what we used to think back in the 1960s. Now, that would be, in my estimation, or one major change. The second major change has to do with the process at this end, rather than the other end. At this end, we are much better now. The scientists are much better now that do this. The technicians that do this are much better with the following. We used to use the phrase back in the 60s, I was. When I was an undergraduate college student, me and my friends used to joke around, greeting each other by saying, freeze, wait, reanimate. Instead of saying, hi there, we would just pass each other and we would say, freeze, wait, reanimate.

As undergraduates. Well, the waiting part still applies, although maybe we don't have to wait as long as we used to think. And the reanimate as an experimental possibility, perhaps a quite decent possibility still exists. But what has changed is the freezing part is that we don't really do the freezing anymore. It's now vitrification. Freezing involves the forming of crystals. The forming of crystals can cause damage. And so now that is no longer the case. We have the cryoprotectants now, where we do away with most of the freezing, the crystallization or freezing damage, and it's now referred to as vitrification instead of freezing.

Right, right. Okay, very interesting. Well, let's kind of shift the discussion to something that's not, you know, something that maybe we have more control over. And I just wanted to talk a bit about increasing health span and lifespan, not freezing and coming back later, but just the traditional idea of, you know, better health for a longer time or maybe for the entire time and having a longer life.

Yes, well, of course, once we do reach this level of technology that we were talking about earlier, where you have the nanotechnology developments, then you will have computerized robots running through your bloodstream, constantly repairing the organism. And so once we reach that stage again, we used to think it might be hundreds or thousands of years in the future. It looks like it's going to be sooner than that. Now when we develop technology, that's the.

Real magic pill, you know, the nanopill maybe that we can take and it just starts repairing our body and yeah, it's amazing. It's incredible. So how close are we? I mean, you know, what's going on in that world? Are there any of these pills out there now? Certainly they have camera pills where we can, you know, look at the inside of the body. That's amazing enough. But what about the pills that will fix things?

Well, I'm not a scientist, so I don't really keep up with the latest developments in that regard.

The, you know, there's been a tremendous amount of research money spent on the development of nanotechnology in the last 20 years, I would say that didn't exist before now, as Eric Grexler, the so called father of nanotechnology, points out, however, much of that impetus and funding and research has not been directed the way that he would like it. In other words, I think if I understand.

Sometimes he will say something along the following lines, that as the scientists discovered the sexiness of the word of nanotechnology in their research, they started throwing it into their research proposals. The word nanotechnology, in some cases it might be microtechnology, and in other cases it might be nanotechnology in some manner of speaking, but not exactly in the way that Drexler was referring to. Drexler really wanted to focus the research agenda on.

Developing devices that you could control at the atomic level to do almost anything that was possible according to the laws of science. And so.

As I understand it, he would have chosen that our research monies in nanotechnology, so called, be spent more in that direction in the past and in the future.

Yeah, yeah, very interesting, very interesting. So what about, you know, just generally health span? That's probably more important or at least more immediate than the discussion of lifespan, because, you know, the lifespan's not too bad. The thing is, having it be helpful.

You know, we know some things, just the things we've known for a long time on how to be fairly healthy in terms of the lifespan that we have. That is to say, we know that, for example, exercise seems to keep us healthy, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem to make us live longer per se. So if we have just a set time period, let's say that we're genetically programmed to die after a century, if you want to look at it that way, then there are things we can do in the traditional mode, such as exercising, that we would keep us healthier for that period of time. But then of course, many of us are interested in going not just having, say, a healthy one century of life, but going from 100 to 150 to 200, 300, etc. And so you might be familiar with the work of the scientist Aubrey De Grey.

Yes, I had Aubrey on the show before. Very, very interesting work.

Oh, good. And so he of course, is taking one route that should be taken, I think, to explore the possibilities of. Because he talks about the so called longevity escape point, by which he means that.

At some point in our progress as we, if we, assuming we can lengthen the lifespan and health Spanish and not be limited to any particular length of time, such as 1 century, as we are Presently, at some point the technology will be such is that we will be expanding the technological possibilities beyond.

One year of chronological age, equaling one year of chronological aging. That is to say.

You can think about slowing down the aging process or repairing it and therefore having a chance of living beyond, in a healthy manner, 100 years. And then you can say, well, I'm going to live in a healthy way until 150, etc. Etc. But at some point you get such a great technological advantage that it just totally takes over so that you go from the possibility or the actuality of living to 150 years to living indefinitely where you die only by accidents. And so it looks like that using some of the abstract.

Analysis that he has done that you can see in that way how the longevity escape velocity.

Would work now, whether it will come about as soon as he hopes or whether it will be later. Nevertheless, the philosophical principle seems to me to make a lot of sense, that principle of the longevity escape velocity. So whether it happens sooner or whether it happens later, it seems to me that the philosophical principle will apply.

That's the escape velocity issue for overall longevity. But what about health? What's going on in the world of the healthspan side? I guess we should say health span, not lifespan.

Well, of course, Aubrey De Grey, that's what he is interested in is his experiments are such that as you are expanding the lifespan, you are expanding the health span at the same time. His experiments are set up that way. So the prizes that he gives, that he hopes to give to successful innovators.

Are such that.

He starts out in mice because his idea, as you may know, is that if you can show that you can expand the health span of mice from.

Say one year to five years or whatever it may be for mouse, that that would be equivalent to human being to it would be phenomenal.

It's the same ratio might apply is what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, A similar ratio at least. And so he thinks that once you do that in mice, then it's a no brainer to get the research monies to go from the mice to the human beings. So he's putting his effort, you know, on getting people to do the research to get the longevity in the mice because he thinks it will be a psychological breakthrough for the people in general and the scientists also at that point it would be a no brainer that obviously we should spend a lot of money and research to do it on humans then if it can be done on mice. So his leverage in that respect is on mice. And he's of course, talking about mice that would be living in a very healthy condition much longer than your mice can even live at all today, basically.

Very interesting, very interesting. Tell people where they can find out more about you and your work.

Yes. Well, I suppose my primary website would be Dr. Tandy.com.

Dr. And that can be spelled either way. You can do the-R tandy.com or spelldoctorout and tandy.com and it will work either way. So that's good to know. Well, Dr. Charles Tandy, anything else you'd like to say in closing?

I would just say that.

It seems to me that cryonic hibernation has a good chance of working on the one hand and also it's not very expensive on the other hand, contrary to what you sometimes hear in the media. Therefore, that is a good thing to do because, number one, you don't know when the life extension or the radical life extension or the radical healthspan extension is going to take place. And number two, you don't know when an accident may occur. So I would emphasize the importance of signing up for colonic hibernation with one of the major proven chronic organizations over the last decades. I would say that's very important and it's rather inexpensive.

Yeah, it's about, I think it's about $30,000 or as I recall, and we've had two of them on the show, which is interesting. Do you want to give out the names of any you might recommend? One of the, you said sign up with one of the credible organizations.

Well, to my mind, there are three that have established themselves over the years and that seem to be trustworthy. And so there's the ALCOR Life Extension foundation and there's the American Cryonics Society and there's the Cryonics Institute, which is located near where I now live in the state of Michigan.

Fantastic. Very interesting. Very interesting. This may actually work in the not too distant future, who knows? But it's fascinating.

Well, I don't really put it that way because it misleads people to thinking that we're going to have some sort of big breakthrough in the near future. And the Quranic idea is based on the idea that we can wait for hundreds or thousands of years if that is necessary.

Yeah, One might wake up to an amazingly different world. I mean, that'll be a, you know, we've seen it in the movies before and wow.

But there are certain ethical issues, philosophical, ethical issues that we sometimes forget. And that is the importance of the individual being the individual human being or. And so, you know, if someone dies at the age of 50, we say that they have been gypped out of life, but if they die at the age of 100, we say they have not been. But in fact, compared with what should be the case, if we really believe in.

Our moral responsibilities toward human beings, then 100 years would be nothing compared with 1,000 years. And so I often will quote the philosopher Albert Camus, who wrote the book the Rebel. And he basically, among other things in that book, he says that it seems to him that. That the death penalty is a rather harsh punishment for being born.

The death penalty is rather harsh punishment for being born. Yeah. Very interesting. Very interesting quote.

So it's one thing to die at the age of 50 or at the age of 100, but it's something else to think about that if we believe in the importance of human beings, then we would. If we love human beings, if we love our family, if we love ourselves, if we love all human beings, then we would be interested in them living a very healthy life. And not just the life of an ordinary animal, but the life of a human being.

So.

That'S the way that I would put it on a practical basis right now. Now, if we wanted to talk about philosophy, I would be willing to do that which we haven't gotten into too much.

And, you know, time is, of course, always limited, but. But this has been a fascinating discussion. Dr. Charles Tandy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you, Jason, for this enjoyable conversation.

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