What is it?
To be human is to be mortal. Mortality is the inevitability of our existence. At least for now. Advances in technology and medicine continue to push back our expiration date. Through vaccines, healthy diets and a great swathe of medical innovations, human lifespans have roughly doubled in the last century or so, from an average of 35 years in 1900 to an average of more than 70 years today.
So the question arises, if we continue to stretch our life spans, could we one day be immortal? And would you want to be? (There’s a philosophical rabbit hole here about immortality, the soul, faith, purpose and the predicted end of the universe in 22 billion years. But we’ll leave that for another day).
Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
Dalai Lama XIV
Why should I care?
Whilst immortality is a long way off, there’s a lot we can learn from current innovations and trends in the field of longevity. From clinical trials in extended reality, to biomedical research in prevention and ageing. There’s inspiration, precedent and opportunity for all of us in how we innovate our service delivery, our research strategies, our mission focus and our supporter journeys.
To help make this area a little more digestible, we’ve grouped our limitless living research into four focus areas: early diagnosis, prevention, treatment and transhumanism.
We aren’t going to cover the implications of longer life expectancy on care or work in this article. We’re saving those whoppers for future trends in the coming weeks.
Do you really want to live forever?
Not everybody is convinced we will be able to go on indefinitely. Many researchers believe there is a limit on how many years a human being can physically live.
A study published in Nature Communications in 2021 suggested that there’s an “absolute limit” on the human life span of about 120-150 years. Using mathematical modelling, researchers from Singapore-based company Gero found that at around this limit “the human body would totally lose its ability to recover from stresses like illness and injury”, ultimately resulting in death.
In a Pew Center for Research 2013 survey on radical life extension in the US, 56% of adults said they wouldn’t want to live a minimum of 120 years. Likewise, roughly two-thirds of adults in a 2016 poll on human enhancement said they wouldn’t want a brain chip implant to improve their cognitive abilities (66%) or synthetic blood to augment their physical abilities (63%).
What you see when you actually look at people at the end of life, to a large degree, is a sense of a life well lived and a time for that life to transition itself. Younger people have a harder time with that, but older people don’t
Paul Root Wolpe, Director of the Emory Center for Ethics
Early Diagnosis - The rise of telemedicine
During the first months of the pandemic, the percentage of healthcare consultations that were carried out remotely shot up from 0.1% to 43.5% in the US. At the start of 2022, NHS England recommended that at least 25% of outpatient appointments should be by telephone or video for the foreseeable future.
The time and cost-saving advantages to both health systems and patients are clear, along with the ability to diagnose and treat patients in remote regions. (We heard a bit about this from Dr Keith Grimes, Medical Director at Babylon Health during our 5G Safari. You can watch the video of his session here).
Teladoc Health, an American multinational telemedicine company, has teamed up with Amazon to offer customers a voice-activated non-emergency general care service that utilises Alexa technology. Teledoc customers in the US will be able to access the service by simply saying “Alexa, I want to talk to a doctor." Once asked, Alexa will instantly connect the user to a Teladoc call centre where they can participate in a virtual visit. According to Teladoc, customers can typically expect a call back in as little as 15 minutes following their appointment set-up, which they will also receive via Alexa.
Babylon Health use AI chatbots, powered by natural language processing, to gather information on symptoms and direct inquiries to the right healthcare professionals.
However telemedicine isn’t just about the telephone or video appointment. To deliver this new approach to distance-based diagnosis, there’s a new generation of wearable technologies, equipped with heart rate, stress, and blood oxygen detectors, enabling healthcare professionals to accurately monitor vital signs in real-time.
The pandemic saw the establishment of “virtual hospital wards” where centralised communication infrastructure could be used to oversee the treatment of numerous patients, all in their homes. An evolution of this idea is the proposal for a ‘Virtual ER’ pilot currently under consideration at the Pennsylvania Center for Emergency Medicine.
Telemedicine has the potential to improve access to healthcare. But to do this, it first needs to win the public’s trust. The rapid shift during the pandemic made it harder for some to access services. Digital access and literacy caused an immediate barrier for some groups. The BMA have written a great article on bridging the digital divide in the wake of Covid, including some useful reflections on the positive impact of telemedicine on older individuals.
Prevention
One approach to limitless living is to look at ageing as if it were a disease that needs to be cured. From enhancing certain proteins which protect cells from ageing to extending telomeres – fragments of DNA which cap both ends of each chromosome and protect against the wear and tear of natural ageing – scientists have tried to halt the ageing process.
Big tech entrepreneurs, including Bezos and Zuckerberg, have become increasingly interested in seeking the secrets of eternal life – or at least a significantly longer one.
Bezos is believed to have poured millions of dollars into Altos Labs, a project exploring gene “reprogramming”, a process in which “mature, specialised cells are coaxed into becoming immature stem cells which can become almost any other kind of cell”. [The Times] This would allow cells to be “rejuvenated” and repaired, hopefully leading to cures for ageing ailments, and ultimately prolonging human life.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are also investing some serious cash through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). The initiative has a mission of curing, preventing or managing all disease by the end of the century.
Together, they plan on spending $3.4bn on “developing new research, institutes and technologies that can help its mission”. This includes $600m to $900m on a biomedical imaging institute at the CZI, as well as a billion given to the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which develops technologies that treat disease. [The Scientist]
If ageing is a code, that code could be cracked and hacked. The current system in healthcare is a whack-a-mole of your symptoms until you die. It addresses the diseases of ageing, but not curing the underlying process behind ageing itself. The healthcare system is doing a good job of helping people live longer and stronger lives, but ageing is still a terminal condition.
Joon Yun, founder of the Race Against Time Foundation
Prevention isn’t just about big bucks investment in high risk, long term strategies. Closer to home, AI and machine learning have a massive role to play in unlocking the potential of health data to prevent rather than just diagnose.
‘Get to know the patient before they become one. Once we start adjusting the strategy away from "last mile" treatment as the default, we're taking that crucial first step toward developing data-driven relationships with people at the first mile of their health journey.’ Hillit Meidar-Alfi, Founder of Spatially Health
AIs are already being used to predict which patients who self-harm are most likely to attempt suicide. AI makes it possible to create tools that can spot patterns across huge datasets far more effectively than traditional analytics processes, leading to more accurate predictions and ultimately better patient outcomes.
Even closer to home there are smartphone apps that promise to help the individual ‘hack’ their biological age. Humanity is an app that can monitor users’ biological age and claims to help them slow and even reverse it. The tool aims to enable users to possibly stay healthy and disease free for decades longer.
Whilst Alike is a digital healthcare startup that uses machine learning to put patients in contact with others who share the same medical characteristics.
Finally, watch out for nutrigenomics - coming to a supermarket aisle near you. Nutrigenomics uses genetic testing to determine the interplay between genes, nutrition, and health. This information is used to help pinpoint the ideal diet for each individual. One startup leading the way on this is Karmacist, who have the backing of former John Lewis Partnership chairman Charlie Mayfield.
Treatment
XR and VR are transforming both clinical training and treatment. From VR headsets being used to train doctors and surgeons, allowing them to get intimately acquainted with the workings of the human body without putting patients at risk, or requiring a supply of medical cadavers. To VR being used to help teach social and coping skills for children with autism.
Virtual simulations also extend to ‘virtual patients’ and ‘digital twins’. The Neurotwin project will build a computational framework to represent the electric fields with the brain, which it hopes will lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
Microsoft’s HoloLens system is being used in surgical theatres, where it lets the surgeon receive real-time information about what they are seeing, as well as share their view with other professionals or students who may be observing the operation.
AR health applications for people who aren’t medical professionals exist too, such as the AED4EU geo layer, which provides real-time directions to the nearest publicly accessible automated defibrillator unit.
Personalised Medicine
Traditionally, drug treatments have been created on a "one-size-fits-all" basis, with trials designed to optimise drugs for efficacy with the highest number of patients with the lowest number of adverse side effects.
Modern medicine can now deliver a much more personalised approach. Tailoring treatments, dosages and drug design to an individual’s genome.
For example, the Empa healthcare centre in Sweden uses AI and modelling software to predict the exact dosage of painkillers, including synthetic opiates like fentanyl, for individual patients. These can be highly effective and life-changing for patients suffering chronic pain but extremely dangerous in excessively high doses.
Drug company Novo Nordisk has teamed up with digital health company Glooko to create personalised diabetes monitoring tools, which provide bespoke recommendations for diet, exercise, and management of their illness, based on their blood sugar readings and other factors specific to them.
It’s really not science fiction
Finally, we enter the world of weird. But none of what we’re about to cover is science fiction.
Bionics might feel like something we saw in the 6 Million Dollar Man or Robocop, but as we’ve written about previously in Good Futures, human augmentation is science fact, not science fiction. From exoskeletons designed to assist with lifting and moving heavy objects, to bionic eyes to help people see, and implants to help people hear. Human augmentation could help us all live independently, longer. But what happens when the technology you’re ‘wearing’ suddenly stops being supported by the manufacturer?
Transhumanism is one approach to ‘immortality’ that removes the biological problem from the equation. A world where the bridge between human brain and silicone disappears. Combine transhumanism with the singularity (where AIs surpass humans) and you reach a point where either humans are redundant or we all become robots. I mean, that’s one way to live forever.
So What?
Stepping back from the existential precipice, living even a few years longer brings both amazing potential and some tough decisions. It’s about unlocking the power of data to help us navigate these futures.
1. INNOVATE - AI TO TRIAGE
Babylon Health has been using AI chatbots to triage patients since 2018, claiming it can appropriately triage patients in 85 percent of cases. Is this Ok? Is a chatbot run by Runaway HelplineTargeted at those aged between 13 and 18 looking for support or feeling pressured or confused, the chatbot asks some simple questions before offering useful information or connecting the young person to a real person for a chat conversation. How could AI help triage enquiries or prioritise those most in need?
2. UP-SKILL - IMMERSIVE TRAINING
The Trevor Project uses AI to help train its counsellors, long before they get put in front of at-risk teens. Training delivered through VR can help students test and learn in an immersive environment. How and where could you up-skill your teams and give them hands-on experience, with limited real-world risk?
3. ANALYSE - UNLOCKING DATA TO PREDICT & UNDERSTAND
AI and machine learning are already being used to predict natural disasters like earthquakes. The WHO is starting to explore the opportunity to use health data to predict future pandemics. AI has long been used in logistics and travel to help optimise process flows. The most powerful asset you hold is your data. Are you leveraging its potential to the fullest extent?