It's just possible
that this girl will have more time on earth than anyone who's ever lived.
She might live for a thousand years.
Immortality, a quest for more time,
is a dream that has driven humanity for generations.
We search for the elixir of life.
Would I be the first one trying it?
And we yearn for the lost time that lingers on in our memory.
Over here.
My god these are the old classrooms.
I haven't been here in 50 years.
Now, finally, in the 21st century,
this search for more time might be over.
Because scientists are beginning to crack the secrets
of how time changes us day by day.
And as we understand time,
eventually there'll be no limit on how long we might live.
I want to live forever.
Like every human who's ever lived,
I know one thing for certain:
One day, I don't know when, my time will run out.
No matter how well I treat my body -
no matter how well I eat or how well I exercise,
I know that my body will fail and one day I will die.
Of all time's effects on us,
the most profound is that one day it will end.
Our time is limited, so our time is precious.
In this programme
I'm going to look at what that means for us,
how the knowledge of our limited time has shaped us as humans.
I'm a theoretical physicist and I live here in Manhattan.
It's a place where time is always in short supply.
I want to know if our time on earth,
our lifespan, has to be limited.
And if we could hold back the march of time,
what would it mean for us?
What would it mean to be immortal?
We may not feel the effects of time changing us day by day -
but we know that it does.
And it's more than just the physical ageing of our body on the outside.
Our sense of time itself seems to change as we get older.
Many of us get the feeling that life is speeding up.
So let's start with a simple question:
Is this just something we imagine?
Or is time really running faster for us as we get older?
Well, the only way to find out is to do an experiment.
So here we are in the middle of mid-town Manhattan.
We're doing a little experiment
that may be fun and you might be interested.
We're trying to measure the duration of time,
how people perceive the duration of a minute.
But we have a theory that says that our perception of time
either speeds up or slows down with age.
I have a stopwatch here, I'll ask you to count for a minute
and we'll see how close you get.
Okay.
Well, let's start the experiment right now.
One minute...
Five.
Six.
Eight thousand, nine thousand, ten...
Ten. Eleven.
One thing I liked about this experiment
is that you can assign numbers to it.
It's quantifiable.
So many times when we talk about the passage of time,
it gets very touchy-feely, it gets very subjective.
Here's an experiment where you can actually test it.
55.
56.
57.
58 thousand.
59.
60.
Go.
One minute.
You're under by about 12 seconds.
Ten seconds under.
You're under by about six seconds.
Six seconds.
Our young people are tending to time a minute too quickly.
They're finishing before their minute is up.
Nine seconds over.
Three seconds over.
Three seconds.
19 seconds over.
Over? Oh my goodness.
By contrast,
our older people finish counting well after a minute has passed.
In other words, they're marking time much more slowly.
Well, I'll spend it well.
And this has a dramatic effect on the way we see the world.
It turns out that the internal clock -
that we have inside our brain
is actually slowing down the older we get.
And as the ticking begins to wind down,
as the ticking of our clock begins to wind down,
everything else seems to speed up.
This disconcerting feeling
that the world is beginning to run on ahead of us
is a very direct reminder that one day,
after about 80 years or so of living,
we'll stop altogether.
Our time will have run out.
But does out time have to run out?
Why can't we just go on forever?
It's a question we've asked for centuries.
After all, in nature some things seem to have an almost endless lifetime.
I'm looking for the oldest inhabitant on earth,
here on the edge of the Sierra Nevada in California.
It's one of these bristleone pine trees.
So ancient that it has a name - Methuselah.
It's nearly five thousand years old.
The Methusaleh tree is four thousand,
seven hundred and eighty-one years of age.
It's staggering to believe
that this tree could be older than the pyramids.
Older than recorded history itself.
It's magnificent.
Amazingly, it's still fertile.
Bury this pine cone and you will have a baby bristlecone pine.
But its parent is almost five thousand years old.
That's a vast amount of time.
So the question is:
What's stopping us from living that long?
What is it that determines how much time we have on earth?
To find an answer, meet Cyril, the boy racer of the animal world.
Cyril is a brown mouse.
His fast lifestyle is driven by his biology.
His heart pulses at 650 beats per minute.
He breathes 160 times a minute.
His metabolic rate is so high that he burns himself out.
This frenetic lifestyle of his is all over within two years.
He's one of the shortest-living of all mammals.
In that time he has to live a whole life.
He's a father at three months, a grandparent at six months.
It's as if he was designed to do everything in fast forward,
as if his time is biologically predetermined.
Cyril truly lives fast and dies young.
He's just 12 months old.
Cute little critter, isn't he?
However, within a year he'll probably be dead.
In other words, it does seem as if he is programmed to die.
Across the animal kingdom, the story is the same.
Each species has a pretty much fixed lifespan.
From mayflies,
who have just one day to enjoy the spring sunshine,
to have sex, just once, and die
to elephants who often have 70 years.
Life and death seems to follow a pattern.
So time, it would appear,
is a precious odity that is strictly limited
by biology.
And for humans too, it's no different.
Horace Higgins feels literally in his bones
that his time is running out.
It's tough, because er, you get aches and pains
and my knees are presently er, getting a little arthritic and it hurts
when I run.
And erm, it's a - to tell you the truth, it's quite a drag.
Horace is 82,
but he has a secret
that suggests his lifespan could be much longer than you might expect.
If you really want to know what it feels like to be getting older,
you should talk to my mum.
Mum, can you hear me okay?
Yes.
I have some pictures here from 1894.
A picture of you, your brother Harry and your sister Fern,
and it shows you sitting in the chair and you're looking quite sad.
- Do you remember that picture? - Yes, I remember the picture.
Okay.
My mother said the photographer frightened me.
Marion Higgins was born in 1893,
which means she's now an incredible 112 years old
one of the oldest people in the world today,
with amazing memories.
I can remember that I was standing on the business street in Boise, Idaho.
I saw a horseless carriage.
It was just a buggy going by, but there was no horse.
I thought that was kind of peculiar.
At 112, Marion has outlived many of her friends and family.
My husband died in 1949.
He was 60 years old.
We were married 31 years.
I have never wanted another man.
So what then is the secret to Marion's long life?
Well, just keep on living, that's all.
That's all I can tell you.
Don't die.
Today many more people are living to old age.
But in the whole world,
just a bare handful rival Marion's 112 years.
The oldest ever was a Frenchwoman,
Madame Jeanne Calment who died in 1997
at the incredible age of 122.
But that seems to be it.
Biologically our allotted time runs out.
Every year there are more Marion Higgins,
but they are not crossing what seems to be an ultimate boundary.
We seem to be bumping up against a natural limit of the human lifespan.
We share this fixed lifetime with all living things.
But there's one thing that makes us unique.
Unlike all other creatures on this planet,
we are the only ones who know that our time is limited.
And this knowledge shapes us as humans.
This feeling for the poignancy and transience of our lives
has been at the root of so much of what we value in human culture.
It's ever-present in our art, literature and music,
and it surrounds us in our monuments, histories and religions.
It makes us what we are.
Knowing that our time is limited
helps to shape the way
we view ourselves and see the rest of the world
in ways that science is just beginning to discover.
Have a look at these pictures.
Which do you remember and which do you forget?
Psychologist Laura Carstenson
uses the pictures as part of an experiment
to study the emotional impact of knowing our time is limited.
Humans are, to the best of our knowledge,
the only species aware of our mortality.
Notjust aware that we're dying when we're dying,
but that at any point in time throughout most of life
we have some sense of how much time we have left.
So the first thing I'm going to have you do
is just look at a slide of pictures.
Some of the images have negative emotional value,
and some are positive.
In her experiments,
Laura's team found that young people remember a wide range of pictures.
A skydiver.
And a woman with a baby.
Snakes.
A man with a bloodied face.
But older people consistently forget one set of images.
Baby being held in the arms of his mother.
Mushrooms.
A good glass of brew.
Perhaps surprisingly,
it's the negative pictures they forget.
That's about it. I can't recall any more.
Okay.
With age, they begin to take account
of how much time they have left in life, and in doing
so tend to see what's most important
and what's not important any more
and to let these other things go.
So it turns out
that as we age and realise that we have, say, just five years left,
this fundamentally changes how we see the world around us.
Well, I think actually that older people
are happy knowing that they only have five years left.
It is that that - the - the five years left
is what's telling them it's all right to let your guard down.
And so being able to stop
and really experience the day and to live in the moment is something
that may be one of the secret rewards of ageing.
In ways we scarcely notice,
this awareness of time passing
is written deep in every aspect of our culture.
It shapes notjust how we see the world,
but how we see ourselves.
Art historian Tarnya Cooper
is convinced that portraits
have always been crucial to the way we think about time.
Portraiture is something which can capture a person in time,
a particular moment in time.
You have this sense of an individual at this particular moment.
And what's interesting about that
is that when that goes up on the wall
and that's their portrait in their house,
is in years to come, in ten years,
in twenty years, in thirty years
you have a sense of - of your own mortality.
And of course, implicit in that is an awareness of our own death,
awareness that we no longer always look the way that we did.
We won't always be youthful.
During the 17th century,
mortality was placed at the centre of high art,
with paintings known as 'memento mori'.
A memento mori picture is anything
really that reminds us of passing time,
that reminds us of our own transience,
of ultimately death and mortality.
It might include anything, all sort of different emblems,
from a skull perhaps in a portrait or an hourglass,
or a ticking watch.
Or it might include, indeed rotting fruit,
or perfect fruit with a fly at the edge,
thatjust be rotting,
and ultimately will become,
as we will, flesh will rot and go into the ground.
Okay, finished.
In the 16th and 17th centuries,
people wanted to have something on the wall
thatjust kept their own pride in check,
that kept their humility saying
I'm still a humble person
whose awareness of their own mortality is there.
Throughout history,
the awareness that our time is limited,
that our life will eventually end,
has driven humans to search for a way out.
For centuries, religions have provided one.
At the heart of religion,
practically all the world's religions,
there is the offer of eternal life,
time without end.
This is Wells Cathedral in Somerset.
For the past 800 years,
every Christian
who's walked in here
has been reminded that their soul is immortal.
So I imagine that the promise of eternal life
was a powerful incentive for the people who worshipped here.
From their bible, they knew that god controlled time.
They read that Adam had reached over 900 years of age,
and Methuselah, the oldest, he lived to be 969 years.
So they knew god had the power over earthly time.
And they believed that god could grant them an infinite life extension.
It was essential that graveyards be placed close by,
so that the living and the dead were almost side by side.
To the medieval mind,
death was viewed as a - as a phase,
as nothing but a natural continuation of life.
The problem today, though,
is that many of us are more sceptical.
To get everlasting life in heaven
you have to trust that heaven actually exists.
Speaking as a scientist
I think that there is a problem
with regards to the after life and religious immortality.
And that is there's no proof that it exists.
Remarkable claims require remarkable proof.
But maybe you don't need proof.
Well, I do.
I'm with Woody Allen when he said,
'I don't want to live on in my work, I want to live on in my apartment.'
We've spent thousands of years in our quest for more time,
searching for the philosopher's stone,
and dreaming of immortality.
And yet, biologically,
culturally and even psychologically,
we are prepared for death.
But do we have to take it as inevitable?
Are all animals, including us, programmed to die?
Because if that's so,
it means that all our cravings,
all our yearnings for magic potions and the fountain of youth,
they're all doomed to failure.
But there might just be a glimmer of hope,
because scientists are beginning to discover
something that might finally offer a very real prospect of unlimited time.
Right from the start, the creation of a new life is amazing.
Our cells divide
and grow into a body that will mature and develop
and ultimately reproduce.
It's clear that we are programmed to live.
But we are now discovering that we might not be programmed to die.
Paul Nurse is a Nobel Prize winning biologist
who has spent a career studying the deepest mechanisms of life.
Every living organism has a certain lifespan.
I mean, whether it's two years for a mouse or longer for other mammals.
So it seems as if there is a - a - a programme
which erm, specifies how long we're going to live.
That - that's what most people used to think.
But that view has recently been turned on its head.
Paul Nurse works on yeast, a tiny micro-organism.
It's just a single cell, but it has a remarkable property.
Yeast cells are immortal.
They keep going.
They'll keep growing and dividing
erm, for as long as they have something to feed on.
Big deal, you might say.
A colony of yeast cells lives forever?
So what?
But in 1985, Paul Nurse had a startling idea.
Perhaps the same mechanism could exist in humans.
Going from yeast to humans is a huge leap.
We last shared a on ancestor erm, 1,500 million years ago.
So this is a gigantic leap in evolutionary time.
His team transplantedhuman genes into a damaged yeast cell.
And incredibly,
the yeast cells could use the human genes to carry on living indefinitely.
In one experiment
we'd shown yeasts and humans worked the same way.
1.5 billion years of evolution, and they still work the same way.
So that now begins to look as if
the programme isn't quite so inevitable.
It turns out that a programme for death just isn't there.
The only plan in our genes is for life.
What's just as remarkable is that the same is true for ageing.
There are genes that build us to maturity,
but no genes that directly age us.
There's no clock that charts our decline.
But you know, in reality
I know that every part of me is getting older.
My hair, my skin, my muscles, every part of me is ageing.
But why?
I mean, what's the problem?
It's this that holds the key to extending our lifetime.
Because if ageing isn't programmed in,
perhaps it could be reversed, or even avoided altogether.
All we need is to understand exactly why we age.
You know, my hair used to be black.
I have tiny cells that manufactured the black pigment,
but as the years went by these cells simply stopped making it.
So my hair turned white.
Over time the collagen framework that supports my skin begins to deform.
As the cells beneath it start making the wrong proteins.
So my skin collapses into wrinkles.
What's happening is that my cells are accumulating damage
which stops them from working properly.
And it's happening right through my body.
We do have extraordinary repair mechanisms.
But over time there's simply too much cellular damage to be repaired.
Take our bones.
The interior honeycomb that gives them strength suffers wear and tear.
In our youth, this gets repaired,
but as we get older the repair mechanism is overwhelmed
and our bones become thin and brittle.
It turns out that we are ageing
just because our cells are too damaged to work properly.
It's not programmed in, itjust happens.
Ageing is not even directly related to how old we are.
If that was so, we would all age at exactly the same rate.
So at this clinic,
they're going to run some tests to see how time-worn my body is.
They're going to calculate my biological age.
Here's your urine sample.
Okay.
Just put it there.
Today you're going to have your biological age system assessment,
and that means that we will be checking your true age.
Now, your true age is actually your body's age.
Here at HB health, we do a biological age testing called Inner Age,
that will comprise your urine sample,
erm, some physical testing and some blood testing.
Okay.
So I'm a guinea pig, in other words, right?
- Yes. - Okay.
Gee, you know, I kind of wonder what age I'll turn out to be.
I think I'm pretty much at the age where I really am.
I'm 58.
I'll find out my biological age when the results come through.
You work out, don't you?
So this is it, the moment of truth.
This is when I get to find out how old I am on the inside.
Here we have the different parts of the body,
and the biological age listed.
My actual age is 58,
and they think I'm 50, which is good.
Which is great.
But what is really strange
is that they think different parts of my body have wildly different ages.
In terms of hand grip, in terms of strength -
well it says here,
very embarrassingly enough, 72 years of age.
Skin elasticity,
ah yes, now we're talking about beauty
25 years of age.
Well, I think this is pretty bizarre.
Er, my left had and my right hand are off by 30 years in terms of age.
So how can that be?
Not only is there no programme for ageing,
but it doesn't even happen in a regular way over time.
What's become obvious to me
is that if you really want to get a handle on the ageing process
we have to get down inside of us,
down to the microscopic level.
And there's a clue deep within a seemingly unlikely source,
because scientists have,
until recently,
been mystified about how one class of animals manages to live so long.
The birds.
These are - are black headed caiques, and they're very mischievous.
As you can see, given time, they will let themselves out.
Oh, look at that.
For many animals,
if you are small you live fast and die young,
but not birds.
For their size, they can live a heck of a long time.
And how old are they?
These are three years old.
They live usually between sort of 28 and 30 years.
That's ten times longer than a mouse, even though it's about the same size.
Amazing.
But the granddaddy of this aviary is Louis, an African grey.
He's 71 years of age.
A bit crotchety now and then, but still going strong.
He's outlived three owners.
And the latest theory
about what's keeping him alive is that like all birds
his cells have one component that is incredibly efficient.
They are the mitochondria.
All animal cell have them.
Miniature power stations that pump out energy night and day.
That energy is vital to life,
but unfortunately dangerous particles leak out of the mitochondria.
These are the so-called free radicals
that many anti-ageing diets talk about.
And it's these that damage the cells.
They crash into vital DNA,
corrupting the instructions that tell the cells how to operate:
The very information the cell needs to continue working properly.
And recent research
suggests that birds leak at least ten times fewer free radicals than mice.
So they age about ten times slower.
So what about us?
On the one hand, we too
generate free radicals that create genetic damage,
but we have a fantastic defence mechanism,
much better than that of the house, even better than the birds.
But the trouble is, even that's not enough.
Not all the free radicals are soaked up,
not all the rubbish is cleared away,
not all the damaged genes are repaired.
So we age.
It's as simple as that.
So finally we understand exactly why we age.
Even though we're not programmed to age,
it seems that time will always get us in the end.
At least that's what we always thought.
Until now.
The thing that would give us
some prospect of escaping the prison of time
would be an animal that isn't ruled by the clock.
And marine biologists off the coast of California
think they may have found one.
The animal that we're looking for lives on the sea bottom.
They move with feet.
They also have spines.
Dr Tom Ebert has spent his whole career
studying the lifespan of sea urchins.
Initially he thought they lived maybe six or seven years.
What finally turned this upside down
was the sea urchins' reaction to a cataclysmic event.
The fallout from Pacific Ocean nuclear testing after World War Two
left its effects in the skeletons of animals that were living at the time.
They discovered traces of that radioactivity
in the jaws of adult sea urchins still alive now.
Yet that bomb went off 50 years ago.
The animal has to be much, much older than 50 years.
From this radioactive benchmark deposited in the 1940s,
they can trace them all the way back to their birth.
And that caused another shock.
The individual that was analysed was clearly
well over a hundred and probably closer to 150 years.
That - that was - that was pretty amazing.
Yeah, I was - I was surprised.
I didn't think that that was going to be the case.
Now, it's even - it's even better than that,
because they appear to be leading a very vibrant life way into old age
without any indication of ageing at all.
Incredible.
Here's an animal that appears to have cracked the ageing process.
It lives outside time.
At the moment, no one knows how the sea urchin does it,
but at least we now know it's possible,
and the key must lie in its genes.
So it seems that the secret to holding back time
might be closer to discovery than we thought.
Throughout history
we have sought the elixir of life
in exotic elements with supposedly magical powers.
But the very latest science
is showing that the secret of controlling
how we age might be inside us.
The key is the mass of genetic data that is now being discovered.
Here we are.
We're at the Buck Institute for Age Research, north of San Francisco.
This is where the action's taking place.
A hundred top scientists focusing in on one question:
Can we tease apart the molecular
and genetic basis of the ageing process.
Ironically,
to study lifespan you need to find animals that live and die quickly.
In Gordon Lithgow's lab,
they look at how the genes of a tiny worm
called the nematode control its lifespan.
We can isolate mutations, naturally occurring mutations,
in individual genes.
This is an animal with 19,000 genes,
but changing just one of those genes can double the lifespan.
These worms usually live for 20 days.
This is an old guy, 19 days old.
Tissues are degenerating,
moving very slowly,
he's not eating much,
hasn't reproduced now for about ten days,
and there's an accumulation of-
of all sorts of protein and lipid damage here.
So the lab breeds worms
that have had one of their genes changed or mutated.
Most of the mutations are harmful to the worm.
Butjust occasionally
changing a single gene has an astonishing effect.
It enhances the worm's self-repair mechanisms
and enables it to live much longer.
So this guy is also 19 days old and,
you know, he certainly looks old, but he's actually doing a bit better.
They're a bit more vigorous moving around a bit more.
And it has a mutation in - in one of the 18,000 genes in the nematode,
and this mutation, it makes the animal resistant to stress
and also, it seems - so far anyway - is making it longer lived.
So er, it's, a 1548 or something
and er, we'll check out what that is
and it looks like an interesting new gene.
What Gordon just told us is nothing less than amazing.
I mean, think about it:
Manipulating a few genes here
and changing the lifespan of another organism.
And we're not talking about creating a new kind of organism,
we're talking about activating genes that are already here,
prodding them, getting them to activate.
And these genes, these genes are in us as well.
It's now possible
to breed worms that can live six times longer than normal.
The next step is to move on to mammals.
First mice, and then maybe, humans.
It's the holy grail.
Think of this: Mice and humans are 97 per cent genetically identical.
Mice live three years, humans live 100 years.
And somewhere in that three per cent of genes are regulators
that determine the pace at which these two pretty similar organisms age.
We know that we can tweak them in mice.
We don't get huge increases in lifespan, but we do.
And there's a good chance if it works for flies
and it works for worms and it works for mice,
a good chance it'll work for us.
Biologists here and all over the world
may be on the way to cracking the secrets of ageing.
Perhaps at long last
we should be taking very seriously
the idea that we could live a lot longer than we do now.
But that raises another question:
How much time do we need?
150 years?
200 years?
How much time are we going to get with this new kind of technology?
And there's still one thing missing,
because we don'tjust want more time,
but more time when we are young and healthy.
We need to postpone ageing, to drink from the fountain of youth.
And there is one scientist,
a theoretical biologist from Cambridge,
who believes that even this may be possible.
I think ageing can be postponed indefinitely fairly soon.
And the reason I think that is because I think I know how to do it.
Aubrey De Grey's theory is based
not on merely slowing the ageingprocess down,
he's confident that we can actually reverse it.
He believes by the time this girl's generation reaches their fifties,
science could have discovered how to rejuvenate them.
What we expect to be able to do
is to take people who are 55 or 60 maybe
and rejuvenate them back to maybe 40.
And so it's going to take them another 20 years
or maybe a little longer
before they get back to being biologically 60.
In that 20 years we can improve the therapies,
so that some of the things we couldn't fix
we now know how to fix.
It means that we're basically solving problems
faster than they are catching up with us.
De Grey believes that his theory could become a reality
because right now biology is on a roll.
Worldwide, hundreds of biologists are searching for ageing cures.
And they're starting to find answers.
If he's right,
it would only be freak accidents that would prevent full-blown immortality.
People are still going to be mortal.
People - there's not going to be immortality
in the biblical sense from this.
People are still going to die from things
that have nothing to do with how old they are,
like crossing the road carelessly, or homicide or whatever.
And on average,
it looks as though the risk of dying
from those causes stays the same as it is now
people will live to around a thousand, maybe a couple of thousand.
Humans living for a couple of thousand years?
This would be one of the most radical interventions in human life
that science could ever achieve,
with profound social consequences for future generations.
Do we really want it?
Every day about 150,000 people die,
and out of those 150,000 about two thirds,
about 100,000
die of causes that young people basically never die of.
Which means, one way or another, they die of ageing.
So if we really do all this,
if we really postpone ageing indefinitely,
we will be saving 100,000 lives a day.
So if you are worried about inequality
or how will we pay the pensions
or wouldn't we get bored or whatever it might be,
my answer to you is not these problems are silly problems.
What's silly is to suggest that they're problems on a scale
thatjustifies condemning 100,000 people a day
to an unnecessarily early death forever.
Okay, so let's have some wishful thinking.
Just imagine for the moment that Aubrey De Grey is right.
In some near future, science has developed the elixir of life.
A potion that will completely cure ageing
and keep you young forever.
Imagine for the moment being able to stop the clock,
being 18, 25, 35, all over again.
Wouldn't that be absolutely incredible?
However, I warn you,
there's one question still unanswered about immortality,
and that is - would you drink this?
I could do with a little more time,
but 200 years or even like 100 years is a pretty long time I think.
I'm happy right now.
So yes, I guess I would drink this elixir of life.
Would I be the first one trying it?
I think life would become mundane.
I think that human emotions would suffer profoundly.
Sure, absolutely.
I like life and er, I'd be quite happy to live an awful lot more of it.
Too sad when all my loved ones pass, too sad when my world disappears.
Already I'm sick of everything.
I'm not saying I wouldn't,
but I'd need to think really carefully about it.
I'd have to think back and see what my best age was
now that I've reached this age.
It'd be so boring to live forever.
It would just be awful I think.
I think it would be great
if everyone had to live with the consequences of their actions.
I think the problem is, humans die too soon.
I'd rather die really.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, I think that what makes life
so worthy is that at the end we die, we all go.
So this is what makes it so extraordinary.
I was surprised
that more young people didn't want to drink from the elixir of life,
but then again young people think they're Peter Pan.
The live forever.
Just wait till they're 70 years of age and they feel their mortality.
But as for me
would I drink from the fountain of youth?
Sure.