Dr Chris Faulkes is standing in his laboratory, tenderly caressing what looks like a penis. It's not his penis, nor mine, and it's definitely not that of the only other man in the room, VICE photographer Chris. But at four inches long with shrivelled skin that's veiny and loose, it looks very penis-y. Then, with a sudden squeak, it squirms in his hand as if trying to break free, revealing an enormous set of Bugs Bunny teeth protruding from the tip.
"This," says Faulkes, "is a naked mole rat, though she does look like a penis with teeth, doesn't she? Or a sabre-tooth sausage. But don't let her looks fool you – the naked mole rat is the superhero of the animal kingdom."
I'm with Faulkes in his lab at Queen Mary, University of London. Faulkes is an affable guy with a ponytail, telltale tattoos half-hidden under his T-shirt sleeve and a couple of silver goth rings on his fingers. A spaghetti-mess of tubes weave about the room, like a giant gerbil maze, through which 12 separated colonies of 200 naked mole rats scurry, scratch and squeak. What he just said is not hyperbole. In fact, the naked mole rat shares more than just its looks with a penis: where you might say the penis is nature's key to creating life, this ugly phallus of a creature could be mankind's key to eternal life.
"Their extreme and bizarre lifestyle never ceases to amaze and baffle biologists, making them one of the most intriguing animals to study," says Faulkes, who has devoted the past 30 years of his life to trying to understand how the naked mole rat has evolved into one of the most well-adapted, finely-tuned creatures on Earth. "All aspects of their biology seem to inform us about other animals, including humans, particularly when it comes to healthy ageing and cancer resistance."
Similarly-sized rodents usually live for about five years. The naked mole rat lives for 30. Even into their late twenties, they hardly seem to age, remaining fit and healthy with robust heartbeats, strong bones, sharp minds and high fertility. They don't seem to feel pain and, unlike other mammals, they almost never get cancer.
In other words, if humans lived as long, relative to body size, as naked mole rats, we would last for 500 years in a 25-year-old's body. "It's not a ridiculous exaggeration to suggest we can one day manipulate our own biochemical and metabolic pathways with drugs or gene therapies to emulate those that keep the naked mole rat alive and healthy for so long," says Faulkes, stroking his animal. "In fact, the naked mole rat provides us the perfect model for human ageing research across the board, from the way it resists cancer to the way its social systems prolong its life."
Over the centuries a long line of optimists, alchemists, hawkers and pop stars have hunted various methods of postponing death, from drinking elixirs of youth to sleeping in hyperbaric chambers. The one thing those people have in common is that all of them are dead. Still, the anti-ageing industry is bigger than ever. In 2013, its global market generated more than £150 billion [€190 billion EUR]. By 2018 it will hit £216 billion [€274 billion EUR], thanks mostly to huge investment from Silicon Valley billionaires and Russian oligarchs who've realised the only way they could possibly spend all their money is by living forever. Even Google wants in on the action, with Calico, its $1.5 billion [€1,27 billion] life-extension research centre whose brief is to reverse-engineer the biology that makes us old or, as Time magazine put it, to "cure death". It's a snowballing market that some are branding "the internet of healthcare". But on whom are these savvy entrepreneurs placing their bets? After all, the race for immortality has a wide field.
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In an office not far from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, with a beard to his belt buckle and a ponytail to match, British biomedical gerontologist Aubrey De Grey is enjoying the growing clamour about conquering ageing, or "senescence", as he calls it. His charity, the SENS Research Foundation, has enjoyed a bumper few years thanks to a £415,000-a-year [€526,000-a-year] investment from Paypal cofounder and immortality motormouth Peter Thiel ("Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead"). Though he says the foundation's £4 million [€5 million] annual budget can still "struggle" to support its growing workload.
According to the Cambridge-educated scientist, the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-ageing therapies already exists. He argues that the seven biochemical processes that cause the damage which accumulates during old age have been discovered, and if we can counter them we can, in theory, halt the ageing process. Indeed, he not only sees ageing as a medical condition that can be cured, but believes that the "first person to live to 1,000 is alive today". If that sounds like the ramblings of a crackpot weird-beard, hear him out; Dr De Grey's run the numbers.
"If you look at the maths it is very straightforward," he says. "All we are saying here is that it's quite likely that within the next 20 or 30 years, we will develop medicines that can rejuvenate people faster than time is passing. It's not perfect yet, but soon we'll take someone aged 60 and fix them up well enough that they won't be 60 again, biologically, for another 30 years. In that period, therapies will improve such that we'll be able to rejuvenate them again so they won't be 60 for a third time until they are chronologically 150, and so on. If we can stay one step ahead of the problem, people won't die of ageing any more."
"Like immortality?" I ask. Dr De Grey sighs: "That word is the bane of my life. People who use that word are essentially making fun of what we do, as if to maintain an emotional distance from it so as not to get their hopes up. I don't work on 'curing death', I work on keeping people healthy. And, yes, I understand that success in my work could translate into an important side effect of people living longer. But to 'cure death' implies the elimination of all causes, including, say, dying in car accidents. And I don't think there's much we could do to survive an asteroid apocalypse."
So instead, De Grey focuses on the things we can avoid dying from, like hypertension, cancer, Alzeimer's and other age-related illnesses. His goal is not immortality, but "radical life extension". He says traditional medicines won't wind back the hands of our body clocks – we need to manipulate our make up on a cellular level, like using bacterial enzymes to flush out molecular "garbage" that accumulates in the body, or tinkering with our genetic coding to prevent the growth of cancers, or any other disease.