The Orange County Register

IRVINE, Calif. – In 400 years, people will live to be 1,000.

Michael R. Rose knows his prediction sounds ridiculous. To most people, it probably seems unbelievable.

But, after working on aging for 30 years, the University of California-Irvine professor and scientist says we’ll be playing golf in our 900s. He says aging is not what most people think it is. It’s not wear and tear. We’ve evolved to have robust bodies in youth, able to survive and breed. Natural selection cares less as we grow older.

Rose was 22 years old when he figured out how to breed fruit flies that lived longer. It was the kind of moment scientists dream of. The stuff of history books.

“The movement’s started,” Rose says. “It’s waiting for something that works.”

Now 50, Rose has seen death become horrifyingly personal, stealing someone close to him. The clock is ticking for him to find the solution he’s been looking for. He’s not going to live to be 1,000. But something in his research, he says, could be bubbling up. Even the skeptics might find it interesting.

Solving the problem of old age wasn’t on Rose’s to-do list at age 22. He thought trying to postpone death was for quacks and hopeless optimists.

Rose had no idea death would soon intervene.

He was working in England at the University of Sussex, experimenting on fruit flies. One night, at 3 a.m., Rose’s mother appeared at his door. His brother, Tim, had killed himself. He was 20 years old.

“People around me started to die,” Rose says. “I thought, “Wow, this is really bad.’ That feeling over time has deepened.”

Soon after the suicide, Rose started a secret experiment. He only let his fruit flies reproduce at old ages. The idea: if you delay reproduction in several generations of flies, natural selection stays stronger later in life.

Reproduction was like a timer for aging, and Rose was pushing it back.

On a beautiful, sunny day in 1979, Rose sat on a bench, analyzing data by hand. He plotted his results into his lab book. They floored him. He walked up one floor to his adviser’s office.

“You have to look at this,” Rose says.

The flies evolved over many generations to live longer. Aging could be postponed.

“That was the all-time most exciting hour of my scientific career,” Rose says. “You could compare it to losing your virginity or getting married – the first time.”

Rose presides over four labs housing millions of fruit flies. That’s where his dreams live.

You’ve heard of Edison. Pasteur. They took science and made it practical. Electricity. Antibiotics. Rose hopes to do the same with aging.

“That’s a dream,” he says. “I’m not confident about that.”

No, it’s not about breeding people or having sex later in life. Women who delay having children would have to wait centuries before their descendants lived longer. He wants to use his knowledge to find drugs that slow intruders that stop life, like cancer or Alzheimer’s.

He won’t reap most of the effects of his life’s work. His hair is graying. His health is not perfect.

But in the field of aging, Rose is an icon.

Fantasists in search of the fountain of youth have assailed him for not doing enough. Moralists chastise him for trying to play God.

“I get attacked by both sides. To me, it’s always been about the data,” he says.

One scientist who Rose considers on the fringe of aging research is Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist at the University of Cambridge.

“(Rose) has really spearheaded the respectability of intervention,” de Grey says. “He has not been afraid to go on television and say we can eliminate aging.”

Rose knows what he has to say is controversial. It contradicts popular assumptions. “A lot of things that happen in science are paradoxical,” Rose says.

That’s why he loves “Alice in Wonderland.” The book is full of seemingly contradictory statements, ideas that defy common sense but are true.

Rose has a mug on his desk with an illustration of the Cheshire Cat. “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat!”

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Rose now advises his own students, like Molly Burke, 23.

His eyes light up as he talks about Burke’s first scientific breakthrough a few days before.

Her work could lay the foundation for freezing people and bringing them back to life, Rose says.

Watching her reminds him of that sunny Sussex day when he was 22.

Rose doesn’t expect another moment like that in his life. Most scientists have their best ideas in youth, he says.

“Oh, yeah, I miss those days,” he says. “It’s like going back in time.”

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For decades, Rose has been using science to answer questions about aging.

Now, in his lab at the University of California-Irvine, he’s trying to prolong life.

It’s a technology that will work for people alive today.

There is no magic bullet. There is no fountain of youth. But in five to 10 years, life could look a little bit like this:

You drink two glasses of anti-aging mixer in the morning, and two at night.

“I don’t know the ingredient list,” Rose says. “I’m pretty committed to finding out.”

Rose and pharmacologist Mahtab Jafari are testing on fruit flies every drug imaginable for anti-aging properties and harmful side effects.

If Rose is right, he might get an extra decade to live.

His graduate student might get two or three.

“You can’t be in the NFL anymore. You can’t be Britney Spears,” Rose says. But you can be middle-aged for a long, long time, if that’s what you want.

“People will look back on the 20th century as one of the last ages where you could fall apart without anybody doing anything about it,” Rose says.

“I figure this project will go on for 200 years. I don’t expect to be around.”

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(c) 2006, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).

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PHOTO (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): SCI-LONGEVITY

AP-NY-01-13-06 0614EST

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