Chapter 0: From Novice to Navigator - Fraser Stewart-Connell
A Prelude to Longevity Exploration; Building an LLM to Explore UI for Elderly Accessibility
Chapter 0: not quite a prologue✒️
“Longevity”, when did you first hear it?
How many of us remember what our journey into longevity looked like?
At LongX we often highlight youth in longevity who are flourishing and contributing today, we can’t help but wonder about those just setting foot on this journey. What is their past, what opinions do they represent, and how will their actions echo across the canvas of tomorrow?
In our latest interview series “Chapter 0“, we’re documenting the experience of people and students fresh to the longevity field as they embark into this exciting world for the first time. As explorers with a few years under our belt, it’s something we wistfully wish we did for ourselves. Now all we can do is look back at misconceptions we held, smile at all the wonderful people we’ve met over time, and gawk at just how much of the aging biology literature we still haven’t read.
But as William Arthur Ward once said,
To make mistakes is human; to stumble is commonplace; to be able to laugh at yourself is maturity.
Reflecting on where we have come from has helped us appreciate where we are now, and where we want to be next. Thus, we’re more than happy to help guide another fellow longevity enthusiast along. But you might wonder, who is this new soul?
Fraser Stewart-Connell
Born and raised in Scotland, Fraser is an aspiring student. Like many children, his early days were filled with dreams of being an astronaut. While he maintains his interest in topics such as time dilation and space colonization to this day, he is intent on pursuing a different career in longevity. Having graduated high school, he now primarily spends his days preparing for college through online engineering courses.
His long-term interest in futuristic technologies means his free time is spent watching and reading loads of sci-fi. Recommends on his part include books such as The Three Body Problem and Blindsight. As for movies, Interstellar!
With eyes set on an interdisciplinary degree at Heriot-Watt University, where fellow writer Dylan Wintle has started an infrastructure for students interested in longevity, Fraser has a promising future ahead and we look forward to seeing how he develops.
Speaking of time, if you could choose, would you rather travel in the past or the future, and at what point? You can assume you could return to the present.
Past, because if we, in longevity, are successful, I won't need to travel to the future to see it. Seeing the Roman Empire would be nice, in particular.
Introduction to Longevity 🧬
When did you first hear about “longevity”?
The word itself must have popped up in a mundane conversation, but the longevity field itself, I probably encountered 4-5 years ago in YouTube videos and TED Talks I watched in my free time.
Once you knew of it, what made you stay in the longevity space?
In high school, I met Dylan, a longevity enthusiast whom I befriended pretty fast during my first year. Around the end of high school, he became specifically interested in pivoting into longevity, and I decided to do the same. If it wasn’t for Dylan’s influence, I would probably still have my career adjacent to the longevity field, but it is more unlikely I’d be working within it.
What made you choose longevity over any other possible thing?
I had trouble choosing any particular career path. Figuring out what I wanted to do professionally took me longer than most. A lot of stuff interested me but I didn't know where to start on any of it. Ever since I was 12, however, I was kept up by the thought that one day I was going to die. This thought never went away. It simply stuck. Now, I want to give people the chance to choose when they would like to die instead of having it be predetermined. I believe I can help solve it, and if I don’t contribute myself, maybe it won't even be solved within my lifetime. If it is solved within my lifetime, I have all the time in the world to pursue any other career.
Aging and longevity are heavily utilized words in the space, yet they are still loosely and subjectively defined. What is the difference in meaning between aging and longevity, for you?
Aging is about degradation, and longevity, is about prolonging.
The Longevity Field 🎯
Who are some longevity figures you know of?
Bryan Johnson comes to mind first. 2 years ago if you asked anyone, 99% of people wouldn't have an immediate answer. Now, anyone on the street can name Bryan, since he is so public as a biohacker. The negative press he gets is counterbalanced by the value of the data he collects. People haven't really tried or documented what works, but he attempts to do that. I can also name David Sinclair. Aubrey de Grey was also one of the first I looked into when I started my interest in longevity.
What do you think are the root causes of aging?
I don't think there's a specific cause. Rather, it’s a cascade. The longer cells are in operation, the more likely they are to mess up something, then something else, and become cancer or degrade in any other fashion. Now, it’s more about figuring out how degradation happens, but there’s a hard limit in that cells aren't built to last.
There are many theories of aging, what do you believe in?
The main theory that struck me as possibly being the cause of all others centers on cell degradation. From an evolutionary standpoint, hard programming a limit to how long something can live is a less likely theory than believing evolution puts energy into designing cells so they don't break down as long as you can have children. Past reproduction, evolution doesn’t seem to care. Roughly, the cells in your body get replaced every 7 years. There's an indescribable amount of cell divisions that occur in that time, and mutations can arise. As long as you make it to 30-40 and have children, evolutionarily speaking, that seems to be enough.
Longevity Concerns 🤔
When telling people we work in the longevity space, they often argue it is a bad idea. Did you encounter any concerns you consider reasonable?
Common arguments include creating immortal dictators, overpopulation, and damaging the planet, all of which have their merit. Often, dictatorships end because the children of the parent dictator don't have the same scale and it all collapses. As a consequence, if the parent dictator stays alive, it would be a different story. Then, in the context of overpopulation killing the planet, I believe that the human population will balance it out to a sustainable level on a micro scale. Would that happen on the macro scale of the whole planet? We don’t know that. There are some estimates that the human population might balance around 9 billion, and that would be sustainable. Overall, I argue longevity is going to happen anyway at some point. There is no stopping it. Even if no funding was given, longevity was blacklisted on every scientific forum, and it was a completely taboo subject, the technology would eventually get to a point where someone could do it by themselves. The second the cat is out of the bag, it's not getting put back in.
What do you think about the way people frame aging and longevity research nowadays?
People may not enjoy hearing that the goal is to specifically make humanity live longer. People don’t have a problem if you want to cure cancer, even though that makes people live longer on average. In the end, by removing biological limitations – like curing cancer –, even without specifically wanting to expand people’s lifespan, the latter would happen. The medical field exists and as diseases get cured, lifespan is pushed forward and forward. Who knows how long we could live this way? There are hard-set biological limitations, but where is the line between curing disease just for medical purposes and curing aging, because it leads to the disease? They're intertwined.
Longevity is becoming less and less of a taboo. New projects pop up constantly. Most of what is ongoing today didn't exist 10 years ago. Back another 10 years, there's nothing almost, and go another 10, you'd be left off. Acceptance grows. Public consciousness also changed over the last 60 years, with sci-fi becoming far more popular, and media talking and showing futuristic scenarios. Nuclear energy, space colonization, making people live longer, implants, replacement, all of it becomes far more available.
Why do you think aging isn’t viewed as a serious issue to tackle?
A lot of people seem to default to the argument that it's natural and it happens to everyone. Old age and death have been uncomfortable facts we had to live with for hundreds of thousands of years, it's pretty ingrained in the human mind. The past hundred years have seen a lot of advancements for the human lifespan, but until now the topic of effectively curing death has been sci-fi, so talking about it only serves to remind people of their mortality. It'll probably take cultures a very long time to catch up to the fact that talking about death doesn't have to be socially taboo, because it's no longer an inevitability.
What is your perception of companies that sell anti-aging supplements or vitamins? Do they benefit the field?
Those contribute to the field as much as hair tonic contributed to the hair regrowth industry. I believe some off-the-shelf supplements can make you live longer if you take them the right amount – how, for instance, giving mice taurine that is otherwise found in energy drinks increased lifespan by 10% – however, most of the anti-aging creams do nothing.
What is something in the longevity space that needs change?
Public perception is important to work on, along with facilitating networking by building infrastructure to connect people in the field with each other. Not enough people focus on that.
What are some bottlenecks in the field?
On the community side, it's hard for people to know what to do if they want to help. There aren't many resources designed to help connect people in the field with each other. On the technical side, processing power is quite a large bottleneck in longevity research. Finding out if longevity treatments increase health and lifespan requires considerable amounts of time, even when testing on mice. Computationally streamlining work could come in handy.
Should aging research be more focused or more exploratory?
Aging is such a complex problem that no single solution could be viable. If all our efforts went into one method of life extension, we could be missing out on dozens of promising research areas. The complete solution will come by looking at the problem from multiple angles. The human body is incredibly complex, so getting it to run reasonably well for orders of magnitude longer than it's designed to will require collaboration between all corners of the field.
How would you allocate resources in the field? Should more go to research, awareness, raising funds, policy…?
Dedicating funds to awareness and networking right now could pay off massively in the future, by bringing more manpower into the field.
A Life Long Lived ♾️
Picture this hypothetical scenario. You are told that when you are 70, a company can use a reserve of your young, healthy stem cells to design and replace parts of your body to help you live longer. However, to unlock that, you have to cut off your arm and cryopreserve it, to save your immune cells. In the meantime, you’d have to replace your biological arm with a mechanical one. Would you do that?
If in the future it will be possible to have a completely indistinguishable arm replacement, there's no reason I wouldn't do that. With the technology available now, with no sense of touch through an artificial limb and challenges controlling it, it would imply a complete change in my lifestyle, but I would still consider it.
Are there certain interventions you're willing to try yourself, or interventions you would never try?
I would not try anything that has to do with my brain – modifying it, adding anything into it, uploading my consciousness into computers – because we don’t have a good enough idea what consciousness is about for me to be comfortable with it. The entire point is to live. The same goes with cryonics unless I had death as an immediate certainty in front of me. Otherwise, I'm pretty willing to replace most parts of my body.
Do you think somebody who can live up to 200 years old will be born around this time?
They're probably already born. The average human life span increased rapidly over the past 100-200 years, mainly because we eradicated conditions that were killing people – like poverty and starvation – in major first-world countries. It'll probably start to go way up again because of technology and longevity science developing. Aging is a compound problem between a million different things but a lot of little things are consistently getting solved. An example is Greg Fahy and his study on thymus regeneration. Over the course of one year, the age of the involved participants regressed by one and a half years. I think there will soon be a possibility to live to 150 or 200, even beyond.
How do you imagine this person, once they’re 200, living their life?
It depends on the person, and whether society was already structured around people living that long, at the time. We’d need to learn to accept such people into society and find a way to restructure society. It also depends on the resources needed for the population to thrive: industries might have to change, to start building giant vertical farms, and adopting nuclear energy, for instance. Assuming this societal restructuring was already done, people might choose to work for longer. I can’t imagine Fortune 500 workaholic CEO’s changing their lifestyle very much. As for the personal life, there is a risk of stagnation.
Future Hopes 💫
How do you see yourself contributing to the longevity space?
I'm planning to go into robotics, with a minor in biology, and so I see myself working more on mechanical solutions to aging, like replacing organs. Data science is an option too. I'm not a people person, but it’s exciting to be at the front line of what people are trying to develop.
How much of a believer are you in the fact that AI and technology will change the aging field exponentially? How crucial is it to the development of the field?
It’s likely AI will greatly speed up the solution to longevity, because we'll eventually get to a point where the complexity of the solutions to the problems is so vast it would take a group of people years to figure out. With the way AI is evolving, you could feed it the data and have the answer in, say, a month. The possibility of solving the problem without AI exists, but it would be particularly difficult.
What's most exciting for you in the longevity field?
The biological side of curing aging is such a titanic problem it will probably not be solved anytime soon. But for me, the engineering side of things seems promising. Replacement of defective organs is very palpable. Say, if you have heart disease, getting something that can be set in the place of your heart is easily reproducible. A heart does one thing and does it really well; it pumps blood. It is a sort of self-contained thing, which doesn't get much communication from the brain. A lot of organs are like that because, from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense not to overcomplicate things. Things survive if they're simple enough. So you can make a bunch of engineered hearts and transplant them, with no need for patient waiting lists.
When do you think aging will be solved?
I can't give a definitive answer to that, but soon. In my estimation, the first person who will live to be over 200 years old has already been born, and while I can't say the exponential curve of aging research will lead to that person living to 300 and beyond, I can say that there seems to be a pretty good chance of it.
If you are to read this interview in a year, are there any hopes and dreams you wish you achieved by then?
Nothing specifically related to longevity, but generally, looking to do well in an academic setting.
The long term ⏳
Our interview with Fraser took place in February of 2024 and we’ll be doing a “longitudinal” study of sorts with a 1 year follow-up. For anyone new to longevity like himself, Fraser recommends watching as many interviews and lectures from the big names in the field just to get a sense of what’s going on. He emphasizes that it’s not important what exactly you’re studying as every area of expertise can be useful!
If you have any advice for Fraser or resources he should check out, comment below! Otherwise, stay tuned for part 2 of Fraser’s journey into longevity in 2025.