Aubrey de Grey

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“No Limit, No”

July 19, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey has a wife who accepts his two younger girlfriends, so of course he wants to live forever.

His quest for immortality is so fervent it leads him to sometimes make proclamations too bold: In 2004, the scientist said “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” Not likely. De Grey would likely blame the lack of large-scale funding from governments, GMOs and individuals in the research he and other like-minded souls are doing–and he has a point. We waste an awful lot of money on killing that might be better spent on other things, defeating cancer and Alzheimer’s among them. Certainly Silicon Valley has gotten into the game in recent years.

For whatever excesses de Grey and his colleagues are guilty of, I’m with them in the big picture. Those of us today won’t likely live to see the benefits, but what a nice thing to do for our descendants, to give them more time. They’ll probably be able to work through any wrinkles that attend the great benefits.

De Grey just did an AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

Question:

Are there any well-known people who support human longevity? Couldn’t the support of people like Bill Gates or Elon Musk considerably boost funding of any projects?

Aubrey de Grey:

We have support from a few celebrities, such as Steve Aoki and Edward James Olmos, but we definitely need more. Yes, any billionaire would do!

Question:

Has Elon Musk ever spoken with Dr. dr Grey or anyone else from SENS on matters related to radical life extension?

Aubrey de Grey:

Briefly, a decade ago. I’d sure love to speak with him again.

Question:

A question about cancer:

Many people claim that most cancers are lifestyle related.

I sometimes find it difficult to convince these people that funding cancer research is of paramount importance as they tend to be bogged down in an ‘either/or’ way of thinking:

“We should put the emphasis on environmental/lifestyle/societal changes instead of spending even more money on research (…or stuffing people with even more medicines)”

So my question is: out of the ~1,700,000 cancers diagnosed every year in the US, is there a consensus on how many could be avoided with better lifestyle (not smoking, healthy diet, limited exposure to household & cosmetic chemical products, limited exposure to pollution etc.)? 10%? 50? 90?

Aubrey de Grey:

There’s a wide range of opinion; I tend to agree with Bruce Ames that lifestyle matters rather little with the exception of smoking.

We should do our best to remove whatever is present in the environment that might contribute to cancer, no doubt. But still we can’t ever remove all harmful agents 100%. For instance, how can we remove HPV from the environment? We have vaccines to help prevent HPV infections but even those are not effective against every strain. So what do we tell patients with cervical cancer? We cannot focus on just prevention or just therapy. Both should be worked on. Not sure about percentages, but if there is a change you can make to your lifestyle that decreases your chances of getting cancer by 10% then by all means do it!

Question:

Do you think there is a limit to how long you can keep the human body going for, even with aging defeated? i wonder when our brain will run out of room for memories… or maybe we will start erasing old memories once we have reached X number of years old?

Also, and this one’s more personal, do you think supplement pills and vitamin pills and algae powder pills are worth taking if you already have basic food needs and exercise needs fulfilled? i have heard of people not eating as much vegetables because they think the pills make up for it. Are they making a grave error?

Aubrey de Grey:

No limit, no. We already erase memories – it’s called “forgetting”! A varied and balanced diet is always better than relying on supplements.

Question:

I am among the minority of people who have said at a every young age that I want to live a very long time, 150+, but all my friends and family all say they would never want to live that long. How do we change people’s perception of growing old and make them think long term?

Aubrey de Grey:

That’s the wrong thing to try to convince people of. Instead, convince them that the diseases of old age are inseparable from the aspects of age-related ill-health that we don’t label as diseases, so that the only way we’ll ever “cure” Alzheimer’s etc is by defeating the whole lot together. Then they won’t be distracted by the unnerving side-effect that they might end up living a long time.•

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“He Believes People Who Have Already Been Born Could Live For Ten Centuries”

May 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Aubrey de Grey might be right, eventually.

The gerontologist believes someone currently alive will live ten centuries, that immortality is inevitable, if we simply work to make it so. If Homo sapiens persists long enough, that might be true, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. De Grey, after all, said in 2004 that “the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.” If it were so, 72-year-olds everywhere would have a right to be excited, but alas. 

The scientist is still playing the 1,000-year game, as evidenced by an Express article by Jon Austin. The opening:

Dr Aubrey de Grey believes people who have already been born could live for ten centuries because of ongoing research being done into “repairing the effects of ageing.”

He hopes to ultimately create preventative treatments that mean humans would be able to consistently re-repair and live as long as 1,000 years or possible even forever.

British-born Mr de Grey, who graduated from Cambridge University in 1985 insists he is one of very few scientists looking at preventing, rather than slowing down ageing, and is perplexed why there is not huge focus on it.

He told the actuary.com: “To me, ageing was the world’s most important problem. It was so obvious that I never tested the assumption. I always presumed that everyone else thought the same.”

But his theory for repairing ageing has not been widely accepted by peers.

He said: “People have this crazy concept that ageing is natural and inevitable, and I have to keep explaining that it is not.•

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“The Mechanisms Of Aging Can Be Treated”

March 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Aubrey de Grey’s wife hasn’t killed him despite the fact that he lives with his two younger girlfriends, so it’s hard to blame the guy for feeling immortal.

In the 2014 documentary The Immortalists, the radical gerontologist’s fascinating personal and professional lives were on display. In that film, de Grey discussed why he feels we’re close to defeating death, which will allow him to frolic forever in his Northern California idyll with his Eves, but I will (regretfully) argue he’s wrong. I’d like him (and the rest of us) to have eternal life, but I doubt those of us breathing today will know an endless summer. There’s nothing theoretically impossible about, at least, extending life significantly, but it will require time, which is the one thing we don’t have. At any rate, it’s a growth industry with ballooning funding.

From Lucy Ingham at Factor-Tech:

It’s an exciting time to be working in ageing research. New findings are coming thick and fast, and although eliminating the process in humans is still some way away, studies regularly confirm what some have suspected for decades: that the mechanisms of ageing can be treated.

“It’s an amazingly gratifying field to be part of,” says biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer and founder of SENS Research Foundation, the leading organisation tackling ageing. “It moves on almost every week at the moment.”

At the start of February, for example, a study was published that had hugely significant findings for the field.

“There was a big announcement in Nature showing that if you eliminate a certain type of cell from mice, then they live quite a bit longer,” says de Grey. “Even if you do that elimination rather late; in other words when they’re already in middle age.”

For those following the field, this was exciting news, but for de Grey, it was concrete proof that ageing can be combated.

“That’s the kind of thing that I’ve been promoting for a long time, and it’s been coming but it’s been pretty tricky to actually demonstrate directly. This was really completely unequivocal proof of concept,” he says. “So of course it motivates lots of work to identify ways to do the same thing in human beings. These kinds of things are happening all the time now.”•

______________________________

“This is not science fiction.”

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“It’s Extraordinarily Frustrating”

August 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Attempting to reverse aging–even defeat death–seems like science-fiction to most, but it’s just science to big-picture gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who considers himself a practical person. Given enough time it certainly makes sense that radical life-extension will be realized, but the researcher is betting the march toward a-mortality will begin much sooner than expected. It frustrates him to no end that governments and individuals alike usually don’t accept death as a sickness to be treated. Some of those feelings boiled over when he was interviewed by The Insight. An excerpt:

The Insight:

I’m interested in the psychology of people, I guess you can put them into two camps: one doesn’t have an inherent understanding of what you’re doing or saying, and the other camp willingly resign themselves to living a relatively short life.

You’ve talked to a whole wealth of people and come across many counter-opinions, have any of them had any merit to you, have any of them made you take a step back and question your approach?

Aubrey de Grey:

Really, no. It’s quite depressing. At first, really, I was my own only affective critic for the feasibility – certainly never a case or example of an opinion that amounted to a good argument against the desirability of any of this work; that was always 100% clear to me, that it would be crazy to consider this to be a bad idea. It was just a question of how to go about it. All of the stupid things that people say, like, “Where would we put all the people?” or, “How would we pay the pensions?” or, “Is it only for the rich?” or, “Wont dictators live forever?” and so on, all of these things… it’s just painful. Especially since most of these things have been perfectly well answered by other people well before I even came along. So, it’s extraordinarily frustrating that people are so wedded to the process of putting this out of their minds, by however embarrassing their means; coming up with the most pathetic arguments, immediately switching their brains off before realising their arguments might indeed be pathetic.

The Insight:

It might be a very obvious question, but it just sprung to mind – maybe you’ve been asked this before, it’s extremely philosophical and speculative – what do you think happens when you die?

Aubrey de Grey:

Oh, fuck off. I don’t give a damn. I’m a practical kind of guy – I’m not intending to be that experiment.•

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“I Am Quite Sure We Can Outrun Chaos”

August 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think, sadly, that Aubrey de Grey will die soon, as will the rest of us. A-mortality is probably theoretically possible, though I think it will be awhile. But the SENS radical gerontologist has probably done more than anyone to get people to rethink aging as a disease to be cured rather than an inevitability to be endured. In the scheme of things, that paradigm shift has enormous (and hopefully salubrious) implications. De Grey just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

What is the likelihood that someone who is 40 (30? 20? 10?) today will have their life significantly extended to the point of practical immortality? 

Is it a slow, but rapidly rising collusion of things that are going to cause this, or is it something that is going to kind of snap into effect one day?

Will the technology be accessible to everyone, or will it be reserved for the rich?

What are your thoughts on cryonics?

What is your personal preferred method of achieving practical immortality? Nanotechnology? Cyborgs? Something else?

Aubrey de Grey:

I’d put it at 60, 70, 80, 90% respectively.

Kind of snap, in that we will reach longevity escape velocity.

For everyone, absolutely for certain.

Cryonics (not cryogenics) is a totally reasonable and valid research area and I am signed up with Alcor.

Anything that works! – but I expect SENS to get there first.

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Question:

Before defeating aging, what if we were to first defeat cardiovascular disease or cancer or Alzheimer’s disease? Do you think this would be enough to make people snap of of their “pro-aging trance” and be more optimistic about the feasibility & desirability of SENS and other rejuvenation therapies?

EDIT: Do you think people would be more convinced by more cosmetic rejuvenation therapies instead (reversal of hair loss/graying, reduction of wrinkles and spots in the skin)?

Aubrey de Grey:

Not a chance. People’s main problem is that they have a microbe in their brains called “aging” that they think means something distinct from diseases. The only way that will change is big life extension in mice.

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Question:

Long life for our ability to continue to develop ourselves, explore the world, gain knowledge, and create is great. The goal however has different paths, from genetic manipulation to body cyborgization. Some speak of mind uploading but who knows if that’s possible, as mind transfer implies dualism.

Is one preferable over another?

And what is your opinion on the potential of our unstable interconnected world to negatively impact our potential for progress from things like ecological collapse, global warming, etc.? I feel like it’s a race between disaster and scientific progress, can we out run chaos? Or is this a false dichotomy, maybe the future is a world of suffering and a few individuals have military grade cyborg tech.

Aubrey de Grey:

I don’t think mind transfer necessarily implies dualism, and I’m all for exploring all options.

I am quite sure we can outrun chaos.

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Question:

I’ve been learning more and more lately about the work that you do in the fight to end aging, and fully believe that it is both possible and just over the horizon. How can the general public get involved in the fight other than donating?

Aubrey de Grey:

Money is the bottleneck, I’m afraid, so the next best thing to donating is getting others to donate.

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Question:

We really appreciate all your work. Some people have expressed concerns that these anti-aging techniques and treatments won’t be available to everyone, but only to the extremely wealthy. Are there strategies to prevent this?

Aubrey de Grey:

Yes – they are called elections. Those in power want to stay there.•

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“In A World Where Getting Old Is No Longer An Issue, Concerns Will Arise About Population Levels”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Aubrey de Grey operates at the extreme edges of gerontology, believing we won’t just extend life a little but essentially defeat death. But if we could live hundreds of years–or forever–what would this endless summer mean for global population? From Factor-Tech:

In a world where getting old is no longer an issue, concerns will arise about population levels and resources that the planet can provide.

De Grey admits that the world will change dramatically and that the transformation will not necessarily be a smooth one. “There may be some turbulence and obviously the more we can forward plan to minimise that turbulence the better,” he adds.

One UN report, from 2003, predicts that the world’s population could increase to more than 36bn people by 2300 – and that forecast is based on regular life expectancy. If everyone is living for hundreds of years then the resources needed to sustain them would drastically increase.

But this view does not give credit to other technologies that are developing at a faster implementation rate than anti-ageing, and people can have a blinkered view about this.

“They just don’t look at the problem properly so for example, one thing that people hardly ever acknowledge is that the other new technology is going to be around a great deal sooner than this technology, or at least sooner than this technology will have any demographic impact,” de Grey says.

“For example we will have much less carbon footprint because we will have things like better renewable energy and nuclear fusion and so on, so that it will actually be increasing the carrying capacity of the planet far faster than the defeat of ageing could increase the number of people on the planet.”•

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“In The Very Long Term It Is Quite Likely That Non-Biological Solutions Will Dominate Medicine”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A little more about post-aging possibilities from Aubrey de Grey, this time from Matthew Burgess at Factor. The gerontologist believes non-biological devices (implants and such) will enable longevity in a radical way in the future, as hardware continues to shrink, though even someone with his progressive vision thinks these developments aren’t just around the bend. An excerpt:

“The miniaturisation of technologies will eventually result in them dominating medical treatments, enabling us to live longer, leading researcher Aubrey de Grey has said.

He said that in the long term non-biological solutions, which have already played a minor role in the medical world, will significantly influence medical treatments.

However before this he believes there will be biological solutions that will make us healthier and as a side effect make us live longer.

de Grey, who is working to end ageing and is looking at how this can be achieved with the SENS Research Foundation, told Factor: ‘The whole area of what you might call non-biological solutions to medical problems is an area that should certainly never be neglected and has already played a minor role in today’s medical world with things like cochlear implants or for that matter just glasses.

‘So the question then is will this increase? I believe it will, in fact I believe that in the very long term it is quite likely that non-biological solutions will dominate medicine simply because they can and they are more versatile.

‘But I think that is going to be a long time coming. It is going to be driven largely by miniaturisation I think. It may very well be that software improvements to do with artificial intelligence for example will play a roll there.'”

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“We Crave A Concrete Idea Of What Real Anti-Aging Medication Could Consist Of”

September 1, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who believes the summers can be endless, sat for an interview with Marty Nomko of Psychology Today. An excerpt:

“Question:

You and those at your foundation and allied scientists believe there’s a 50 percent chance that your proposed strategies for repairing age-related cell damage will come to fruition within 20 to 25 years. What’s your evidence for that?

Aubrey de Grey: 

It’s the same kind of evidence that any pioneering technologist has: We have a concrete idea of what real anti-aging medication would consist of plus detailed knowledge of what technology already exists that constitutes the starting-points for developing that medication. So we have a reasonable sense of how hard it is to get from here to there and thus how long it will probably take.

Question:

That sounds like a blend of evidence and gut feeling.

Aubrey de Grey: 

It’s a different sort of evidence than what basic scientists use to make progress in understanding nature but it’s exactly the way technologists always work in devising new ways to manipulate nature.”

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“The Human Body Is A Machine”

May 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who aims high and communicates well, always makes for good copy, whether you agree or not with his optimistic view of human life without death. From an interview by Gian Volpicelli at Vice:

“Question:

Do you think that people may be starting to think that ageing is the real enemy?

Aubrey de Grey:

I do think so, yes. The things that I’ve been saying for years are finally beginning to get understood. People are understanding that diseases of old age are not really diseases: They are aspects of ageing, side effects of being alive. If you want to cure them, what you’ll have to cure is to be alive in the first place—but you can’t actually do it. So we’ll have to take a preventative maintenance approach. That means that we’ll have to identify the various types of molecular and cellular damage that the body does to itself as a side effect of its normal metabolic operation. Once you’ve identified them, which has already been done, you have to find a way to repair that damage and prevent it from developing into a pathology of old age. That’s what I’m working on.

Question:

What are you really trying to achieve? Longevity or immortality?

Aubrey de Grey:

Well, first of all, any longevity benefit that I may achieve would be a side effect. I don’t work on longevity, I work on health. And it just happens that, historically, the main thing that kills people is…not being healthy. So healthier people will likely live longer.

Question:

How much longer?

Aubrey de Grey:

It depends on how much longer we can keep people healthy. The best we can say at the moment is that the human body is a machine. Therefore, it ought to be the case that we can have the same kind of impact on the human body that we already have now on simple manmade machines, like cars. So, as I said, we can rely on preventative maintenance: repairing any damage before it makes the doors fall off. It seems to work really well with cars; we’ve got one-hundred-year-old cars around now. So, if you do sufficient maintenance, the sky’s the limit. We should be able to maintain the human body in good health indefinitely, however long we like.

Question:

So…it’s immortality, right?

Aubrey de Grey:

Don’t use the word immortality when you talk about my work. It’s taken; it’s a religious word. Immortality means zero risk of death from any cause, but I don’t work on stopping people from being hit by trucks. I work on keeping them healthy.”•

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“Aging Is Just Another Disease”

May 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Gerontologist/optimist Aubrey de Grey believes someone alive in 2014 will live to 1000 years old, and I bet it ends up being Donald Sterling. He’ll be 850 years old with a 600-year-old mistress because he likes them much, much younger.

Technology may be that close to (largely) defeating death or de Grey may see the future as almost being here when it’s still in the far distance. From Charlotte Allen at the Weekly Standard:

“The British-born de Grey, with a doctorate in biology from Cambridge, is also the single most colorful figure in the living-forever movement, where colorful figures generously abound. “I look as though I’m in my 30s,” he informed me after we settled, first into a cluttered conference room dominated by an enormous scribbled-over whiteboard, and then into a low-ceilinged lounge whose mélange of hard-bounce chairs and sofas looks as though it was scrounged from sidewalk discards. And maybe he does look that young, but it’s hard to tell, because his waist-length, waterfall-style beard​—​a de Grey trademark​—​gives him the look of an extremely spry Methuselah, who, according to the Bible, made it only to 969 years. De Grey is actually of the phenotype Ageless British Eccentric: English Rose cheeks, piercing blue eyes, and someone-please-make-him-a-sandwich slenderness; his tomato-red shirt and gray slacks hang from angular shoulders and legs. Bony frames that verge on gauntness are a hallmark of the living-forever movement, most of whose members hew to severe dietary restrictions in order to prolong their lives while they wait for science to catch up with death. De Grey, by contrast, claims to eat whatever he likes and also to drink massive quantities of carb-loaded English ale, working it all off by punting on the River Cam in the four months a year he spends doing research back at Cambridge. (During the rest of the year he lives in Los Gatos, a picturesque Victorian town in the Santa Cruz Mountains 14 miles southeast of Mountain View.)

De Grey subscribes to the reigning theory of the live-forever movement: that aging, the process by which living things ultimately wear themselves out and die, isn’t an inevitable part of the human condition. Instead, aging is just another disease, not really different in kind from any of the other serious ailments, such as heart failure or cancer, that kill us. And as with other diseases, de Grey believes that aging has a cure or series of cures that scientists will eventually discover. ‘Aging is a side effect of being alive,’ he said during our interview. ‘The human body is exactly the same as a car or an airplane. It’s a machine, and any machine, if you run it, will effect changes on itself that require repairs. Living systems have a great deal of capacity for self-repair, but over time some of those changes only accumulate very slowly, so we don’t notice them until we are very old.'”

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“Retirement Will Be A Periodic Thing”

October 8, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Following up on yesterday’s post about biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, an excerpt from “The Invincible Man,” a 2007 Washington Post profile by Joel Garreau of the scientist who believes we can conquer aging:

“At midday in George Washington University’s Kogan Plaza off H Street NW, you are surrounded by firm, young flesh. Muscular young men saunter by in sandals, T-shirts and cargo shorts. Young blond women sport clingy, sleeveless tops, oversize sunglasses and the astounding array of subtle variations available in flip-flops and painted toenails.

Is this the future? you ask de Grey.

‘Yes, it is precisely the future,’ he says. ‘Except without people who look as old as you and me.’

‘Of course the world will be completely different in all manner of ways,’ de Grey says of the next few decades. His speech is thick, fast and mellifluous, with a quality British accent.

‘If we want to hit the high points, number one is, there will not be any frail elderly people. Which means we won’t be spending all this unbelievable amount of money keeping all those frail elderly people alive for like one extra year the way we do at the moment. That money will be available to spend on important things like, well, obviously, providing the health care to keep us that way, but that won’t be anything like so expensive. Secondly, just doing the things we can’t afford now, giving people proper education and not just when they’re kids, but also proper adult education and retraining and so on.

‘Another thing that’s going to have to change completely is retirement. For the moment, when you retire, you retire forever. We’re sorry for old people because they’re going downhill. There will be no real moral or sociological requirement to do that. Sure, there is going to be a need for Social Security as a safety net just as there is now. But retirement will be a periodic thing. You’ll be a journalist for 40 years or whatever and then you’ll be sick of it and you’ll retire on your savings or on a state pension, depending on what the system is. So after 20 years, golf will have lost its novelty value, and you’ll want to do something else with your life. You’ll get more retraining and education, and go and be a rock star for 40 years, and then retire again and so on.’

The mind reels. Will we want to be married to the same person for a thousand years? Will we need religion anymore? Will the planet fill to overflowing?”

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“The Average Life Expectancy Of Medical Immortals Would Be 5,775 Years”

May 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Do You Really Want to Live Forever?” Ronald Bailey’s Reason review of Stephen Cave’s new book, Immortality, which sees the defeat of death as a Pyrrhic victory: 

“Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating physical death? This is the goal of transhumanists like theoretical biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey who has devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) program. SENS technologies would include genetic interventions to rejuvenate cells, stem cell transplants to replace aged organs and tissues, and nano-machines to patrol our bodies to prevent infections and kill nascent cancers. Ultimately, Cave cannot argue that these life-extension technologies will not work for individuals but suggests that they would produce problems like overpopulation and environmental collapse that would eventually subvert them. He also cites calculations done by a demographer that assuming aging and disease is defeated by biomedical technology accidents would still do in would-be immortals. The average life expectancy of medical immortals would be 5,775 years.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“In Ten Years We’ll Have A Pill That Will Give You Twenty Years”

August 10, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Life extension predictions that seem too optimistic, from “The Coming Death Shortage,” Charles C. Mann’s provocative 2005 Atlantic article:

“In the past century U.S. life expectancy has climbed from forty-seven to seventy-seven, increasing by nearly two thirds. Similar rises happened in almost every country. And this process shows no sign of stopping: according to the United Nations, by 2050 global life expectancy will have increased by another ten years. Note, however, that this tremendous increase has been in average life expectancy—that is, the number of years that most people live. There has been next to no increase in the maximum lifespan, the number of years that one can possibly walk the earth—now thought to be about 120. In the scientists’ projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.

Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward ‘engineered negligible senescence’—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have ‘a good chance of success in mice within ten years.’ The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. ‘In ten years we’ll have a pill that will give you twenty years,’ says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. ‘And then there’ll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born.'” (Thanks TETW.)

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Cocoon trailer, 1985:

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