Immortality: Can Quantum Computing Help Us Beat Aging?
Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Dr. Michio Kaku Published: 2023, Doubleday ISBN: 978-0385548366
The Oldest Question
Kaku opens Chapter 13 with a trip through history. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Garden of Eden, Emperor Qin Shi Huang sending his entire fleet to find the Fountain of Youth. He tells a great story from Greek mythology about Eos, who asked Zeus to make her lover immortal but forgot to ask for eternal youth too. The poor guy just got older and more miserable forever.
Now Kaku asks the modern version. Can quantum computers help us figure out aging at the molecular level? His answer is yes, in two ways: biological immortality and digital immortality.
Physics Says Aging Is Not Mandatory
Something that surprised me. Kaku explains that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one that says everything decays and falls apart, only applies to closed systems. Living things are open systems though. Energy flows in from the outside (sunlight, food) and that means entropy can be locally reversed.
Immortality does not actually violate physics. Nothing in the laws of thermodynamics says a living thing must eventually die. It just says that without energy input, things decay. We get energy input constantly though.
The real question becomes not “is immortality physically possible?” but “can we fix errors in our cells faster than they appear?”
What Aging Actually Is
Kaku frames aging as an accumulation of errors at the molecular level. DNA lesions happen 25 to 115 times per minute in our bodies. That is 36,000 to 160,000 per cell per day. We have repair mechanisms, but aging happens when the error rate exceeds the repair rate.
He draws an analogy to a car engine. Where does a car age? In the engine, where oxidation happens. Where does a cell age? In the mitochondria, where energy production and oxidation take place. Smaller animals have higher metabolism, higher oxidation, more errors, shorter lives.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute found that if you multiply mutation rate per year by lifespan, you get roughly the same number across species. About 3,200 total mutations across a lifetime. For humans with 47 mutations per year, that gives roughly 70 years.
Resetting the Clock
Kaku covers several approaches to fighting aging. First, telomeres. Every time a cell divides, the caps on the ends of chromosomes (telomeres) get shorter. After about 60 divisions, the cell enters senescence and dies. This is the Hayflick limit. There is an enzyme called telomerase that can prevent this shortening. Scientists have already used it to make skin cells divide hundreds of times instead of sixty.
A catch though. Cancer cells also use telomerase. It has been detected in 90 percent of human tumors. You cannot just flood the body with telomerase without potentially creating cancer.
Second, caloric restriction. Eating 30 percent fewer calories can extend lifespan by roughly 30 percent in animals. Tested across insects, mice, dogs, cats, and apes. A 2022 Yale study found that caloric restriction rejuvenated the thymus gland, which makes T cells for our immune system. By age 40, about 70 percent of the thymus is fatty and non-functional. The researchers zeroed in on a protein called PLA2G7, involved with inflammation. Understanding how this protein works at the molecular level is where quantum computers come in.
Third, DNA repair. Researchers at the University of Rochester studied 18 species of rodents and found that long-lived ones (beavers, naked mole rats living 25-30 years) had stronger DNA repair mechanisms, specifically more potent sirtuin-6 proteins. When they injected beaver sirtuin-6 into fruit flies, the flies lived longer. When injected into human cells, there was less DNA damage. The sirtuin-6 gene is sometimes called the “longevity gene” for a reason.
Reprogramming Cells and Growing Organs
Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese Nobel laureate, found four proteins (Yamanaka factors) that can reprogram adult cells back to their embryonic state. Altos Labs, backed by Yuri Milner and Jeff Bezos, is investing hundreds of millions into this.
David Sinclair at Harvard used reprogramming to restore eyesight in mice. Alejandro Ocampo from the University of Lausanne said you can take a cell from an 80-year-old and reverse its age by 40 years in vitro. The Babraham Institute in Cambridge took skin cells from a 53-year-old woman, exposed them to Yamanaka factors for only 13 days, and the cells ended up looking and acting like they were from a 23-year-old.
Cancer is the recurring side effect though. Every approach to reversing aging seems to carry cancer risk.
Tissue engineering offers another path. Anthony Atala at Wake Forest builds organs by creating a biodegradable mold in the organ’s shape, seeding it with patient cells, and applying growth factors. The cells grow into the mold, the mold dissolves, and you get a functional organ with no rejection risk. Simpler organs like skin, bone, cartilage, and bladders have been done. Hearts and kidneys are still in progress.
Where Quantum Computers Fit
Kaku argues quantum computers will be essential for analyzing the massive genetic datasets needed to understand aging. About 100 genes where aging seems concentrated have already been identified. Quantum computers could process genomic data from millions of people to find patterns: why do some people live past 100 while others age rapidly from diseases like Werner syndrome or progeria?
People over 100 have significantly higher levels of the DNA repair protein PARP and cells that resemble cells from much younger people. Understanding why at the molecular level requires simulating quantum-level interactions. That is what quantum computers are built for.
Digital Immortality
The second type of immortality Kaku discusses is digital. Most of our ancestors left behind two lines in a church record and a tombstone. Today we leave massive digital footprints. William Shatner sat in front of a camera for four days answering hundreds of personal questions. A computer program organized all that material so future people could ask questions and get coherent answers as if he were there. In the future, the constant recording we do with phones and social media could be organized by AI into a digital version of a person.
My Take
This chapter covers a lot of ground. Kaku is at his best when explaining the physics of why aging happens and the biology of how it works at the cellular level. The thermodynamics framing is genuinely useful. Aging is not some mystical process. It is error accumulation that outpaces error repair.
The quantum computing connection is sometimes a stretch though. Much of what Kaku describes, like identifying aging-related genes and testing sirtuin-6 in different species, is already being done with classical computers. The argument that quantum computers will be “essential” feels more like a repeated thesis than a proven necessity for every application. The digital immortality section is thought-provoking but feels tacked on. More of an AI story than a quantum computing story.
The core science is fascinating though. The idea that a naked mole rat and a giraffe accumulate roughly the same total mutations in their lifetimes, just at different rates, makes you stop and think. Worth reading for the biology alone.