Nobel prize scientist says a pill for humans to live FOREVER & pause ageing ‘closer than we think’ 

A NOBEL Prize-winning Scottish chemist believes science could soon create a pill to help humans live forever.

Princeton University’s Prof David MacMillan, who is from Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, is heavily involved in trying to develop cures for deadly diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer.

But he reckons technology is advancing so rapidly that it’s not far-fetched to say boffins will find a way to pause the ageing process.

The expert, 57, said: “The only way you can do that is to basically reprogramme yourself to not switch off at some point. And there are researchers already working on that.

“Your biology is set up to go into this thing called senescence – which is to age effectively and after aging you just die when you stop replacing cells.

“If you could just reprogramme yourself to keep replacing them the way you do when you’re younger, you absolutely could keep people around on earth for forever.

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“It’s just a matter of figuring out the biology – which is something that people are actively working on right now. You would literally just stop aging and stay in the current equilibrium that you’re in.

“My view on that is that it’s far more attainable than probably people would realise.”

But Prof MacMillan added: “You could get to that point where you could keep people alive for hundreds of years or maybe effectively forever – which brings up this really wild question of should you do it?

“Most human beings at least would think they would much rather live longer than die at whatever age. But ethically it’s unsustainable.

“You couldn’t have a planet where people didn’t die. As crazy as it sounds, we just don’t have the resources to handle it.

“’There are some very wealthy people who would love to live forever, but the ethics of it are crazy if you think about it, because, why should this billionaire be allowed to live forever? How does that person get the right to do that?

“I’m a big believer that if you can’t do it for everyone, you shouldn’t do it for anyone. But at the moment we’re just not set up to be able to allow that to happen to the human race. If we did it would be pandemonium.”

The Scotsman gained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Glasgow before moving to the US for postgraduate studies.

After studying in California in the early 1990s, he moved to Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley before becoming a professor at Princeton in 2006.

He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Prof Benjamin List after he created a new way of building molecules that helped make progress in the development of drugs for Alzheimer’s, cancer and heart disease.

The money he scooped – more than £400,000 – was used to set up The May and Billy MacMillan Foundation, named after his parents, where he funds Scottish students and offers routes into education for underprivileged young people.

In the more immediate future, the expert thinks drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease will be available within five years.

Meanwhile, he also thinks that we’re on track to continue making inroads towards curing cancer.

Prof MacMillan said: “There’s a lot more major pharmaceutical companies deploying enormous amounts of research funding and going after Alzheimer’s like they didn’t do before.

“And the reason is that they’ve got a lot more understanding now of the biology of Alzheimer’s and they’re feeling more and more that it’s worth their while to invest money.

“Pharmaceutical companies are really interesting because they’re looking out for the social impact and the care of its social impact, but they’re also businesses and they have to make money so they have to sort of balance those two different things.

“But the fact that there’s more and more of them investing in it shows you that there’s a much stronger belief that they’re on the cusp of actually getting some major breakthroughs.

“You can see these molecules which could become medicines are beginning to have an impact and that’s why we’re really at the beginning of the neuroscience revolution.”

He added: “I do personally believe that there’s cures out there for everything. Inherently that has to be true because it’s just a physical phenomenon. It’s happening in your biology and if you can just overturn it, you can cure it, right?

“What’s happening right now is there’s so much good knowledge coming online about these diseases that it’s making it more tractable for all these different companies to do it and so the investment part becomes less and less risky.

“I’m also heavily into the cancer field where you can see all these different approaches that are going on right now.

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“It’s like shots on goal in a football match. You know if a player takes enough shots, eventually one of them will go in.

“That’s what raises our confidence level that something’s going to crack because there’s so many different people taking so many different approaches.”