Aging Is a Disease; Treat It Like One 625
theodp writes "In a letter to Sergey Brin, Maria Konovalenko urges the Google founder to pursue his interest in the topics of aging and longevity. 'Defeating or simply slowing down aging,' writes Konovalenko, 'is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet.' Calling for research into longevity gene therapy, extending lifespan pharmacologically, and studying close species that differ significantly in lifespan, Konovalenko says 'it is crucial to make numerous medical organizations recognize aging as a disease. If medical organizations were to recognize aging as a disease, it could significantly accelerate progress in studying its underlying mechanisms and the development of interventions to slow its progress and to reduce age-related pathologies. The prevailing regard for aging as a "natural process" rather than a disease or disease-predisposing condition is a major obstacle to development and testing of legitimate anti-aging treatments. This is the largest market in the world, since 100% of the population in every country suffers from aging.'"
Tithonus (Score:5, Interesting)
"when Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever 'but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.'" (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus [wikipedia.org]
Wrong, it's a trade-off (Score:4, Interesting)
Aging is a tradeoff. Cell reproduction and functions build up more errors at higher churn rates (metabolism). The end result is cancer. The alternative is to slow processes down to reduce the error rate, but slowing stuff down means parts start to not work right. Thus, we either die of organ failure or of cancer. There's no free lunch.
The only "fix" would be artificial error correction so that metabolism can be set to normal (30-year-old-like), and that's several decades away, at least.
Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs (Score:4, Interesting)
Any couple that has four children is already doing more harm to the population than one person living forever. Should we force-sterilize people at two or three kids per couple?
If only my modpoints would not have expired yesterday.
You, sir, are 100% spot on. I have 1 child, exactly for this reason. We can slice the world population in half within a generation and save the earth, rather than this energy conservation bullshit. There is enough to support 3 billion people.
Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, if people continue to have the same number of children they do now, and our lifespan doubled (or tripled), we'd have a brief period of doubling or tripling the population, and then the rate of growth would fall back to original levels as people started dying again.
For most longer-living and/or higher educated cultures, the birth rate is already closely tracking the death rate. For those with a shorter lifespan, women are already limited to the number of children they can have in their lifetime, and the number wouldn't change.
Short story: the sooner we expand our lives, the better, as we can sustain doubling the population _now_, but that might not be the case after we travel further along the growth curve.
Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs (Score:3, Interesting)
The opposite is likely more true. For example, Einstein wrote all is great papers in his 20's.
Maybe if Einsteins 20's lasted 100+ years he would have accomplished more.
Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs (Score:4, Interesting)
We've always had a significant percentage of arable land undeveloped and ways to significantly increase production ... the way out has always been abundantly clear, grow more crops. We still have significant amounts of undeveloped land, but the percentage is much smaller than in Malthus his time and production increases are stalling. They are both going to hit zero at some point.
Also there are additional novel problems like peak water, peak oil, peak fossil fertilizer and peak charity (a lot of countries procreating themselves into the abyss can't feed themselves). In the past feeding the additional masses never really relied on better technology, just better organization and use of existing and already recognized resources ... which might be also still for fertilizer (ie. better recycling of shit) but not so much for oil and water. We absolute need to invent new sources of extremely cheap energy in the future just to replace oil and to power desalination plants ... or we're fucked.
Basically a single solution has always kept the doomsayers at bay ... and that solution is running out of steam.
Re:That's so sad. (Score:5, Interesting)
This argument (^) is a strawman created by an idiot.
I have many genetically heritable issues, and I strongly advicate normal, natural death. I am not a 20 something, and I do have health issues.
Death is required. Making death clean and without suffering would be humane and beneficial, but killing death itself is foolish in its most extreme.
Creating strawmen to shove in other people's mouths because you don't like what they are actually saying is delusional and stupid.
(For the record, since I am sure you will ask, despite having no business asking, I have a congenital heart defect, genetically linked soft tissue tumors, blood sugar regulation trouble associated with early type 1 diabetes risk factors, and several other noteworthy things. I consider death essential, and I am glad it exists. Take your strawman and shove it up your ass.)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's so sad. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are making an equally dangerous one.
Age related mental decline has been directly associated with increased stresses on ogliodendrocites [nih.gov], which comes about as the number of axonal connections needing care increase.
Using the existing data from these kinds of studies, you can derive a maximum theoretical upper bound on the complexity to longevity coefficient.
The prognosis is not good. You can probably boost the numbers somewhat by introducing genetic modifications to improve cellular health of these vital support cells, and to improve the number of divisions from progenitor cells they can be reasonably derived from, but that intoduces yet more complex problems.
The human brain is simply not constructed in a fashion that is infinitely durable. Even if you solve the hygiene issues with the ogliodendrocytes, you will still run into issues with axonal branching reaching critical capacity, and the individual neurons being unable to cope with new information.
So, either you fix this by making people suffer dementia, and forget things in order to avoid this "post death" era overload, or you end up with vegetables who have siezures. Again, if you go through the trouble of solving the dendrocyte problem.
This is a problem that cannot be solved, while retaining physical humanity.
Sure, you could possibly find a way to liberate a brain from its bony prison, and gently loosen the neural fibers in a nutrient bath, to allow nueronal and axonal migration to continue, but then the patient isn't really human anymore, are they? Congratulations, your immortal person is a giant, energy hungry brain in a tank.
Even then, there are mechanical stress limits from the raw weight related mass of the liberated organ to contend with. Eventually, being displaced in a fluid won't be enough, and the young modulous of the axons inside the bloated mass of tissue will be exceeded, just from the collections own rest weight, resulting in systemic brain damage. You'll have to go into orbit.
And then, you run out of resources, because neural tissue is absurdly energy hungry, (your existing brain consumes a full third of all calories consumed!) And space doesn't exactly have raw material in infinite abundance.
Immortality simply can't work.
Re:Tithonus (Score:4, Interesting)
Drought == famine. (Score:4, Interesting)
Humans are territorial mammals, they were fighting and killing each other over access to resources long before Homo Sapiens arrived ~200ky ago, I see no signs of that behaviour changing but I do see signs of dwindling resources, in particular the most essential resource of all - water. Princes and priests don't normally cause' wars they simply rationalise them for the rest of their tribe. The instinctive 'mob' behaviour is obvious and easy to spot from a safe distance, but knowing the cause won't help you much when you're standing in a bread line.
But, as I said, if dreaming of global doom gets you off, keep at it
If pretending the likelihood of a self-induced population crash is zero makes you comfortable, keep at it. Fortunately for the rest of us, the pentagon considers climate related mass migration as the #1 long term threat to global security, and has held that opinion since the mid-naughties.
In shorter words, the life support system on this spaceship is broken but operable, we need a major upgrade just to keep the population we have. Taking on extra crew is not advisable at this time, we should be encouraging (as opposed to demanding) an overall reduction in numbers through natural attrition.
I think it depends how you interpret it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I viewed the initial comment as relatively insightful. No, I don't think anyone's calling disease or disability a gift. But since the human body is a biochemical machine, it seems to generally cease functioning via those processes. (Not everyone is going to die cleanly and painlessly in their sleep.)
The "gift" refers to the beauty inherently designed into the process as a whole. IMO, medicine should be focused on giving the best quality of life possible, within the parameters nature has set up -- NOT trying to "cheat" the natural course of things.
I recall reading a piece of sci-fi a while ago where the characters had supposedly achieved very long life-spans (thousands of years, typically). Eventually, many just opted to "check out" after a while, voluntarily putting themselves into a coma. The idea was, after you've been around that long, you reach a point where you feel like you've "seen everything, done everything". The things you still haven't learned yet are pretty much the things you already concluded you simply have no interest in, or get no enjoyment from -- and you're bored with the rest.
It's just a fiction story, but I think it would be pretty accurate.... Most of the people who fear death or even aging just fear the unknown. If you can't say that you lived a "full, rewarding" life in the window of time most of us naturally get, you were doing something wrong. Plus, there's just something that motivates us, knowing that our time is limited on this planet. If you had essentially unlimited time to accomplish things, would you really get more done -- or would you just keep putting things off?
I'm not old enough to say for certain yet, but I sure hope there are some great, valuable and rewarding experiences to be had when I'm in those older, retirement years. When society (and your own health situation) deem you incapable of working a job each day for a paycheck and you've reached "old age", it's a little bit like a second shot at childhood, except with all the wisdom you gathered along the way as an adult. Surveys have been taken, asking people how happy they were in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's ... and overall, people were increasingly happy with each decade. So "youth" clearly isn't everything.
I'm willing to handle the experiment. (Score:5, Interesting)
The brain as miraculous as it is can only handle a single lifetime of information.
And you have how many multi-lifetime old samples in your research to support this claim.
Come up with a way to give me multiple lifetimes, healthy as I was in my late teens, to see if my brain crashes due to "filling up", and I'm willing to be an experimental subject.
I'm already in my late '60s. I'm also studying for a college degree and getting 4.0 (much better than when I was trying to work my way through college and avoid the draft during the Vietnam era.)
Psych research has shown that intelligence, as measured by I.Q. tests, increases with age. ("Senile dementia" is a handfull of specific diseases, which only a fraction of people get, and eliminating THOSE would obviously be part of "curing" aging.) Meanwhile, the brain's capacity for both memory and processing is very large (as shown by the amount of info people with eidetic memory accumulate, and are able to index and retrieve without apparent problems, over normal life spans.)
So you think there's a limit to how much the brain can handle, a wall we might hit if we cured aging? Let's find out. Bring it on!