Aging Process May Be Reversable, Scientists Claim (theguardian.com) 253
New submitter TheNinjaCoder writes: A new type of gene therapy is showing promise in reversing the aging process. The scientists are not claiming that aging can be eliminated, but say that in the foreseeable future treatments designed to slow the process could increase life expectancy. The Guardian explains the scientists' experiment in its report: "The rejuvenating treatment given to the mice was based on a technique that has previously been used to 'rewind' adult cells, such as skin cells, back into powerful stem cells, very similar to those seen in embryos. These so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have the ability to multiply and turn into any cell type in the body and are already being tested in trials designed to provide 'spare parts' for patients. The treatment involved intermittently switching on the same four genes that are used to turn skin cells into iPS cells. The mice were genetically engineered in such a way that the four genes could be artificially switched on when the mice were exposed to a chemical in their drinking water. The scientists tested the treatment in mice with a genetic disorder, called progeria, which is linked to accelerated aging, DNA damage, organ dysfunction and dramatically shortened lifespan. After six weeks of treatment, the mice looked visibly younger, skin and muscle tone improved and they lived 30% longer. When the same genes were targeted in cells, DNA damage was reduced and the function of the cellular batteries, called the mitochondria, improved. Crucially, the mice did not have an increased cancer risk, suggesting that the treatment had successfully rewound cells without turning them all the way back into stem cells, which can proliferate uncontrollably in the body." The study has been published in the journal Cell.
Things to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations! But even if you have the cure for aging you'll have to solve some (quite big) problems:
* The danger of overpopulation. If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies, our planet will become overcrowded soon. Which system should be implemented? A policy where you need permit by the government to have babies? Will we make a gigantic ponzi scheme where we put those extra humans on mars, then on other plantes, colonizing the galaxy? What when the whole galaxy is colonized? Intergalactic travel outside of our local group is quite hard, as expansion of space will make those galaxies leave us faster than light before we can get to them.
* The danger of cancer. Often when rejuveniating cells you put them in a mode where they like to multiply. You artificially increase the likelihood for cancer with this to an extent of almost certainity.
Re: Things to solve (Score:2)
Generation ships, probably.
Take a hundred thousand people, build a spaceship big enough to house them (with room to grow) find some way to synthesize food and water (soylent green, anyone?) and point them off into the stars.
Rinse and repeat
The other option would be terraforming, but that seems a bit far fetched, doesn't it?
Re: Things to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
You people don't seem to understand how exponential growth works: you will always get to a limit. Whether its the limits of a planet or the limits of a galaxy, or some other limit isn't really relevant.
You "point them off into the stars" method has a couple of issues: first, its expensive resource wise to build and maintain those ships. Space colonisation is much easier doable with spaceships filled with fertilized human eggs, with actual infrastructure to breed and raise those humans once the destination is reached. Second, you need something to target those ships to. Either you target them into nothingness, meaning the people inside the spaceship is almost certain to die (who wants to go on your spaceships then?), or you target them at actual promising locations. But even there it might turn out to be hostile to higher life.
Re: Things to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Things to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
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The death rate isn't all it takes to keep human population in check. Since 1966 the number of births has outpaced the number of deaths by a wide margin.
Immortality treatments will be expensive at first (slow rollout to 1% of the 1%), whatever adjustments are necessary for a world of immortals are already mostly necessary to keep the population 20B.
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Hm, around 1995/1997 there where probably about 10 companies on the internet announcing break throughs in life extension "technologies".
Now you don't even find them with google anymore.
Population can be dealt with one simple rule (Score:2, Interesting)
The rule is: if you have a child, your anti aging treatments stop
penalty for breaking rule: death
Re:Things to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations! But even if you have the cure for aging you'll have to solve some (quite big) problems:
* The danger of overpopulation. If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies, our planet will become overcrowded soon. Which system should be implemented? A policy where you need permit by the government to have babies? Will we make a gigantic ponzi scheme where we put those extra humans on mars, then on other plantes, colonizing the galaxy? What when the whole galaxy is colonized? Intergalactic travel outside of our local group is quite hard, as expansion of space will make those galaxies leave us faster than light before we can get to them.
* The danger of cancer. Often when rejuveniating cells you put them in a mode where they like to multiply. You artificially increase the likelihood for cancer with this to an extent of almost certainity.
The summary specifically mentions that they found no increased chance of cancer and besides cancer and overpopulation are not reasons not to pursue it. If you could keep someone healthy to 150 and then just took them out in the streets and shot them that would be preferable to what we have now which is where a 100 year old is frail and decrepit.
There are other problems too that need to be dealt with. Society changes because the older generation dies out. If you think the top .01 percent of the rich are bad now, imagine how much worse it would get if they never died and could continue to amass wealth and power indefinitely.
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... imagine how much worse it would get if they never died and could continue to amass wealth and power indefinitely.
Fortunately, the same law applies. There is always a limit to growth, and if history shows us anything, it is that the limit is quite often a lot closer than we like to imagine.
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There is always a limit to growth, and if history shows us anything, it is that the limit is quite often a lot closer than we like to imagine.
What history shows us that? Certainly not the history of human population.
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If you could keep someone healthy to 150 and then just took them out in the streets and shot them that would be preferable to what we have now...
Try convincing that to the 150 year old guy. "OK, Charlie. We're just gonna tie you to a stake and put a bullet through your head. A small one, just to open it up a little bit. Maybe put some fire ants in there. Alright?"
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Try convincing that to the 150 year old guy.
You mean the guy who already decided more than 50 years ago?
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If you could keep someone healthy to 150 and then just took them out in the streets and shot them that would be preferable to what we have now...
Try convincing that to the 150 year old guy. "OK, Charlie. We're just gonna tie you to a stake and put a bullet through your head. A small one, just to open it up a little bit. Maybe put some fire ants in there. Alright?"
I wasn't saying that was a good solution. I was just saying I would prefer it to what we have now. Besides, it doesn't really matter. If you eliminate aging, the average life expectancy would jump from about 80 years to about 250 years even if everyone had the same probability of dying each year as a 25 year old does. So just because a person doesn't age doesn't mean they are going to live forever unless we also greatly decrease the odds of dying from random accidents.
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The danger of overpopulation.
Easily solved. Just charge $25k/person/year. And wallah, negligible increased overpopulation.
Re:Things to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
I think they might set the bar a little higher because that's probably in the grasp of hundreds of millions around the world. It'll definitely cost more and be carefully controlled.
And no matter how much it costs you know who will always be able to afford it? Politicians.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if governments establish a rule that elected members, or non-elected like UK House of Lords, get rejuvenation therapy during their tenure. This would establish an even greater desire to maintain office, which would lead to blatant gerrymandering, changes to election rules and restrictions on voting rights.
Sometimes something that looks like a good idea just doesn't turn out that way.
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Voila.
Good rule of thumb: if you can't spell a word, you should avoid trying to use it in writing - it makes you look like someone trying to qualify for the B-Ark....
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There are two kinds of people. People that know they can not spell a word correctly, and people that don't know.
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(and as a side note) strictly speaking you spelled it wrong, too!
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* The danger of overpopulation. If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies, our planet will become overcrowded soon. Which system should be implemented? A policy where you need permit by the government to have babies? Will we make a gigantic ponzi scheme where we put those extra humans on mars, then on other plantes, colonizing the galaxy? What when the whole galaxy is colonized? Intergalactic travel outside of our local group is quite hard, as expansion of space will make those galaxies leave us faster than light before we can get to them.
If overpopulation is really the biggest issue, why don't we just kill a lot of people? This isn't flamebait, I'm serious. If it truly is the worst possible problem, then let's just handle it, have a lottery or something.
I hear this all the time and it's so stupid. Nobody complains about overpopulation thanks to vaccines, cleaner water, cleaner/better food, etc, but start talking about keeping people from getting old suddenly it's a big deal. Do you think people in horrific places in the third world say "wel
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If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies,
People in developed countries generally don't aspire to have as many children as they can before their biological clock runs out. They decide they want to have X children, for some fixed X, and stop after that. If people live longer, it probably means they'll have the same number of children, but over a longer time, which would reduce population growth. They might even put it off indefinitely (since their biological clock isn't ticking anymore) which would reduce it even more.
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* The danger of overpopulation. If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies, our planet will become overcrowded soon. Which system should be implemented? A policy where you need permit by the government to have babies? Will we make a gigantic ponzi scheme where we put those extra humans on mars, then on other plantes, colonizing the galaxy? What when the whole galaxy is colonized? Intergalactic travel outside of our local group is quite hard, as expansion of space will make those galaxies leave us faster than light before we can get to them.
* The danger of cancer. Often when rejuveniating cells you put them in a mode where they like to multiply. You artificially increase the likelihood for cancer with this to an extent of almost certainity.
I guess we'll have to solve those. Given that curing aging is a much harder problem and we've already solved overpopulation in the developed world, I'm not seeing much of a downside there.
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Forget those. Those are minor issues.
The real issue of people living longer is that the old crotchety ignorant louts get to live longer too. Change only happens when old people step/fall/are pushed aside to make room for the younger generation who tend to be more accepting of new ideas and methods. By leaving those people around longer they will slow down and collapse progress on bigotry, equality, and in general caring for others that allows civilized society to function.
Personally if you live to 75 I sa
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"License to Live"
You can "apply" for a "License to Live" and it grants you, government-supported, up to an extra 100 years of healthy life extension, which includes government supported vasectomy or sterilization. Only people who have had no more than 2 kids are eligible to receive such a license. People who have only had o or 1 child can get up to 150 years of govt-supported life extension.
Caveats:
If you become unhealthy (heart disease, cirrhosis, cancer, etc) then you are only allowed to continue receivin
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Population growth has been over a billion people in the last 20 years.
That means your "dealt with" plan involves moving 50 million people off the planet in rockets per year.
Do you have a way to make achieving your stated goal remotely realistic, or is that not actually your goal?
Solutions (Score:3)
Or it means space elevators.
Rockets are, as you intimate, not a good tool for this. They are expensive, polluting, risky, and only capable of small payloads.
But a space elevator would serve well in all of those categories. The materials science, which is the primary challenge that must be overcome, is coming along. [iaaweb.org] Once funded -- which is a huge deal, but not an insurmountable one -- space would become muc
Re:Things to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
"Overpopulation can be dealt with by moving people to other planets"
Or, we could just gradually lower our fertility rate as life extension catches on. This normally takes place anyway when an agrarian society industrializes and the five children per family become two.
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Not to mention, kids will be waiting around for their inheritance quite longer, and might defer on that extra child due to economics.
Re:Things to solve (Score:4, Insightful)
That will only work if there is something to inherit. For most people, there is nothing.
Re:Things to solve (Score:5, Interesting)
"Overpopulation can be dealt with by moving people to other planets"
Or, we could just gradually lower our fertility rate as life extension catches on. This normally takes place anyway when an agrarian society industrializes and the five children per family become two.
Exactly. We need something like 2.2 children just to maintain the same number of people. Also, reversing aging really doesn't buy as much time as most people think. If you eliminate aging, the average life expectancy would jump from about 80 years to about 250 years even if everyone had the same probability of dying each year as a 25 year old does.
Re:Things to solve (Score:4, Interesting)
If you eliminate aging, the average life expectancy would jump from about 80 years to about 250 years even if everyone had the same probability of dying each year as a 25 year old does.
You must be refering to some third world country or you're off by an order of magnitude. Here in Norway 47/99369 die at age 25, starting from 100000 people at birth. That would make life expectancy about 99369/47 = ~2114 years.
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If the probability of dying any given year becomes 47/99369 from age 25 and onwards, then the probability of being not alive (i.e. dead) at age 250 is (1-47/99369) * (250-25) ~= 89.9%, plus whatever probability of dying one accumulated before turning 25. That does not make the life expectancy ~2114 years. Your math is broken.
No, the math fail is yours, it's (1-47/99369) ^ (250-25) ~= 89.9% chance to be alive not dead. If you take the sum of the power series from zero to infinity you'll find the answer is 99369/47 = 2114 or the mean life expectancy. Note that the median life expectancy will only be about 1500, but you will have a very long tail with no drop-off. P.S. One point I forgot to add, a significant number of these are suicides. If those are more related to personality than circumstances and trends toward zero we might a
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Re:Things to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
Overpopulation can be dealt with by moving people to other planets.
No it can't. At current birth rates, you'd need to move about a million people off planet every week. To put that in perspective, every day roughly 100K people get on planes at London Heathrow. That means that your spaceport would have slightly more departures to space then Heathrow has to terrestrial destinations, every day. Most travellers at Heathrow have under 20Kg of luggage: you're talking about permanent emigration, where people would need a lot more. Let's be conservative and say 100Kg of baggage allowance per person, making a total of about 100Kg. The energy cost to geosync orbit is 50 MJ/Kg. Assuming that in your future world, you have a 100% energy efficient solution (and you have a magical space drive to take them somewhere else), that's 10,000MJ (10GJ) per person, or 10PJ per week.
Now, to put that in perspective, that's about a tenth of the total world energy production currently, just to lift these people and a modest amount of baggage to orbit, using an unfeasibly efficient system and assuming that your magical space elevator is a sunk cost. This sounds almost feasible, but it has a number of unfeasible assumption. Current power beaming (the method of choice for powering a space elevator) is 0.5% efficient and scientists hope to get it up to 2%. That multiplies your energy cost by 50 and means that you're now talking about using five times the current total world power output just to lift people to orbit.
Now, you might say, if you have a space elevator then you could power it using photovoltaics in Earth orbit. Okay, let's look at that. We'll assume 40% efficient solar panels (about the theoretical maximum for photovoltaics). That gives us 400W/m^2. To get our 500PJ/week, we need a constant supply of around 825GW, or a square of solar panels 45km on each side, along with all of the associated cabling and infrastructure. That might just about be possible to build, once you have the space elevator running (though assuming 1Kg per square metre panel, with estimated costs of space elevator operation, it would cost around $400bn in today's dollars, so not exactly a cheap project).
And that's just to get people up to orbit. If you want to actually get them to another planet, you're going to need enough interplanetary ships to carry them somewhere else. And then there's the question of where you send them. Mars? Even if you terraform it, it has the same land mass as Earth, so even if you ignore the children of the colonists then it will fill up in about the time it would take the population of the Earth to double, so that's only going to buy you a few decades.
Since we're talking future hypotheticals, let's say that we find exoplanets with a compatible biosphere and develop a faster-than-light drive (and we'll not even think about the energy costs of that). Unless you reduce the birth rate, the human population is still going to keep doubling every few decades, so all of those newly colonised planets are going to start exporting people soon too. You'll need to double the number of human colonies every few decades and unless human-friendly planets are startlingly common, that's not sustainable. And if you do manage to reduce birth rates to a manageable amount, then the need to export people from Earth goes away.
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unless human-friendly planets are startlingly common, that's not sustainable.
Even if human friendly planets are common, if they have life on them then that life is likely already filling all the ecological niches. It would likely take years to evaluate a planet to make sure it doesn't have pathogens that can kill us and even if it doesn't, what if there is intelligent life? It's bad enough that we are destroying earth, now we are talking about hostile takeover of hundreds of planets. Terraforming would likely take hundreds of years and that's if you are able to find suitable plan
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In the short term we would be better off building houses and farmland in the Sahara.
I won't take a WAG at the numbers, but terraforming the Sahara has got to be massively cheaper than terraforming Mars - For quite a few reasons. For the price of settlements on Mars, we could probably start populating sea beds.
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I won't take a WAG at the numbers, but terraforming the Sahara has got to be massively cheaper than terraforming Mars - For quite a few reasons. For the price of settlements on Mars, we could probably start populating sea beds.
I completely agree. Terraforming the Sahara or even Antarctica would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than terraforming Mars. The only advantage that Mars has over Antarctica is that there is easier access to raw native building materials (aka rocks) and less competition for those resources.
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A space elevator does not need power beaming.
A long power line and a solar plant on top of it is enough.
Or as soon as we are out of the atmosphere, a smaller solar plant every 100km.
Beaming power to the "crawler/climber" is a SF concept that does not really make sense.
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A space elevator does not need power beaming.
A long power line and a solar plant on top of it is enough.
What material would you make the power line from where the losses over 35,800 km are sufficiently small that it would deliver a useful amount of power? Actually, assume a power plant at the bottom as well, you only need resistive losses to be under 2% for 17,900km. For reference, the longest power transmission line in the world currently is a high-voltage DC line that is 2,385km long. Current HVDC lines have losses of about about 3.5% per 1,000 km, so that's over a 60% loss over half the length of the ca
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If we model growth as an exponential, and the factor is >1, not even space colonization will save us.
Assuming zero death rate and a growth function n^x :
- if n < 1, or less than 1 child per person per lifetime, or less than 2 per woman, we may be able to stay on earth as population will end up stationary.
- if n == 1, it is a linear growth and we need space exploration to keep going
- if n > 1, overpopulation will happen no matter what we do. The fastest we can colonize space is by going at the speed
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Nay-saying everything and bashing everyone over the head with your 'maturity' hammer is a form of childishness. You wanna be an adult? Make some effort toward forward progress instead of being a useless critic of everything.
Attitudes like yours are what hold people back in fear of ridicule. It's the people taking risks on unknowns who what have made the most progress to the advancement of knowledge, not comfortable and safe scientific prediction.
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"Nay-saying everything and bashing everyone over the head with your 'maturity' hammer is a form of childishness."
Inability to differentiate between fact and fantasy is as well.
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If overpopulation was a big enough problem, I think we'd put more scientific emphasis into making self-sustaining other-world colonies.
In all likelihood though we would never reach an unsustainable population even if you doubled the population on earth. In Africa alone there is enough arable land to feed 12billion people with current technology. (the problem is getting the money for distribution and modern farming there).
Other resources, such as water might become problematic. So we would need expensive
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I disagree, with a source of energy and a diverse native mix of natural resources, any body can be self-sustaining. We may not have the technology today but that doesn't mean we won't have the technology in the future.
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That's the one that got me. Generally, almost anything that reduces aging / induces regeneration / etc is also associated with cancer. That they're not detecting an increased incidence here is a huge finding.
Hopefully the followup research will be just as promising.
Re: Things to solve (Score:5, Funny)
We could always sterilize the anonymous cowards. They seem to be breeding like flies.
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Brain cells, used and unused, die with EXPERIENCE. Those that remain form a better refined control system... up to a point.
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It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that past some point, life extension will require forgetting some of your life and dealing with some personality changes, as there are limits to the brain. I guess that means Dr. Who got it kinda right.
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It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that past some point, life extension will require forgetting some of your life and dealing with some personality changes, as there are limits to the brain. I guess that means Dr. Who got it kinda right.
The brain compartmentalizes and prioritizes even during a normal life-cycle. This is why saying "oh yeh I forgot about that" is so common when talking about some old memories yet treating PTSD is so difficult even decades after the initial trauma
Re:Things to solve (Score:5, Insightful)
Our species, it appears, has better tools for advancement than those that evolved naturally. When you start intelligently editing gene expression and genomes, you're kinda in uncharted territory.
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Not really. We only have to have a vague idea of what we are doing to enter uncharted territory. The normal process of evolution is to just throw random mutations up against a wall and seeing what sticks. We're on the cusp of making those mutations rather less than random.
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Progeria mice (Score:5, Insightful)
The scientists quoted say 10 years away from any sort of human clinical application. One interesting thing to note is that these are progeria mice, who would normally age very rapidly from their condition. So it's more like making them age more normal, not extending their lifespan abnormally. Will be interesting to see if they can use this technique to actual reverse normal aging and extend a normal lifespan, not just one which was previously going to be cut very short.
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10 years assumes continued research and progress over that period. That requires funds. That requires a government that believes in science. That's not gonna happen in the US. 'Murica is in the final throws of civilization. We have become an idiocracy. Pay attention, rest-of-the-world, this is what failure looks like...
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Right now their process requires changes in embryo, so you're already too old yourself... :)
The 10 years is a hope for finding a way to do the same thing without genetic manipulation before birth.
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"In vivo reprogramming improves regeneration in 12-month-old wild-type mice" -- TFA ...which even though it may not extend lifespan, it could significantly delay senescence and thus allow people to have higher quality, more productive, later years. Combined with a lifetime of experience this could be a win-win proposition for both the economy and the individual.
Also, the estimate is 10 years before clinical trials are possible. So, some number more years after that.
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Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/678/ [xkcd.com]
10 years never means 10 years, it just means they have no clue.
Great News - I think (Score:3)
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But thank you for not repeating the tired "but I feel better at 40 than at 20" horseshit denial you usually get from old people. I'm 40, and IT FUCKING SUCKS. Give me YOUTH *any day* over this agonizing slow death and decay!
I legitimately felt better at 30 than I did at 20 because I lived a healthier lifestyle. Unfortunately by 35 started getting arthritis and various joint pains and it quickly got worse year by year, by 37 there was not a day I didn't have pain somewhere.. I suspect I'm going to be a mess by 50.
Age reversing pills won't grow back cartilage either, so I'm screwed even if they come out with age reversing pills unless they find a cure for arthritis or I become a cyborg.
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Sounds like you need to take better care of yourself. I'm 38 and I have all my hair (and still it's original color). I don't have daily pain, I'm not overweight, nothing creaks. My teeth are in great shape.
Some is genetics, but a lot of it is daily exercise and being very careful with what I eat.
I'm in my mid 50s. My few remaining hairs are grey, and I'm not likely to win any foot-races, but no pain, I'm slimmer than I was at 40, and have most of my teeth (soda addiction hurts me there). Certainly genetics (mom's alive & kicking at 82, aunt's not kicking but at least alive at 97!), but also exercise, and few harmful vices (other than the damn soda).
Rather low bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Genetic disorder mitigated by genetic manipulation. Yes?
Instead of progeria-afflicted mice, why not attempt the technique on otherwise healthy mice? If that can be made to result in a 30% lifespan extension, that would be notable.
Re:Rather low bar (Score:5, Informative)
Genetic disorder mitigated by genetic manipulation. Yes?
Instead of progeria-afflicted mice, why not attempt the technique on otherwise healthy mice? If that can be made to result in a 30% lifespan extension, that would be notable.
"The team also saw improved organ health in normal mice but, because the mice are still living, could not yet say if longevity was extended."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12... [nytimes.com]
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> "The team also saw improved organ health in normal mice but, because the mice are still living, could not yet say if longevity was extended."
Well, more accurately, perhaps the experiment hasn't been running long enough to even see if extended longevity kicked in. The animals don't actually need to die for the experiment to demonstrate life extension. In fact, the longer the animals are alive, the better :-)
Slightly related I'm always appalled at published life expectancy numbers. The only solid measure
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Well, more accurately, perhaps the experiment hasn't been running long enough to even see if extended longevity kicked in. The animals don't actually need to die for the experiment to demonstrate life extension.)
To quantify longevity median lifetime is often used, so to get that value you need half of your mice to die. But of course you can still get a lower bound on it before then.
I'm wondering if there are models and estimates for life expectancy in a forward-looking way, perhaps with alternative scenarios for future medical advances.
"The Lee–Carter model is a numerical algorithm used in mortality forecasting and life expectancy forecasting. The input to the model is a matrix of age specific mortality rates ordered monotonically by time, usually with ages in columns and years in rows. The output is another forecasted matrix of mortality rates."
https://en.wikip [wikipedia.org]
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3) Not sure what "entropy" has to do with any of this as you're the first person to mention it
He used it as evidence for eternal life not being achievable.
But there's little need to take the long entropy view, with the heat death of the universe. The entropy that the sun experiences every day is enough.
If we consider the life span of Earth from life started until Earth no longer can support life because of the sun having grown too hot, life is already well into aging. In human terms, scaled onto a human life span of, say, 85 years, life on Earth is already 68 years old. Even if we manage to not e
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It does, by exactly the chain of reasoning I gave.
You don't get to scope inference.
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My point is not to "tackle" biological aging, but rather to set the context of rational versus irrational interpretations of a populist clickbait Slashdot title. Review the sequence of the posts if that's unclear.
If I save some people time realizing sooner rather than later that "reversing aging" and the open-ended implications that clearly tries to suggest, are plainly and irreversibly scientifically invalid, all the better.
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The empirical evidence you have a 0% survival rate is overwhelming, as is every other quite-scientific claim I have made.
You're trying to shoehorn a failed stock argument into a statement that isn't there, that you choose to imagine is there wishing it fit. What is overwhelming proven by experience and all data is that you will die, and this and every position you have become completely irrelevant according to you yourself. I'll take it from there.
Hitchens was ironically and appropriately eaten by his own
Well, hurry the fuck up! (Score:2)
Treatment costs (Score:3)
Pick a number pretty much any number, double it, somebody will pay that.
There won't be an overpopulation problem because only .001% of the population will be able to afford it.
What there will be is huge black market that primarily consists of fake treatments that will kill you, probably. If the odds are a million to one that you get to reset to some lower age or die of old age people will roll the dice.
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Pick a number pretty much any number, double it, somebody will pay that.
There won't be an overpopulation problem because only .001% of the population will be able to afford it.
Well, if the technique these scientists used is how it's done, the treatment won't be particularly expensive. It'll have to be done by genetic engineering of embryos, or even germ cells (eggs or sperm). The genetic modification process isn't that expensive, but the modified embryo will have to be implanted, etc., so the process will look almost exactly like in vitro fertilization, plus a little. That would put it easily within the reach of the middle class in wealthy countries, and assuming everyone who cou
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Considering that the treatment in itself basically costs nothing, it will be hard work to keep the price up so high that only the number you mention can afford it.
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The downside: if it works, Robert Mugabe will be president for 500 years.
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This already happens with drugs that only provide a chance at euphoria for a few hours. Not a real leap to think the same thing will happen at a larger scale if it adds years to your life.
A short story (Score:2)
A man, who hadn't seen Mr Keuner for a long time, greeted him with the words: "You haven't changed at all." "Oh!", said Mr Keuner, and went pale.
The premisse is the title is flawed (Score:3)
Obviously, if ever there is a public technology, they would be much more interested in spinning it down to older people that has more disposable income, however ultimately, it would be the ultra rich taking more advantage of it for a younger age.
Now, lets solve... (Score:2)
so many possibilities - (Score:2)
How Will this Affect... (Score:2)
How will this affect those "lifetime" warranties?
How old would you need to be to retire?...any pension not adjusted for inflation would end up being worthless over time.
How old would you need to be to collect Social Security? There would have to be adjustments made.
Could I still get the senior discounts at age 60?
Would this reverse my baldness?
Could I get it up again w/o Viagra?
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If this is something that could be taken as a pill without the need of medical staff to administer to you on a regular basis then I don't think this will be for the wealthy only (if it doesn't require permanently scarce resources).
This would have broad appeal across a wide range of people. R&D costs spread across the whole of humanity means the pill should be fairly inexpensive, especially when you consider economies of scale. (plus politics will make this important to get to the people).
Article is misleading (Score:2)
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Pluripotent stem cells don't suffer from telomere loss, so the first generations you should be fine.
Also we know which enzymes are needed to fix telomeres.
Progeria isn't aging (Score:2)
I haven't done a ton of research, however progeria aging seems a pretty logical statement. Progeria may look like accelerated aging, it may even have shared cursors as aging. However it is not aging nor accelerated aging. Wiki uses the word "resembles" and that usage is probably very purposeful. So maybe their might be some take aways learned eventually that may help in corresponding aging process, but maybe (probably) not.
What this research does "resemble" is work towards treatment of an incredible rare d
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Oh because there's currently equality in aging. In some current societies 40 is ripe old age if one is lucky to live that long, while in others, some kids go to school, do no work, have no spouse or kids, live on the support of their parents or take on huge debt till they're around 40. I.e. what's decrepit age one place is the start of social adulthood at another. Still, no war b/c of that... ... though YES there are wars and they're often one reason why people there don't live that long, and wars are fough
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Obligatory Reference - - - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Intelligent species on earth
1) MICE
2) Dolphins
3) Homo Sap.
Re: Always in mice (Score:2)
"... and best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley."
There - fixed it for you.
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An interesting question... Likewise you could ask, when will my toaster learn to talk? The answer is never. Merely living longer doesn't give the ability to do things that are outside their ken, their design specs.