Saudi Arabia Plans To Spend $1 Billion a Year Discovering Treatments To Slow Aging (technologyreview.com) 83
Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it. Now the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has about as much money as all of them put together, is going to try it. From a report: The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1 billion a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as "health span." The sum, if the Saudis can spend it, could make the Gulf state the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the underlying causes of aging -- and how it might be slowed down with drugs. The foundation hasn't yet made a formal announcement, but the scope of its effort has been outlined at scientific meetings and is the subject of excited chatter among aging researchers, who hope it will underwrite large human studies of potential anti-aging drugs.
The fund is managed by Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the onetime chief scientist at PespsiCo, who was recruited to the CEO job in 2020. "Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan," Khan said in an interview. "There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one." The idea, popular among some longevity scientists, is that if you can slow the body's aging process, you can delay the onset of multiple diseases and extend the healthy years people are able to enjoy as they grow older. Khan says the fund is going to give grants for basic scientific research on what causes aging, just as others have done, but it also plans to go a step further by supporting drug studies, including trials of "treatments that are patent expired or never got commercialized."
The fund is managed by Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist and the onetime chief scientist at PespsiCo, who was recruited to the CEO job in 2020. "Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan," Khan said in an interview. "There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one." The idea, popular among some longevity scientists, is that if you can slow the body's aging process, you can delay the onset of multiple diseases and extend the healthy years people are able to enjoy as they grow older. Khan says the fund is going to give grants for basic scientific research on what causes aging, just as others have done, but it also plans to go a step further by supporting drug studies, including trials of "treatments that are patent expired or never got commercialized."
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Slowed down aging - you'll reach puberty when you are 120...
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Oh damn! Age of consent will be 180! (160 in Kentucky)
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that's part of the secret time travel funding. mostly just to turn off the cameras in the past
Now it's suddenly bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it.
What is this B.S.? So, a billionaire putting money into researching how to extend healthy human lifespan is now bad... because it's a billionaire doing it? Is this the new msmash logic? Since it's bad that there are billionaires, then anything a billionaire wants to do is necessarily bad, and therefore researching age extension is bad? Really?
I can't imagine how contorted your thinking must be to sit there on your couch connecting to your Starlink internet, opening Google Chrome and going to Amazon to order a big roll of bristol board and paint so you can make a big sign to protest how these billionaires have made your life so miserable.
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If only I had mod points. A virtual +1 for you!
It's amazing how the world has decided that no matter how a rich person spends their money, it is wrong and bad.
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From what I know about rich people, most of them are unethical at best and what most could consider immoral at worst. They live on another planet, and most only care about furthering their wealth or ego (who wouldn't, but still)
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From what I know about rich people, most of them are unethical at best and what most could consider immoral at worst.
So, they're just like everyone else?
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I know a few good people
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Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it.
What is this B.S.? So, a billionaire putting money into researching how to extend healthy human lifespan is now bad... because it's a billionaire doing it? Is this the new msmash logic? Since it's bad that there are billionaires, then anything a billionaire wants to do is necessarily bad, and therefore researching age extension is bad? Really?
I can't imagine how contorted your thinking must be to sit there on your couch connecting to your Starlink internet, opening Google Chrome and going to Amazon to order a big roll of bristol board and paint so you can make a big sign to protest how these billionaires have made your life so miserable.
If they make it so I can live forever and have to WORK forever, it will make my eternal life incredibly horrible. I want to retire!
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It's not bad because billionaires are doing it, it's bad because it can lead to the rich living longer than everyone else since anti-aging treatments will be costly elective procedures. This would only exacerbate inequality further.
I can't imagine how contorted your thinking must be to sit there on your couch connecting to your Starlink internet, opening Google Chrome and going to Amazon to order a big roll of bristol board and paint so you can make a big sign to protest how these billionaires have made your life so miserable.
Because all that technology didn't make the person's life better in any meaningful way, and they'd probably trade it all in for affordable health care and/or housing and/or a livable wage because picking up a bristol board and paint at the local hardware store wasn't bad at all?
It's not bad, full stop. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know about the rest of his rant, but I'm strongly in favor of anti-aging research. Aging is causally linked to untold numbers of extremely painful and debilitating illnesses; finding a way to counter this would be beneficial to all of humanity. My mom passed in a particularly painful and awful way in 2016, my dad passed to heart issues and having his lungs fill with fluid last month. These kinds of illnesses are far less likely to occur in a younger person and if they do occur the body is much more able to fight them off.
There would certainly be associated problems, but in my opinion, the potential to substantially decrease human suffering outweighs having to tackle the inevitable problems. As far as people making claims about living forever or whatever, I would much rather choose when to go out on my own terms (or not at all, if I so choose) than be forced to go out in misery well ahead of when I want to. I see no problem at all with giving people more power over their own terminus. It's also why I support right to die -- again, both my parents' deaths inform this position.
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I'm worried that the early expensive phase of life extension technology could change the world in a way that prevents the treatment from ever being affordable. Right now death is the great equalizer, you can't take it with you as they say, and look at how much a few still want to amass. Remove that limit and how greedy would the ownership class become then? I'm sure we'd end up plumbing the depths of exploitation, leading to generations of hyper-unequal dystopia culminating in a global French Revolution 2.0
Re:It's not bad, full stop. (Score:4)
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Re:It's not bad, full stop. (Score:4)
I should also note that I paid $150 no contract for my Moto G Pure back in January and it does everything I need it to and then some. So it's not like you have to get an expensive phone.
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Sounds like this already happens pretty frequently nowadays, at differing layers of abstraction; be it having been born in a developing country, inheriting a poor dietary education, or simply having freer access to more (advanced) medical care as is already the case in places such as the US. Oh, and cryogenic freezing, if that still counts.
But yet, I would still be in agreement with what I'd imagine to be a majority of people that the only way to ethically permit access to such hypothetical anti-aging medic
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Sounds like is already happening pretty frequently nowadays, at differing layers of abstraction; be it having been born in a developing country, inheriting a poor dietary education, or simply having freer access to more (advanced) medical care as is already the case in places such as the US. Oh, and cryogenic freezing, if that still counts.
But yet, I would still be in agreement with what I'd imagine to be a majority that the only way to ethically permit access to such hypothetical anti-aging medicine is to
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Oh, and cryogenic freezing, if that still counts.
Haha no it doesn't, the field is 100% pseudoscience right now, about as realistic as a warp drive. I remember a few years ago some actual scientists tried to freeze and thaw a pig carcass using the best scientific knowledge available, just to test the practicality of that part of the process. When they tried to thaw the pig, it cracked in half.
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Maybe not a pig yet, but I do recall some small success with small animals... was it a rabbit? I don't remember. In any case, the intention is not for immediate success, but rather for potential future success. And modern methods involve fluids that minimize crystallization, so as to not damage tissue. I mean, if it costs as much as a Netflix subscription if you start saving up young, and it allows you the minuscule possibility of seeing the far future, why not.
But I suppose it does share quite a few simila
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It's not bad because billionaires are doing it, it's bad because it can lead to the rich living longer than everyone else since anti-aging treatments will be costly elective procedures.
No, this is perfectly normal, and has been for millennia. Partly it's because the rich can afford to be early adopters, first to try out innovations that with time and competition, slide down the learning curve until they become commonplace for all. One example if this in my own lifetime has been air travel.
But the more important reason is that certain people are experimentally minded, and enjoy jumping on unproven innovations first. Some of them make horrible mistakes, and die doing it, but in the long run
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Often enough they're right.
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Often enough they're right.
But less than you would think, because generally those are the people who have nothing worth stealing.
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An honest mugging would at least leave him knowing why he now has to buy a fifteen year old car that he'll have to pay more to maintai
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The global rich already live way longer than the poor. Life expectancy in Japan is 85, in the Central African Republic it's 53. Does that make the Japanese bad people? Do you wish they died younger so life could be fairer?
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The life expectancy discrepancy isn't good, but it's barely approaching the scale of what life extension technology might be able to deliver. It's also an average and someone with no money at least has a chance of beating the odds.
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One of the more interesting compounds I've noted in this field is ISRIB [ucsf.edu]. It is being developed by Calico Labs, Alphabet's equivalent of this Saudi Arabian venture with Abbvie as a partner. I believe both Alphabet and Abbvie have contributed funds and resources in the billions range.
From what I've read about ISRIB, if it were to work out, it would just be a compound that everyone in the world takes once every few years to turn cells back on that were mistakenly turned off. At that kind of volume, I seriously
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It's not bad because billionaires are doing it, it's bad because it can lead to the rich living longer than everyone else since anti-aging treatments will be costly elective procedures. This would only exacerbate inequality further.
The rich have better access to *everything* that money can buy, unless you do away with free market and move 100% to communism, nothing is going to change that. Any technological progress will benefit the rich first, be it better cars, better computers/phones, better materials, better medicine, etc.
On the long term, only technology progress give significant improvement to everybody's standard of living. That the rich may be getting the benefit first is not a valid reason to slow down research.
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This isn't an ordinary technological improvement that doesn't even make a big difference to anyone's standard of living, this has the potential to hyper-incentivize greed in an unprecedented way while turning the rich into almost a different species that see the plebs as short-lived insects.
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...unless you do away with free market and move 100% to communism...
And that change will last only until someone "more equal" takes over and we wind up with a dictatorship covered with a veneer of Communism.
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People are not that unequal. They are not nearly so unequal that 8 men are as productive as the poorer ~4B of the world combined. Only a system that can misattribute productivity from workers to owners is capable of that. Good thing they have bootlickers like you to defend this ridiculous state of affairs I guess...
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I hope billionaires will be taxed until they only have relatively sane amounts of money left AND that many more people will eventually get the chance to live a longer healthier life. If more governments and less billionaires were funding this research, that would be far more likely to happen.
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Long before AOC was saying that every billionaire is a policy failure, I was saying in a less catchy way that every decamillionaire is a policy failure.
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Strictly from an economic standpoint it's a failure because wealth-hoarding kills demand. If you look beyond the economy and consider that the economy is supposed to serve a society, then it becomes a multifaceted clusterfuck - if that level of wealth is supposedly accrued by "working" then there's a massive misattribution of productivity going on.
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Oh my goodness. First, I agree that the US has too many loopholes for avoiding taxes. However, what you're describing is a regressive tax (tax based on how much you have, not how much you make.) Most of these billionaires don't have billions of dollars sitting in the bank. They own shares of companies. But the IRS doesn't take payment in shares, they take payment in USD. So in order to pay a billion dollars in tax, you have to sell a billion dollars of shares. OK. So in that case you're forcing some
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However, what you're describing is a regressive tax (tax based on how much you have, not how much you make.)
The word for that is a property tax or wealth tax, a regressive tax is a different thing, one with lower tax rates for higher taxable amounts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There is not even anything practically-regressive about wealth or property taxes in general, unlike sales taxes on essential items such as food for example.
Most of these billionaires don't have billions of dollars sitting in the bank. They own shares of companies. But the IRS doesn't take payment in shares, they take payment in USD. So in order to pay a billion dollars in tax, you have to sell a billion dollars of shares. OK. So in that case you're forcing someone to sell an asset in order to pay that tax. As soon as they try to do that, the price of the shares goes down (like Musk did last year). So not only did they hand over a billion USD in taxes, but everyone who owns shares of that company now has less wealth (on paper) including the individual you're taxing. That includes a lot of pension funds and the like. Ok, so who purchased that billion dollars of shares? Where did that billion dollars come from? Not a whole lot of investors are sitting around with a billion dollars in cash just to scoop up the shares of people who need to pay their taxes. What you did was take a billion dollars out of the equity market and handed that to the government, so you just implemented quantitative tightening, which is going to reduce investment in growing companies, which means fewer companies that would have expanded and hired more people.
This all sounds good so far really, the stock market has been running too hot since at least the dot-com era, taking money out of the stock market sounds like a good way to cool it
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Sounds like you need to get in the "cure aging" business, job security and there are a lot of rich people that will cough up a lot of money.
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Imagine if all the wealth and political influence one can gather in a lifetime was allowed to continue accumulating for more than a single lifetime, and never had to be surrendered to death.
I can't imagine how short-sighted your thinking must be that you can't see a downside to having the rich and powerful continue to gather wealth and power far beyond the lifespan of the people they oppress. That is literally the plot of more than a few dystopian stories.
=Smidge=
Re:Now it's suddenly bad? - no one said that. (Score:2)
There was no value judgment in the sentence at all, but rather just an amusing observation. No where in that sentence is there any mention of that being "good" or "bad". There's not even an implication about a value judgment, and the rest of the summary is a quote so not even context to imply a value judgment. Yet, there's a rant about a statement that wasn't made and it's getting +5 insightful.
I therefore have to conclude that the value judgment came from the parent poster, not the summary writer.
My tak
What if the solution involves less crude oil? (Score:5, Funny)
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It would be ironic if the upshot of all the research is that the best way to extend healthy lifespans would be to build walkable neighbourhoods where people don't need cars.
Yup, that would be a lot of fun in Saudi Arabia, in the summer, in a sand storm -- up hill, both ways ... :-)
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Do Saudi women live significantly longer than Saudi men? Because they're already not allowed to drive cars...
If it's quietly canned in 3 years (Score:2, Funny)
I'll assume the miracle cure is homosexuality.
Re: If it's quietly canned in 3 years (Score:2)
Homosexuality and Atheism, I think you mean.
There is a lot already! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: There is a lot already! (Score:2)
5) Yamanaka Factors. How much to take to cause stem cells to form and not to cause your body to be overwhelmed with cancer? Well, that's for billionaires and their slave/prisoner test trials in questionable ethics countries to figure out.
Death is Good (Score:2)
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The worst thing that could happen to humanity and democracy is see the oligarchs live longer.
Or politicians or judges w/lifetime appointments.
I thought the Saudis could already stop aging (Score:3)
They just cut you up into pieces and smuggle you out of their embassy in a suitcase. Once you stop screaming...no more aging.
It is not a question of money (Score:1)
Obviously, this type of research needs exceptional scientists working on it or it has no chance of ever succeeding. These people are basically never motivated by money. Hence this one will fail as well.
Don't play GTW (Score:2)
Try to avoid playing GTW. Nobody lives long in that game.
Religion (Score:3)
>The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1 billion a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health
I guess they are not eager to meet their maker. They reckon they are more likely to go 'down' than 'up', I'd imagine.
Re: Religion (Score:3)
Maybe deep down they have accepted that god and heaven are bullshit with no evidence they exist.
I wonder. (Score:1)
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1/2.053=.041, and that's how many Yemens this is worth year by year, assuming Yemen's economy keeps up with inflation.
"Hevolution"? (Score:2)
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Presumably it stands for Health + Evolution.
Lazarus Long has them on the radar (Score:2)
Selective breeding I would guess.
Yes, ageing and death are problems. (Score:1)
Preventing aging means extending healthy life. (Score:1)
If they succeed, only for select people (Score:2)
Imagine your favorite dictator living forever.
Death is not a disease (Score:2)
From the article: "There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one."
I suggest a bigger problem is the psychological one that many people cannot face the inevitability of their own death. The article implies that having loads of money worsens this affliction. I think we should take their money away, for their own good.
However, there is a lot to be said for research into treating the diseases associated with ageing, which does not necessarily mean prolonging life. For example, a great number
Aren't they already too late to this party? (Score:2)
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Good news: They manage to give mice twice the lifespan of a normal mouse
Bad news:They [they] manage to give humans twice the lifespan of a normal mouse
Clean the air and water of fossil fuel pollution (Score:2)
$1 billion dollars later... âoeStop burning fossil fuels. It turns out that cancer from air pollution is shortening lives.â.
Saudi Arabia: ðY
The main discovery (Score:2)
The main discovery will be that the primary driver of aging is the toxic exhaust from burning petroleum products.