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Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

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Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#121

Post by eli_gottlieb »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #89
pointytrees wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes talk about wanting to live forever and get weird stares. Are you joking me?? I want to hike every trail in the world. I want to climb every mountain. I want to play every video game. I want to beat the hardest raids in every expansion of WoW. I want to learn multiple langauges. I want to spend several years living in every biome. I want to learn all of the programming languages. I want to go back to schoo…

Thankfully death comes along and sorts through the wants from the willing. It has a nice way of making space for a newer generation of thinkers. Old prejudices die, new thinkers arrive. There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else. I guess this is the rub I get from most people that extol the Silicon Valley dream of extending the…

>There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else.

Oh shush. You know, I've got a 93-year-old grandmother with a damned sharp wit who should not fucking need assisted living and should be able to remember what we were talking about five minutes ago. I've also got a 68-or-so uncle who came down with Parkinson's Disease almost instantly upon his retirement from a lifetime of practicing medicine.

That's not to mention the in-laws with fibromyalgia and the step-father with several "bad lifestyle" diseases.

If your argument in favor of aging and death is, "Indiscriminately inflicting extreme suffering to randomly-selected people for every moment of their lives really helps to freshen up the world", you should reconsider. The problems I mentioned are not unique and special things that happened like a car accident happens. They're just what happens to everyone from living long enough. The bit at the end where you go to sleep and never wake up is nothing; the problem is the decades of suffering followed by that.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#122

Post by rezashirazian »

komali2 wrote: post #53
rezashirazian wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that when you're a billionaire you have much more to lose when you die.

I don't understand this belief, can you expand on it? The way I see it, you don't "lose" anything when you die, because a "loss" implies the lack of ability to use something you once were able to use, and the feeling that comes from that lacking. When someone dies they'll never again be able to use stuff, so there is no loss.

I think we agree up to "a 'loss' implies the lack of ability to use something you once were able to use". Since a dead person is unable to do anything, being a billionaire or not leads to the same conclusion.

Where we differ is on the feeling that comes from that lacking. A dead person feels nothing and by your definition is not losing anything since they can't feel it.

this is all very true and I agree, however as humans we can sense impending events and a since death is an indisputable fact the feeling of this eventual loss can begin to haunt one before it actually sets in. So technically we can argue that a billionaire begins to feel the cost of losing it when she becomes a billionaire. (since she knows she will die and lose it).

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#123

Post by aaron-lebo »

notgood wrote: post #119
deegles wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm excited for ant-aging, not so much for an endless deluge of VC backed treatments/supplements that aren't grounded in science and/or ineffective. Besides, lifestyle needs to be addressed first. Reduce/eliminate risky behaviors, eat correctly (whatever that may be), and exercise regularly. Then perhaps look into supplements and treatments.

Some vegans die at their 60s of "natural causes", Winston Churchill died at 90 after having smoked all his life and being very fat. Yeah, statistically there is relevance to eat correctly, but its not as dramatic as some like to believe.

General Montgomery: I neither drink nor smoke and I am 100 percent fit.

Churchill: I drink and smoke and I am 200 percent fit.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#124

Post by paulsutter »

nullc wrote: post #111
pointytrees wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes talk about wanting to live forever and get weird stares. Are you joking me?? I want to hike every trail in the world. I want to climb every mountain. I want to play every video game. I want to beat the hardest raids in every expansion of WoW. I want to learn multiple langauges. I want to spend several years living in every biome. I want to learn all of the programming languages. I want to go back to schoo…

I've found it helpful to share this with people: http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

> "orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the human species because it kept the population size down"

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#125

Post by eli_gottlieb »

nostromo wrote: post #79
a13n wrote: post #56

I'm not a billionaire and I'm not old, but I am so excited about anti-aging. I know Hacker News is super negative, but who doesn't want to live longer?! Of all the pain points humans experience, you'd think death lies pretty high on the list. Why are people fighting this?

It comes from reverence for naturalism. It's similar in that sense to other movements, like anti-GMO, anti-vax, etc. Tell people you want to cure cancer and you're a hero. Tell people you want to cure age-related decline and eventually death and you're a weirdo extremist.

The word "naturalism" means something else.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#127

Post by yazaddaruvala »

jacquesm wrote: post #70
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all seriousness, the price for eternal youth will be the cost of production and shipping. If it turns out to be a compound for eternal youth, then it can be reverse engineered by labs in China or India (or anywhere). There is no sufficient patent, IP law, moral high ground about R&D expenses. The world will be supplied at the cost of production and shipping.

Just like the cost of all medication is just production and shipping?

My doctors in the US, were hesitant to give me an MRI for my knee because of costs (~$1000 per MRI). Something about the insurance company needing some prerequisites. Fair enough. My knee really wasn't that bad, and I lived my life. 3 months later I was in India for other reasons. I walked into a clinic, spent $96, two days later I had the results of my MRI. I was handed a CD with the raw image files they collected (MRI specific file format). I had "printouts" of those images. I even had a note in english for a layperson like myself to understand. Later, I took those MRI files to my doctors in the US. They confirmed all the findings, and suggested the same things as the doctors in India and I went along my way. Unprovoked the Ortho looking at my knee and the MRI even exclaimed, "thats the best $100 MRI I've ever seen".

In this case, the total costs of production/shipping were higher than they would have been in the US. But that is because I had to ship myself (i.e. ~$2000 round trip). However, I built it into my vacation, so the MRI essentially cost me the ~$100 for "production". I've had single dinners which are more expensive.

Taking pictures of your body is relatively innocent. Medication is a little more tricky. You need to be able to trust the source. However, if layperson B can trust the source of the Heroin they consistently buy on Silk Road, I have no doubts that the trust issues for medication will be solved far before we have compound "eternal youth".

For what its worth, we just happen to have insurance so we tend to think everyone buys drugs legally like we do. Do some research about what people without options actually do. Did you watch the "Dallas Buyers Club"? Where do you think poor diabetics get Insulin, or Metaformin? Even today, Metaformin being an "anti-aging" drug, is even imported from China and sold without prescription.

If you're still not convinced: Think about the risk reward calculation for a second. Importing illegal drugs, risk (aside from eating bad pills): 50 years in prison. Reward: You're now eternally young. Endure a really poor 50 years, then a long long time from now, watch the universe slowly end as you eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, fondly looking back at the last bajillion years.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#128

Post by farresito »

Chinjut wrote: post #126

I want desperately to live longer, or even to recapture youth, and yet, my worry: When finally science unlocks the secret of immortality, they'll just raise the retirement age correspondingly.

The concept of retiring will disappear relatively soon. I don't even think we will be working 8 or 10 hours every day. I think society will make a shift when it comes to work.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#129

Post by beambot »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #11
meerkats1 wrote: post #8

I would love to get involved with a company like this, however I am only a software engineer with no background in the biological sciences. Is there a feasible path that does not involve going back to school for many years? I am not afraid of learning new things or doing the hard work I'd need to do, I just feel like that route would be highly inefficient. I would really like to contribute towards meaningfully extend…

In the short term, get the highest-paying software engineering job you can, and donate a meaningful part of your income to charitable organizations working on anti-aging research such as SENS. (Check if your employer matches charitable donations, as well.) Much more efficient and effective than rethinking your entire career just so you can add one person's worth of time to such an effort. (That's not to say "don't wo…

There are undoubtedly other efforts that could benefit from parent's CS skills -- much more than just at this company: university labs, startups, non-profits, etc. We need more people to combine CS with other fields to make this world a better place -- not just CS for CS' sake (or fintech, apps, web, etc).

meerkats1, I assure you: The "work to donate" mantra commonly touted for charities does not apply. There are plenty of organizations looking for top CS talent, and they're willing to pay real salaries. Get out there and ask friends for introductions, send emails to biotech people in your area, etc.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#130

Post by JohnDotAwesome »

neom wrote: post #77
misiti3780 wrote: post #46

I just finished a book by Nick Lane where he discussed how he believes aging is cause by mitochondrial free-radical leakage. His hypothesis (and he is a smart guy) is that science will allow people to live longer, but probably not much longer than 125. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20021368

What's the book? Would like to read it. Thanks.

The Vital Question. As a layman -- and an audio book listener -- this wasn't an easy book to get through! Still, it caused me to sit and think a little, and that was the whole point.
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