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Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

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Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#111

Post by AstralStorm »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #58
HaveCourage wrote: post #51

Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) Bad for society Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)…

Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Already, modern medicine expands lifetime and in particularly healthy lifetime significantly and the richer you are the more of it you can access. Like, I don't have the same chances to get to 70 and still feel alright as someone born today in Bangladesh, or Zambia. The world is already very unfair, and the only solution to that is to make it more f…

Specifically, make the treatments cheap and scalable, then ignore IP.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#112

Post by AstralStorm »

jacalata wrote: post #100
kiba wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ending aging will reverse this trend. The crisis then won't be population decline but the side effect of population growth.

Ending aging won't stop accidents, homicide, suicide or (probably) even most modern physical failures like diabetes and heart attacks.

It might fix the latter. The mechanisms involved in heart disease and diabetes are related to general aging as well.

Accidents and suicide could be handled too. Former by outlawing machines of murder (cars) and spare or artificial organs, latter by improving our understanding of neuroscience and psychology.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#113

Post by srcreigh »

tn13 wrote: post #79
anigbrowl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much. I don't know why news headline writers are so insistent on bullshit, when they could have taken a cue from you and said 'gene therapy increases mouse lifespans by 30%,' which would have been just as short and interesting but vastly more honest.

But very bad clickbait. The problems of media relying to eyeballs and ad clicks :)

Clickbait title to support the media business (marketing, journalist salaries), Hacker News for the summary.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#114

Post by AstralStorm »

HaveCourage wrote: post #63
anigbrowl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What fear is motivating me to ask other people to die, as you put it? Eternal life would be sort of cool but I dispute your proposition that more people automatically make more progress faster. More people increases competition which incentivizes some kinds of progress but arguably retards others - consider our lamentable record of environmental destruction. I don't think your aspirations are morally wrong in any way…

You never step in the same river twice. If life gets too boring for you, remember the saying, cut down the tracks, not across the street. Might it be easier to cure boredom than decay? You need only become forgetful right? You wouldn't ask the restaurant to take items off the menu because you might not like them, would you?

I would expect a great cultural and scientific renaissance because you could devote a lot more time to creative pursuits. Even if many people are too lazy, the few geniuses with much longer lifespans would turn the world over.

An interesting side effect could be that public figures would become more careful, because if you're sunk, you'd be done forever.

Plus the shift from old people retirement driven politics. Much bigger focus on handling employment.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#115

Post by AstralStorm »

djsumdog wrote: post #54
HaveCourage wrote: post #51

Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) Bad for society Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)…

For you Sci-Fi fans out there, I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. In his fictional world, humans do discover how to extend longevity and it goes into many of the social issues that arise (who gets treatments? The rich? The poor? How do we deal with over population?).

Dealing with overpopulation is best done the Elon Musk way - go to space, it is empty.

A trip to Mars of three months in a lifetime of few hundred could be considered an interesting interlude.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#116

Post by AstralStorm »

EGreg wrote: post #108
fapjacks wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, interesting. Like a whole new kind of financial indentured servitude that you can't even die your way out of.

Look people, it's very simple. Many countries are currently addicted to population growth. Their mentality hasn't adjusted to the rise of automation and the decline of demand for human labor. They still think we need to keep high birth rates to fund social security schemes. What will happen in the next few decades is that fewer people will be needed to do anything really productive. More people will study and raise t…

The converse is that a size of the group required for taking over the world will get ever smaller.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#118

Post by AstralStorm »

known wrote: post #104

METFORMIN also does the same http://qz.com/431663/scientists-want-to-treat-aging-like-a-d... and http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21704788-fight-cheat-...

Currently probably the most impressive treatment, yes. But it is not patented, so no company can go out and make a killing off it ;-)

Much better than the second best, statins.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#119

Post by return0 »

lvs wrote: post #94
RushAndAPush wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that the mice that didn't have their genome edited didn't have a drastic life extension? I assume the improvements only occurred in the mice that had their genomes edited to reduce Yamanaka factors because they then artificially replaced the Yamanaka factors?

No. That's not quite what I'm saying. There was no particularly interesting effect of inducing transient expression of the Yamanaka factors on normal mice reported in this paper. It is effectively a negative result that's being reported, as it pertains to wild-type mice. The paper primarily reports results that pertain to mice with a genetic defect that causes progeria. Mice with this defect have a shorter-than-norma…

so its more a treatment for progeria than general aging reversal

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#120

Post by AstralStorm »

L_Rahman wrote: post #97
jgord wrote: post #50

Its very noisy to read these 'blip' articles, rather like following the stock ticker blow by blow ... Its wonderful that we see these interesting reports every week, but as a non-specialist you never how it will impact human longevity, and when. What I'd like to read is a well considered "state-of-longevity-science" report - by someone not Aubrey DeGray (give the man a medal) but equally cognizant, perhaps more conse…

Would you pay for a publication that maintained something along these lines but for a variety of topics - energy technology, human lifespan, US healthcare systems, etc? Assume that the pieces are well researched and the journalists have domain expertise, paired with deep reading of primary texts.

Sure, but how much?

Currently Springer's stranglehold is very tight.

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