Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by bildung » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #167

Chestofdraw wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to say nothing happened at all. Aging populations, coupled with low birth rates, are causing difficult political problems. In my country (UK) pensions are the biggest government expenditure next is healthcare, which the elderly use the most. This obviously has to be paid for so you have two options, raise taxes or increase immigration. Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of…

The solution is to raise the pension age. Just politically difficult. Raised pension age vs longer life, fairly obvious choice.

An alternative solution is to raise wages.

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

#172

Post by yread » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:39 PM UTC

daemonk wrote: post #18

tldr for biologists out there. They made a transgenic mouse line of doxycycline inducible Yamanaka factors in progeria (LAKI) background. Too high induction lead to mortality and teratomas, which is known. They cyclicly induced the Yamanaka factors and found it reversed signs of aging (prolong lifespan by ~30%)

So they had mice with a disease that caused early aging and managed to fix that. But there was almost no effect on mice who do not have this disease.

Makes me wonder how overhyped this whole "our children will live for hundreds of years" thing really is.

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

#173

Post by mabbo » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

sho wrote: post #140

dandare wrote: post #126

The consequences of longer lifespan to social order are unimaginable. Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos, especially if the treatment will not be available to everyone. From where I stand it seems that relatively little resources are spent on the research of consequences of longer lifespan compared with the discussions we have about friendly/enemy AI, machines replacing jobs, universal incom…

> Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos Care to explain? I don't see why humans living on average a dozen years longer would inevitably lead to "wars and chaos" and a breakdown of social order. Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last 80 or so years and nothing happened at all. The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to apply to developed countries; if anything it'…

It's not about all humans living a decade more on average, it's about those with the wealth to afford it getting a decade more of healthy years, while the poor do not.

A decade more of time to earn more, build more, become more wealthy and pass that on to children who are then wealthier.

Damn, this would be a fantastic dystopian sci fi plot point.

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

#174

Post by kharms » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:57 PM UTC

sho wrote: post #140

dandare wrote: post #126

The consequences of longer lifespan to social order are unimaginable. Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos, especially if the treatment will not be available to everyone. From where I stand it seems that relatively little resources are spent on the research of consequences of longer lifespan compared with the discussions we have about friendly/enemy AI, machines replacing jobs, universal incom…

> Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos Care to explain? I don't see why humans living on average a dozen years longer would inevitably lead to "wars and chaos" and a breakdown of social order. Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last 80 or so years and nothing happened at all. The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to apply to developed countries; if anything it'…

Estate taxes and legacy-driven philanthropy play a huge role in the redistribution of wealth, so there is that.

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

#175

Post by naasking » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:02 PM UTC

kiba wrote: post #99

naasking wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) [...] Stop having kids This already happens. The more affluent a country becomes, with its better healthcare, better education, and greater career opportunity, the lower its birthrate. The big crisis in 50 years will be population decline .

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

Ending aging will not reverse this trend. Many people only have kids due to age constraints and its effect on fertility and the health of offspring, ie. much harder to get pregnant over 35, and chance of birth defects or other problematic genetic problems increases dramatically, even for men.

This will no longer be the case, so there would be no rush for either gender to have kids. You can focus on your career for the first hundred years, and then have kids. At worst, there would be a minor uptick in population while people get accustomed to the new reality.

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

#176

Post by naasking » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

fapjacks wrote: post #103

naasking wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The societal upheaval of rich people getting smartphones a few years earlier is probably not something you can extrapolate to the societal upheaval from "you could live forever but you don't have enough money right now". I'm not sure that would happen. Consider that they have an eternity to pay it back -- or really, a few hundred years given everyone will likely experience at a fatal accident on such a long timelin…

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

Of course you can die your way out of it. What an absurd thing to say.

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

#177

Post by bassislife » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

somanychoices wrote: post #152

bassislife wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these dictators in Africa ruling for (eternal) life ?!! What a nightmare !

The nightmare would be, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the perfection of the concentration camps: the ability to torture someone forever while keeping them alive.

That's not different from having a bad leader ruling forever... That's torture. 1789 occured for a reason.

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

#178

Post by waterhouse » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:30 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #132

AstralStorm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then you will have no new treatments, and be back to square one.

Adapting a suggestion that I've heard and haven't studied too closely: Find insurance companies that essentially bet that people won't die in the next N years, find very large companies of this sort or form some kind of aggregation of them, and make the case to them that if they spend a bunch of money funding the development of some treatments that work, then they will make a profit because their bets will turn out better.

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

#179

Post by dpeck » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #173

sho wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos Care to explain? I don't see why humans living on average a dozen years longer would inevitably lead to "wars and chaos" and a breakdown of social order. Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last 80 or so years and nothing happened at all. The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to apply to developed countries; if anything it'…

It's not about all humans living a decade more on average, it's about those with the wealth to afford it getting a decade more of healthy years, while the poor do not. A decade more of time to earn more, build more, become more wealthy and pass that on to children who are then wealthier. Damn, this would be a fantastic dystopian sci fi plot point.

Look at life spans of royalty vs commoners in 19th and early 20th century, this already happened and took the medical advances of 20th century to make similar.

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

#180

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 3:57 PM UTC

Chestofdraw wrote: post #162

sho wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos Care to explain? I don't see why humans living on average a dozen years longer would inevitably lead to "wars and chaos" and a breakdown of social order. Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last 80 or so years and nothing happened at all. The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to apply to developed countries; if anything it'…

I don't think it's fair to say nothing happened at all. Aging populations, coupled with low birth rates, are causing difficult political problems. In my country (UK) pensions are the biggest government expenditure next is healthcare, which the elderly use the most. This obviously has to be paid for so you have two options, raise taxes or increase immigration. Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of…

>Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of people didn't like that so the government blamed the EU, this went on for a while and brexit was the eventual response.

Well, your government chose to increase immigration while also suppressing housing construction and wages. The result is that the government set the immigrants against the native-born citizens in a zero-sum economic contest for basic human needs, while the rich eat up all available economic gains that could have gone to young workers or old pensioners.

>So the chaos is already here, war might be hyperbole but a war caused by something is not unimaginable and ageing populations would be a contributing factor.

You need young people to staff the armies.