This article, and a few others covering exactly the same thing keep getting posted here ever few months. I hope Mr. de Grey is right, and I hope I live long enough to find out. That said, until there's some progress to announce, please stop re-posting this here.
We will be able to live to 1,000
101–110 of 156 posts
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#102We might or might not defeat the diseases of aging anytime soon, but if you want to help the people who are trying to make it happen, consider donating to the SENS Foundation (money goes directly to research): http://www.sens.org/ Sadly, because aging isn't considered a disease by the FDA and other regulatory bodies, there is actually very little research being done on it if you take into consideration the fact that…
Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?
That's complicated. My criticism of Aubrey de Grey is one I have of transhumanism in general, which is that it's mostly CS people taking Moore's law and applying it to biological problems without having any experience in biology. Aubrey de Grey's degrees are not in the life sciences, and to my knowledge he's never been directly engaged in a biological research project. Those of us who have done aging research understand how ridiculously difficult it can be to do things that sound simple on paper, and De Grey isn't even making proposals that are simple on paper.
On the other hand, he seems to be a smart, well-intentioned guy who has spent a lot of time developing a theoretical knowledge of how biological systems work. De Grey's not going to spend your money on coke and whores, and he's not going to spend it developing the ultimate power crystal. He's just underestimated the difficulty of solving the problem.
So if you think aging is a disease and not a natural process, it's probably underfunded and you should consider giving him money. Just understand that you're probably going to die of an aging-related complication regardless of how much money you or anyone else gives him.
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The chain gets to weed out errors by starting with cells that got through functionally unblemished courtesy functioning error correcting mechanisms. Each new cycle gets a fully functional error correction mechanism, and is fault tolerant to the theoretical point of repopulation from a small point of individuals. An individual human body has error correcting mechanisms that do not benefit from being renewed every cycl…
Where does the fresh water come from? Your assumption is that sex cells are magically exempt from the accumulation of errors.
It's not that they are magically exempt, but that the error filled ones are less reproductively viable, and die out. That contrasts directly with e.g., cancer cells, that become more prolific and lead to the death of the organism.
(There's several points of 'selection' for sex cells- error free ones are, loosely speaking, more likely to successfully fertilize/get fertilized, and more likely to create viable offspring that themselves reproduce.)
Edit: It's like the difference between being able to select the top 10% and selecting those with a score above 90%. The chain gets to "select" only those that perform above a set threshold, but the organism has to play out every hand it's dealt.
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#104Ignoring any claims that the man is a crackpot and any other problems one might have with the science. Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored :-/
I've always preferred the idea of immortality on the installment plan -- get frozen/stored/whatever, then woken up every couple hundred or couple thousand years, do stuff, go back into freeze/storage/whatever. Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool stuff the future holds.
You will live in a perpetual state of cultural shock. You can't possibly be useful to the society in that situation.
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#105There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions. I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?". He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate. It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.
A specific concern I've always had about this idea of indefinite lifespan is that of monoculture. How often have you heard a phrase along the lines of "this is a temporary problem; once the 'old guard' is no longer in charge, society can move forward on issue XYZ"? Make "XYZ" any major social issue we've had in the past thousand years; from fiefdoms to gay rights to democracy. It's effectively the end of generational…
People still die, from accidents and what have you. In terms of multiples of the average death rate, generational change will be exactly the same. But generations are 10+ times as long in this view.
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#106There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions. I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?". He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate. It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.
That's an explanation that rests on group selection, which tends not to be taken very seriously by most biologists. Similarly, group selection explanations of why we age are held only by a handful of researchers in the field of aging. Most biologists in the field of aging hold that aging is the result of the decreased force of natural selection with age. This is somewhat difficult to explain even with diagrams, but I…
"There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age."
That makes a lot of sense. Passing on the genes seems to over-ride a lot of other things, just look at the crazy stuff most (all) creatures do to find and attract a mate.
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
"How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?" That question doesn't make a lot of sense. This is not a Web 2.0 startup. It's a lot more fundamental than that, and a lot of the required tools and technologies have not been invented yet - that's what they are trying to do.
Of course, but he should be able to give a ballpark figure. Are we talking about millions, billions or trillions?
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
He used to be a lot more controversial a few years ago (Technology Review even had a challenge, asking biogerontologists to debunk his claims, though none really did a convincing job). He's slowly but surely making his ideas more mainstream by tirelessly speaking, debating anyone who wants to, organising conferences and editing a respected peer reviewed journal (Rejuvenation Research, iirc). If you think you have a g…
What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
Another line of research that has been progressing since the early days of fundraising (because it was cheap to get started) is the search for bacterial enzymes that can break down the gunk that builds up in your cells with age, and as a consequence destroys the cellular garbage-collection mechanisms. You might have heard of lipofuscin and its effects on autophagy, for example:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/12/lysosomal-activit...
The links at the bottom of this page outline progress to date - some potential enzymes are found, which could feed into a larger scale project to develop them if funding arrives:
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/lysosens
Meanwhile, small scale funding can keep people working on screening bacteria for more enzymes to break down more types of chemical gunk that cause your cellular systems to fail with advancing age.
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything that happens after reproduction is in an evolutionary blind spot. Aging is the result of evolutionary neglect , not design.
I disagree. If my parent stays around and eats all my food, I'm carrying bad genes that cause me to die pre-reproduction.
That would be the case, and what I said up-thread was badly formulated. But it still remains that in the way things happened, aging is evolutionary neglect. We've evolved repair mechanisms that help us pass our genes, and also parents who take care of their children (since it takes quite a while for a human child to become self-sufficient), but through most of history, humans died pretty young and so we never had time to evolve repair mechanisms for the kind of damage that happens when you are 50-60, etc.
Re: We will be able to live to 1,000
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
You might look at the mitochondrial work which recently focused on Corral-Debrinski's lab as the most likely prospect for getting the job done. A brief outline is at the end of this page: http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens and you can look at Corral-Debrinski's breakthrough here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18771762 Basically it's now shown possible to move a mitochondrial gene into the…
How much of that money has been donated already? i.e. how much more is needed?
It's interesting stuff. It makes me wonder whether I should be studying biology :)