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How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

aging.nautil.us

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Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#21

Post by Razengan »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #19
Razengan wrote: post #11

So we have the following use cases for immortality: • "Selfish" vanity, fear, etc. including accumulation of wealth, power, etc. • A desire to remain with loved ones, including pets, and to keep loved ones around, including celebrities. • A safeguard against unexpected "unfair" death, e.g. getting murdered, assassinated or dying in a freak accident, or terrorist attack etc. • Carrying out long-term plans that take lo…

> • Cloning. You basically get a new person that may be "as good" as the loved person/pet/celebrity you wanted to preserve. I don't think this is an accurate description of cloning.

Making an identical copy of the body but without the memories and likely without the same personality?

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#22

Post by dahart »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #20
dahart wrote: post #18

Great article, this is the first one on aging I've read in a while that has it's head on straight and isn't trying to make weasel arguments that suggest aging cures are just around the corner. Happy to see a clear distinction between lifespan and longevity, so many people like to leverage confusion between those concepts to argue that medical advancements have improved longevity, like Ray Kurzweil does. > People talk…

> I want to have conversations with my doctor all the time about routine advice seeking kind of stuff, but I don't because there's nothing wrong, plus it costs a lot. I assume you mean it costs a lot as a total package, including paying for health insurance. For me, my individual visit to see my doctor costs me $20 per visit, which I do not consider to be expensive.

Yeah, I do mean the whole package. I have a copay too and I maybe shouldn't worry about it, but I do have a fear that using insurance too much for routine stuff will bite me later. $20 isn't much, but the doctor's office charges $100 for that, and I'd love to chat like twice a month. I assume that I end up paying the full price eventually. As it stands I make it in once or twice a year.

Even if I paid full price without insurance, $200/month for a doctor's attention and advice isn't that much, it's less than insurance, so maybe I'm irrationally afraid. But either way it's still part of what's keeping me from doing it. That, and if I call for an appointment they ask what's wrong multiple times. They de-prioritize scheduling for appointments when nothing's wrong, and they assume it's a one-time event. I feel like there is a non-negligible social disincentive built-in to calling for help when nothings wrong.

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#23

Post by reasonattlm »

GCA10 wrote: post #15

Time to own up to the elephant in the room. Medicine so far has done a really good job of prolonging people's seventies and eighties. All the symptoms of advanced aging that used to be compressed into ages 70-82 or so, ending in death, now can be stretched out from ages 70 to 98. Will this initiative double the amount of time that we've got the full capacity of our 20s and 30s? Or will it just allow people a prolonge…

The trend of the past is the result of medicine and medical development that did not in any way attempt to address the causes of aging. Benefits have resulted from either (a) inadvertently slowing down the damage accumulation, or (b) compensating in some way without addressing the damage. In either case the benefits are small in the grand scheme of things. 0.1 years of life expectancy at 60 with every passing decade is not a large outcome, and we should not be surprised to find it small given that treating aging as a medical condition hasn't been the goal of research or implementation.

Trying to keep a damaged machine running without repairing the damage is expensive and futile. How far does changing the oil in a car or pressing the accelerator harder get you if you never fix anything that goes wrong in the engine? Similar situation.

The future will be radically different because researchers are now resolved to treat aging as a medical condition, to investigate the causes, and to intervene. The debate now is over the best way to go about it, and alas most of the research community remains fixated on the path that will cost a great deal and achieve next to nothing, which is to say efforts to alter the operation of metabolism so as to modestly slow down the aging process. Calorie restriction mimetics, autophagy enhancement, and etc.

If you want better results, you have to look to the rejuvenation research of the sort carried out by the SENS Research Foundation, the Big Pharma groups clearing amyloid, the new senescent cell clearance startups, etc. Slowing aging by altering metabolism is the expensive road to nowhere. Repairing the causes of aging is the more efficient, faster road to rejuvenation of the old and the prevention of aging.

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#24

Post by reasonattlm »

msie wrote: post #10
reasonattlm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly startups / small companies working on rejuvenation therapies, however, ways to repair the forms of damage that cause aging rather than merely slowing down that damage a little as is the case for calorie restriction mimetic drug development. See for example these entities working on means to selectively remove senescent cells, with Unity Biotechnolgy being the one connected to Buck Institute resear…

Any human trials yet?

Unity will be starting human trials this year, so far as we know.

Oisin will follow later this year or in 2018, if they keep to the standard way in which things work in biotech companies following an A round.

I have no idea what SIWA will be doing; they have been around on life support for a while, and now resurrected by the newfound money coming into the field. I'd imagine that their next step would be some form of trial, though it is unclear as to where exactly they are in their animal study schedule.

There are people self-experimenting with senolytic drug candidates now, though not in any way that will provide useful data. If you draw the line at candidates for which there is in vivo evidence in mammals, you're left with just the chemotherapeutics and foxo4-dri. (A pity that fisetin has no in vivo evidence yet...). The chemotherapeutics are worth skipping over, since they are ugly chemicals and really only a starting point for the development of analogs without the horrible side-effects, and foxo4-dri hasn't been tested in any formal way in humans yet.

At the pace at which new drug candidates are emerging and being tested, a couple of years from now would be a good time to be self-experimenting.

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#25

Post by RivieraKid »

neom wrote: post #5
dpatrick86 wrote: post #4

Great interview. I thought his comments about the upper limits of human lifespan were especially interesting: > There currently is an upper limit, and the upper limit is probably around 115, 120. You have a very large number—100 billion people to choose the number of people that have ever lived—and you have only one who has made it through to 122, Jeanne Calment. The second oldest was 119. It does seem there is an up…

While immorality might be a stretch, CRISPR is certainly going to change how we think about longevity in a sensationally magical way.

How? CRISPR is overhyped. We don't even understand aging sufficiently enough.

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#26

Post by miloshadzic »

Razengan wrote: post #17
melling wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? "First, if you hear the word immortality, just run" No one is talking about immortality here.

I'm making the cases for it! After all, it's the culmination of all medical research, whether intended or not. What happens when science "solves" aging and disease? What will we call the state where people just don't die unless killed?

Hell

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#27

Post by mclide »

reasonattlm wrote: post #7
Techowl wrote: post #3

The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction. I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though. > There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity…

There are certainly startups / small companies working on rejuvenation therapies, however, ways to repair the forms of damage that cause aging rather than merely slowing down that damage a little as is the case for calorie restriction mimetic drug development. See for example these entities working on means to selectively remove senescent cells, with Unity Biotechnolgy being the one connected to Buck Institute resear…

See also Mount Tam Biotechnologies, a spin-off from the Buck Institute focusing on mTOR modulators, shown to extend lifespan in mice. Their initial application addresses Lupus, an autoimmune disease.

http://www.mounttambiotech.com

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#28

Post by tdist »

comboy wrote: post #16
GCA10 wrote: post #15

Time to own up to the elephant in the room. Medicine so far has done a really good job of prolonging people's seventies and eighties. All the symptoms of advanced aging that used to be compressed into ages 70-82 or so, ending in death, now can be stretched out from ages 70 to 98. Will this initiative double the amount of time that we've got the full capacity of our 20s and 30s? Or will it just allow people a prolonge…

You can have pretty much the same mental condition when you are 70-80 years old as when you are 20-30. But to have that you need to keep using your brain and challenging it. Old people usually have much less opportunity to stay mentally active. And less motivation. Statements above are based mostly on The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge[1] which I highly reccomend. Plus just listen to some old folks that y…

Listing old, famous intellectual people that have retained their wits is poor a excuse for evidence, since we don't know the ratio between old and famous intellectuals that have lost their wits vs that have retained them.

Re: How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives

#29

Post by comboy »

tdist wrote: post #28
comboy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have pretty much the same mental condition when you are 70-80 years old as when you are 20-30. But to have that you need to keep using your brain and challenging it. Old people usually have much less opportunity to stay mentally active. And less motivation. Statements above are based mostly on The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge[1] which I highly reccomend. Plus just listen to some old folks that y…

Listing old, famous intellectual people that have retained their wits is poor a excuse for evidence, since we don't know the ratio between old and famous intellectuals that have lost their wits vs that have retained them.

We also don't know the ratio of those who could retain it if they would keep thinking hard every day. It's really a lifestyle choice. You can still be wise, but when you have a lot of money you can just relax and enjoy the nature without wondering how it works. Some people just love thinking and studies suggest that it keeps them good at it (refs in that book).

I didn't mean to show by these examples that this is the default, or even that it's common. I don't think it is. But I hope it's getting better, mostly thanks to the technological progress which can be stimulating for those who choose to make use of it.

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