I might be missing something, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a non-peer-reviewed pre-print written by employees/investors of companies that produce or sell the product being tested. There are also some red flags in the paper itself, such as the discussion about how the original data gathering was "hypothesis generating".
Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#12It seems to be based up on an extract from a plant root- it should be cheap to produce in that case. edit: i checked the company website- they want about $1000 a month!
Raising an important question in a manner perhaps less (or more) abstract than "normal" life-saving medication: let us say that this or something else actually does work for longevity. Say it gives an extra 20 active years or whatever.
How should that be handled? Is every person equally deserving of it, or just the wealthy? Should a company be allowed to take in a thousand a month per person (particularly for a naturally occurring substance) or should governments maybe subsidise it for citizens? Or should it be made available for free, circumventing patent laws if needed?
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#13I might be missing something, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a non-peer-reviewed pre-print written by employees/investors of companies that produce or sell the product being tested. There are also some red flags in the paper itself, such as the discussion about how the original data gathering was "hypothesis generating".
Maybe the red flag is constant reference to the product instead of the claim that some active substance effect is tested, but I admit I don't know how otherwise such articles are written. I have impression you're right.
Also see the comment of terrapinbear here, it's a "proprietary extract of the dried root of Astragalus membranaceus." and of tomwalker: "they want about $1000 a month."
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#14What about cancer? Does this increase the risk? It does seem like it would.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#15Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.
Also, telomeres are largely an anti-cancer defence mechanism, like a surprisingly large number of other things that your cells do all day. When a person 'gets cancer', this just means that one of the many, many potential cancers they've had, slipped through all the defences and got out of hand. At a cellular level, the opposite of ageing isn't longevity, it's cancer.
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Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#16It seems to be based up on an extract from a plant root- it should be cheap to produce in that case. edit: i checked the company website- they want about $1000 a month!
Raising an important question in a manner perhaps less (or more) abstract than "normal" life-saving medication: let us say that this or something else actually does work for longevity. Say it gives an extra 20 active years or whatever. How should that be handled? Is every person equally deserving of it, or just the wealthy? Should a company be allowed to take in a thousand a month per person (particularly for a natur…
You are free to produce the substance. If you produce it, it is your property. You own it. You may choose to keep it, or you may choose to trade it for someone else's property. You may ask a billion dollars per gram if you like. No one may force you to trade your property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it.
I am free to produce the substance. If I produce it, it is my property. I own it. I may choose to keep it, or I may choose to trade it for someone else's property. I may ask twenty thousand dollars per gram if I like. No one may force me to trade my property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it.
Et cetera, et cetera. Apply that same formula equally to each living being in the universe, and you have my view on the matter.
Also, no subsidies. A subsidy involves the taking of an individual's property by force, which is morally wrong.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#17Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.
Also, telomeres are largely an anti-cancer defence mechanism, like a surprisingly large number of other things that your cells do all day. When a person 'gets cancer', this just means that one of the many, many potential cancers they've had, slipped through all the defences and got out of hand. At a cellular level, the opposite of ageing isn't longevity, it's cancer.
However, our ability to fight cancer is also getting better and better, and likely will not be a serious issue in the long term.
I, for one, would be happy to trade longer life for a higher risk of cancer. As a reasonably healthy person today, I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#18This is just an ad masquerading as research, I'm flagging this.
I mean, please: "Calvin Harley is one of the inventors of TA-65. He consults for TA Sciences and is personally taking TA-65. He owns stock and stock options in Geron Corporation, a company that is developing telomerase activators for therapeutic purposes and the company that licensed TA-65 to TA Sciences." how transparent can you be.
Also, if something is present in nature you discover it, you don't invent it.
If you google around a bit, elsewhere they claim it can cure cancer and will cause wounds to heal rapidly.
Amazing compound, really.
Interesting comments here:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/04/more-on-ta-scienc...
On http://www.quackwatch.com/ the publisher Marie Ann Liebert, Inc is listed as a publisher that promotes quakery.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#19Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.
laypersons explanation: this is a commercial entity that would very much like to sell you their snake-oil to the tune of $1000 per month on a product that you'll never be able to prove is at best a placebo.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raising an important question in a manner perhaps less (or more) abstract than "normal" life-saving medication: let us say that this or something else actually does work for longevity. Say it gives an extra 20 active years or whatever. How should that be handled? Is every person equally deserving of it, or just the wealthy? Should a company be allowed to take in a thousand a month per person (particularly for a natur…
You are free to produce the substance. If you produce it, it is your property. You own it. You may choose to keep it, or you may choose to trade it for someone else's property. You may ask a billion dollars per gram if you like. No one may force you to trade your property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it. I am free to produce the substance. If I produce it, it is my…
This ignores patents, which is the prevention of the creation of something useful by force which is wrong. (Note: Some people disagree with my stance, they are wrong.)
IMO, there is no absolute morality, there are system of morality that are self consistent, but you cant transplant individual ideas between them to get an absolute truth.