Age reduction. Enammel reconstruction. Batteries. The three pillars of perpetual breakthroughs.
Interested to hear more about Enamel reconstruction!
We all do. Here we are in 2020 and we still can't properly fix teeth.
Age Reduction Breakthrough?
321–330 of 426 posts
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 90 is not that old these days True but Hong Kong life expectancy for men is 81.3 years so one should still consider this evidence in favor of the man doing something that extends his lifespan. Doesn't need to be smoking-gun level but still: update your priors.
n=1
I'm not going to take a side here but just wanted to point out that the previous poster is referring to conditional probability.
P(works|someone doing this is 91) > P(works). n is 1 here so the probability hasn't changed much at all.
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#323Since it seems like the upshot of all of this is that Katcher is claiming to have discovered a set of signalling molecules which, when injected, rejuvenate tissue and presumably lengthen life, it runs into one of the most fundamental objections that can be leveled at theory of aging (or cure thereof): of the billions of humans that have existed, how is it that none of them have possessed a mutation which (in this cas…
At risk of sounding absolutely insane: There's probably no way to prove that this hasn't happened. Anyone who realizes they're not aging normally would likely have taken on a new identity elsewhere for fear of: 1. being burned at the stake 2. being trialed in repeated experiments 3. being deified, and then subsequently being burned at the stake. --- I realize my comment sounds like a joke, but I'm entirely serious. I…
If you have not seen the movie The Man From Earth, I highly recommend it.
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you or I found out we're not aging normally and look e.g. 25 by the time we reach 40, or 30 by the time we reach 45, would either of us remain in our current lives? I was routinely told I looked 25 at the age of 45, and can assure you I felt no need to start accumulating secret identities.
Internet is full of these stories, I believe none. For one, even if there are people who look younger (say, Selena Gomez, or Lucy Liu) even them cannot pass to be 10+ years younger than they are, after looking at them in person. Have you actually met a 30+ year old person who could pass consistently as a teenager? I have never met one. The second thing is that if you are "routinely" told that you look XX or YY years…
These responses happen after people encounter me first, then see my kids come up to join the conversation (in their 20's) getting introduced as my kids, at which point the person I'm talking with realizes I am way older than they thought and they freak out. "Routinely" doesn't mean daily, but it does mean it happens often enough to be a thing.
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
The eternal struggle between "rewrite it from scratch" and "build upon legacy code"
In this case, we're trying to build upon compiled assembly code that's been re-obfuscated every generation. I'm not even kidding. Almost every protein in the human body has multiple unrelated functions, just because evolution says "hey, this is here, let's use it for something new". Every new human is an experiment in code chaos.
> Almost every protein in the human body has multiple unrelated functions
That is why the phrase "DNA is the blueprint of the cell" is terrible. In a blueprint, one can move a door 6" to the right without affecting the rest of the structure, add or remove a window, etc.
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#326Since it seems like the upshot of all of this is that Katcher is claiming to have discovered a set of signalling molecules which, when injected, rejuvenate tissue and presumably lengthen life, it runs into one of the most fundamental objections that can be leveled at theory of aging (or cure thereof): of the billions of humans that have existed, how is it that none of them have possessed a mutation which (in this cas…
"The man from the earth" movie comes to mind reading this. Should have ctrl+f 'ed before commenting. It's a great movie.
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#327Here's an excellent video on the same topic that discusses David Sinclair's research https://youtu.be/XlFl0jDg0Jg
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#328Since it seems like the upshot of all of this is that Katcher is claiming to have discovered a set of signalling molecules which, when injected, rejuvenate tissue and presumably lengthen life, it runs into one of the most fundamental objections that can be leveled at theory of aging (or cure thereof): of the billions of humans that have existed, how is it that none of them have possessed a mutation which (in this cas…
> how is it that none of them have possessed a mutation which (in this case) endogenously produced the signalling molecules which Katcher is proposing as treatment?
FWIW, I'm pretty skeptical of this announcement, but (assuming it's correct), it's possible that you need multiple signalling factors to achieve the age-reduction and that one single mutation might not do the trick.
Let's say that you needed four precise mutations to achieve the age reduction, then the probability of getting all of them in a single individual would be quite low.
But like I said, this announcement has a bad smell to me. In particular, the fact that they are not revealing the "rejuvenating factors" as well as the fact that they have not demonstrated age prolongation.
Finally, the complaint about the aging field being focused on cellular damage feels a little "straw-man-y" to me. I'm certainly not an expert in the field, but I imagine there are numerous researchers hunting for age-related signalling molecules.
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#329Since it seems like the upshot of all of this is that Katcher is claiming to have discovered a set of signalling molecules which, when injected, rejuvenate tissue and presumably lengthen life, it runs into one of the most fundamental objections that can be leveled at theory of aging (or cure thereof): of the billions of humans that have existed, how is it that none of them have possessed a mutation which (in this cas…
Well, the obvious explanation to me is that that did happen, and then the person died of some cause unrelated to these specific signalling molecules. Possibly another cause of aging.
In 1850 the leading cause of death in the US census was "zymotic diseases" and cancer caused death in the triple digits. In 2020, almost none of the diseases in the "zymotic" category are significant in the US, but we're still dying. We've cured croup and scarlet fever, so we don't die of those much any more--instead we live long enough to die of heart disease and cancer. Cancer didn't kill many people in 1850, but that's only because "zymotic diseases" killed them before they could develop cancers.[1]
I think it's likely that there are many causes of aging, and they will behave the same way: as we eliminate some causes of aging we'll live long enough to die of other causes of aging that take longer to potentiate.
Given most people who reproduce do so before the age of 50, there's not really an evolutionary pressure to not age--in fact, there may actually be evolutionary pressure to age so you die off and leave more resources for more efficient (younger) organisms carrying your DNA. Ghengis Khan, the most evolutionarily successful person in history, died at 64 or 65. So if a person did produce these signaling molecules, they wouldn't necessarily gain any evolutionary benefit from them.
[1] Obviously "zymotic diseases" is a nonsense category in modern medicine--most were bacterial infections, some other forms of infections, some completely misattributed to infection. The point here is that most of them weren't cancers or heart disease--the things that kill Americans today.
Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?
#330Do we really want to live in a world where the billionaires live forever?
I don't think that this research is going in that direction. It may end up being a very cheap and effective treatment/cure for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or other maladies that affect the old disproportionately. Also, it seems that there is hope that it will be a cheap treatment.