Live data from Hacker News

Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

nature.com

61–70 of 121 posts

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand this particular mindset. I mean, I can get _some_ of the fallacies involved. Pure envy. Scope insensitivity. But it just doesn't explain it for me. People buying high end audio gear have disposable income and spend obscene amounts of money on their hobby, and yet they get at most mild ridicule. Old people wanting _not to die_ get hate. How do people even get here?

the worry is of course that in 300 years Mark Zuckerberg will be having his big pan-American birthday part and all the plebes get treated to a 30 minute newsblast about it while eating their gruel. It's one thing to have music of lower quality, it's another to be old and dying and watching someone who was born a century before you gifted with youth and vitality. It's not hard to envision that situation if the rich ha…

More likely you'll see all people rent organs; surprisingly EVEN poor people don't usually like death.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#62
Aside: figure 1 epitomizes everything that I hate about high-impact results-first journals: everything has to be packed into this one figure because nobody's expected to read anything else. No disrespect to the authors, these journals force you to express your work in this reader-hostile fashion where the most important parts of the paper wind up buried in the supplement.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#63
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also shortsighted. You might never develop a taste for high end audio gear. But you certainly will age and die. Unlike many things it's a problem that affects every single one of us.

I think the reaction is at least partially based on the loss of precisely that certainty: there is a sense of comfort in that no matter how unacceptable someone’s actions or ideas are to us, they will die, regardless of who they are — eventually. The thought of that eventuality becoming unusually distant in the future threatens that comfort. Doubly so when only the powerful will live longer, which will come first, ev…

Instead of resigning to “at least they will one day die”, wouldn’t it better to hold rich people responsible? This argument just sounds too much like in Christian theology where the “evil” are punished in the afterlife, which is just a mix of defeatism and propaganda.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#64

[flagged]

Taking from a comment above:

"Remarkably, the microenvironmental change and the functional decline of mid-old cells could be reversed by a young cell-originated protein, SLIT2"

I wonder then if this could be the magical factor in the blood of younger people. If there is indeed one or a small set of factors that induce the positive effects of young blood transfusions, then that type of "rejuvenation" becomes available to everyone and without any ethical issue.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#65

Aside: figure 1 epitomizes everything that I hate about high-impact results-first journals: everything has to be packed into this one figure because nobody's expected to read anything else. No disrespect to the authors, these journals force you to express your work in this reader-hostile fashion where the most important parts of the paper wind up buried in the supplement.

Formatting wise this is a very poorly made figure. I sincerely hope this is not the current standards for what’s considered to be a good journal nowadays.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the worry is of course that in 300 years Mark Zuckerberg will be having his big pan-American birthday part and all the plebes get treated to a 30 minute newsblast about it while eating their gruel. It's one thing to have music of lower quality, it's another to be old and dying and watching someone who was born a century before you gifted with youth and vitality. It's not hard to envision that situation if the rich ha…

More likely you'll see all people rent organs; surprisingly EVEN poor people don't usually like death.

Sure, Society in its majestic equality will allow rich and poor people alike to rent a new bio-heart with youthenating agents for 1 million dollars a month.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#67
post #4

[flagged]

I genuinely want to understand this mindset. Are you only against things that help extend lifespan a very large amount, or is it more nuanced? 80 years was only achieved recently because of various quality of life and medical advances. Do you feel that those are 'ok' for other reasons, or for example, that things that cure cancer, HIV, or better sanitation that increase lifespan should also be repealed if it was up t…

We are at a point in history that many people can live up to the natural limits of human body. They don't die during childbirth or as very young children, because of bad sanitization or through unlucky sickness.

Those improvements in healthcare are fine in my eyes. Someone could argue that dying because of some illness that we cured is also natural. Perhaps yes, but for me the baseline is healing the "unlucky" instances - viruses, cancers etc.

My golden standard worth aiming for is someone like the nonagenarians in Sardinia or Okinawa - someone who ate healthy food, lived in a tight happy community, low amount of stress and lucky to evade any serious illness. Those people still die and this is fine.

I would like everyone to have a chance to live like this, this to me is the natural limit of human body.

I am not a fan of extending life beyond this limit.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#68
post #60
post #4

[flagged]

In the ideal world, anti-aging therapy that works well actually reduces this problem. Healthy older people can work, reducing the economic stress on the younger part of the population. The costs of the therapy may actually incentivize them to do so.

As the civilization progresses, people should be _allowed_ to work less. Workers from the fin-de-siècle will be appalled that we still work 8 hours a day and average real wages stagnate since 1970s despite all the tech and effectivity improvements.

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#69
post #29
post #2

Can someone explain why this is interesting? It looks like a directionally interesting anti-aging study, but without any major breakthroughs. I'm curious what folks upvoting see in the study that I'm missing.

"Remarkably, the microenvironmental change and the functional decline of mid-old cells could be reversed by a young cell-originated protein, SLIT2. Our data identify functional reversion of mid-old cells as a potential method to prevent or ameliorate aspects of aging-related tissue dysfunction." I think this sounds promising.

So, potentially, we can synthesise this SLIT2 and inject people with a bunch of it?

Re: Mid-old cells are a potential target for anti-aging interventions in the elderly

#70
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't like hearing it, but if you can't make peace with your mortality in 80 years, you won't manage it in 800 either. And you (whoever is reading is) isn't actually that special that you should go on forever, instead of new life coming into the world. It would be a bigger loss for you to stay, than for you to pass on, because of the implied opportunity costs of other people being born. We all think we're hot…

Sounds like an angry projection of your own value of your life. Its as if you're supposed to accept your death by 80, otherwise you'll... die and not accept it? Very few people that die 'made peace with their morality'. Why is it a prerequisite? How do you assign value to another person's life simply based on if they made you cringe or not? That's cringe.

The whole universe runs on decay & arise of the new. From stars through chemical compounds through cells to us humans.

If the rotating cloud of gas and dust stayed forever, there would be no Earth. If the chemical compounds would be super stable, there would be no life. And so on. Systems are kept in equilibrium by this, otherwise they became unstable.

Making space for the next, better entity is a cosmological principle.

If you can't make peace with that, I am sad for you.

Post reply on HN