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Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

theguardian.com

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Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#91

Post by VLM »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #39
rjknight wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have fewer kids then where's the harm?

This is very true. It's proven itself over and over in history. The more stable, healthy, and developed a country is the less children it has. Europe and East Asian countries are having this problem right now as both have negative population growth. In fact this might be the solution to over population. If I knew I'd live to 150 I'd probably wait till I'm 75 to reproduce and replace myself with children.

Well, you've outed "Chris" as the male form of the name "Chris" as there are certain female reproductive system issues where once you're outta eggs thats all folks. Dudes are fertile to a ripe old age. So at 75 you need a wife 1/3 your age.

The cultural issues could be pretty huge if women are only fertile for a small fraction of their life and dudes are fertile for X times as long as women. Or maybe it becomes a cultural "job" of young people to churn out kids as fast as possible for old people to raise them, which we seem to already be implementing in certain socioeconomic classes.

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#92

Post by YokoZar »

xuhu wrote: post #55
rtfeldman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-aging has nothing more to do with immortality than does, say, curing a particular disease. Aging is only one of many causes of death; if we solve that one, there's still heart disease, stroke, getting hit by a bus...

There were 2.5M deaths in US in 2010: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm If you take other leading causes out (accidents 120k, diabetes 70k, influenza 50k, suicide 40k), it still leaves about 2M deaths related to ageing: heart, cancer, chronic respiratory, stroke, alzheimers.

And this particular anti-aging therapy, if it works, will only treat a subset of those age-related diseases. There are many different mechanisms of aging, and each therapy we develop will only incrementally improve things.

In that light, philosophical discussions about anti-aging therapies are somewhat doomed to only have a specific context such as "what's wrong with curing alzheimer's?"

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#93

Post by charlieflowers »

kyzyl wrote: post #81
krapp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The labor won't be infinite... they'll work us to death at some point.

Beat me to the punch ;-)

But they'll pump us full of anti-aging meds that restore us to youth, so they can work us to the brink of death again. It's more efficient than growing new humans through that whole irritating "childhood" phase.

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#94

Post by VLM »

xuhu wrote: post #55
rtfeldman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-aging has nothing more to do with immortality than does, say, curing a particular disease. Aging is only one of many causes of death; if we solve that one, there's still heart disease, stroke, getting hit by a bus...

There were 2.5M deaths in US in 2010: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm If you take other leading causes out (accidents 120k, diabetes 70k, influenza 50k, suicide 40k), it still leaves about 2M deaths related to ageing: heart, cancer, chronic respiratory, stroke, alzheimers.

Cancer is a big treatment problem. Well here I am a tired old 95 year old cancer cell, too tired and sore to start reproducing madly and my hosts blood chemistry is too F'ed up anyway for me to grow, so I'll just sit here in my lung cell sized recliner and watch Fox News with my host... Ah I see now after some treatment I feel I'm in the body of a healthy 25 year old and I'm absolutely bursting with energy... lets get fissioning boys, there's a new sheriff in town and we're takin' this here place over.

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#95

Post by D-Coder »

saalweachter wrote: post #71
polskibus wrote: post #18

They should put it on kickstarter, asking for donations and early adopters. I'm pretty sure they would've fulfilled their goals in a week or less.

Pledge $X or more Y backers ONE EXTRA DAY OF LIFE.

Someone once asked me why I'm so interested in life-elongation technology. I said, "I'm BETTING MY LIFE on it!"

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#96

Post by VLM »

rictic wrote: post #52
pvnick wrote: post #37

Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age. The addition of this compound led to the radical reversal in the ageing of the mice. While this is pretty cool, it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), meaning more energy "currency" for the body's machinery to work with [1] [2] (someone…

This post fills me with questions. Foremost: What makes anti-aging technology unnatural compared to other medical treatments? To take one example, the smallpox vaccine was initially considered unnatural, and an affront to God[1]. [1] http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html

Wouldn't this treatment system create an immense selection pressure against irrational belief?

So kids born to families who think its an affront to god would not have the social / cultural / monetary resources to even begin to compete with kids born to more rational families?

Not that I'm saying a selection pressure against irrational belief would be a negative or a problem, I'm just saying it would be strongly selected against?

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#97

Post by maaku »

VLM wrote: post #86
nzp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? (serious question)

The era between the end of nomadic lifestyle but before civil engineering of water and sewer systems aka the centuries where the average woman had 14 kids and watched 12 of them die before adulthood. It kinda sucked.

Yes, but what the GP said was the opposite.

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#98

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

VLM wrote: post #91
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true. It's proven itself over and over in history. The more stable, healthy, and developed a country is the less children it has. Europe and East Asian countries are having this problem right now as both have negative population growth. In fact this might be the solution to over population. If I knew I'd live to 150 I'd probably wait till I'm 75 to reproduce and replace myself with children.

Well, you've outed "Chris" as the male form of the name "Chris" as there are certain female reproductive system issues where once you're outta eggs thats all folks. Dudes are fertile to a ripe old age. So at 75 you need a wife 1/3 your age. The cultural issues could be pretty huge if women are only fertile for a small fraction of their life and dudes are fertile for X times as long as women. Or maybe it becomes a cul…

Good point. But I'm sure that's a problem that will be solved by that time.

Not sure if this is 100% true but "It had been widely accepted that a woman was born with a limited number of eggs [...] But, in 2012 this dogma was challenged in a paper that found proliferative germ cells that sustain oocyte and follicle production in the postnatal mammalian ovary. This means that women do not have a limited number of eggs."

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#99

Post by VLM »

ganeumann wrote: post #41
kps wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I probably do riskier things when I do feel old. Tick... tick... tick....

It's not the feeling old, it's the realization that you have, in fact, spent the first half of your life not doing the things you wanted to do. And then the realization that you better get a move on if you want to get them done. Motorcycles, Porsches, divorce + remarriage to a much younger woman, angel investing. You know, the mid-life crisis.

There is a NoSQL joke floating around in here somewhere.

Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

#100

Post by baudehlo »

gaius wrote: post #85
vilhelm_s wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden

It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance a…

The flip side to that argument is that right now life is short, and so I try and fit as many wonderful experiences into it as I can. If life were long I could put everything off until tomorrow. And that doesn't sound good to me.
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