Hmm... As I'm new here I'm a little confused. I posted the same article yesterday but this one posted by Mizza got picked up quite heavily. Does the poster's "karma" have something to do with it? Or is it just a coincidence?
Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
101–110 of 243 posts
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ge…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this were an accurate metaphor, wouldn't cancer incidence decrease with age, rather than increase?
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good opportunity to apply the "reversal test": you say the status quo is better than an envisaged alternative, so let's see how it looks if that alternative is the status quo and someone proposes to switch to what we have now. So: Imagine a world in which people (let's say) stay at 25-year-old health until the age of about 90, and then die quickly. And suppose, in this world, that someone comes along and sa…
This is silly. You have absolutely no clue what a future with a "25-year-old health until the age of about 90" would look like. Not even close. There are literally millions of things, from the economy to social structure, that would be impacted. It's not possible to even remotely predict.
> It's not possible to even remotely predict.
What? He's responding to your prediction.
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#105The article reports, "Turner said a 'magic pill' that reverses ageing is several years away, partially due to the cost of the compound, which would be about $50,000 a day for a human."
That suggests several things. The clinical trials will be small in the beginning, and thus the small-n studies will not have much statistical power. There will be some kind of patent scramble related to any patentable technology that can reduce the cost of producing the chemical in a dosage form appropriate for human medicine. And (if and only if this preliminary finding in mice translates into a safe and effective human medicine) there will be immense political pressure for a public subsidy to make treatment like this available to more patients.
The HN participant who kindly submitted this interesting story found a news source with a nuanced headline, "Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice." That doesn't overpromise, and tells what stage the research is in. The news report mentions that the researchers have a peer-reviewed journal publication in Cell
http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213?cc=y
on their findings, and I suppose many scientists will be looking at that publication and thinking about their study findings. That too is better than the usual submission to HN. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.
The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[3] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.
[1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
[2] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#106This seems to be a pretty big deal, but the article gives off the impression that mithocondrial aging is the only reason that we age. In fact there are many other aging factors that have not been linked to mithocondrial aging (and have, agruably, no relationship). Some other factors I recall studying are - gradual DNA damage, which is quite inevitable - collagen degradation, which affects the eyes and all cartilagino…
Yes, it is confusing, since there is no wider context given in the article at all. The conventional story I hear about ageing is that telomeres in replicating cells become shorter until the DNA no longer replicates and the cell either dies or seriously malfunctions. As a significant proportion of the cells in your body move into this state you "age".
So I'm struggling to relate this phenomena to the mitochondrial story described in the article - it's not clear to me whether these are independent aspects of ageing or somehow related?
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#107Researchers 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…
“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
FYI the guy's name is actually Patrick Nielsen Hayden. He's an award-winning editor for Tor.
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#108Earlier 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…
More accurately, professional philosophers don't have any particular standing to discuss "serious philosophical issues." At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?"
(I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#109How is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) synthesized, such that their estimates for cost are "about $50,000 a day for a human."? I would expect that any such estimates on cost would be based on the predicted cost at scale and not the cost to produce it one off for lab experiments. Is this a PR ploy to start staking a high price, so that people view it as a bargain when it is released at some absurd price like $…
They must have some special version of it. NAD can be gotten online for considerably less http://www.herbspro.com/co-e1-nadh-tab-76057.html
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
OK interesting, but the larger scale problem exists now where most 75 year old women are infertile. That could be "fixed" by yet another medical breakthru.