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So you wanna build an aging company

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Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#61

Post by hakfoo »

derektank wrote: post #33
nowahlot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve. As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea. For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations. Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to f…

Aging exists because the human body is optimized to survive and reproduce in a resource constrained environment with many threats. Our predecessors eked out just enough calories to survive to the age of 15, when we could begin reproducing. Any traits that made it more likely for us to survive until that point, even if those traits resulted in damage that would eventually accumulate and wear us down after our reproduc…

I don't think "live to 15, have kids, and die" makes sense as a model for humans, even if you're modeling them solely as child generating machines.

Humans are a pretty damn care-dependent species. They're not going to defend or feed themselves without years of support, so if they aren't surviving en masse into their 30s and 40s, the next generation is probably going to have a severe die-out.

Beyond that there's probably ongoing marginal benefits to species fitness with longer lifespans. If you can keep a few generations in circulation at once, you probably have greater resilience to things like disease outbreaks (the 50-year-old cohort might have some past related immunity to a disease that rampages the 20-year-olds).

This also completely ignores any value of intelligence and ability to pass down knowledge, which is definitely a fitness factor just for being able to prevent future generations from poisoning themselves as easily.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#62

Post by [deleted] »

rhet0rica wrote: post #45
spandrew wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit. And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design . Cancer…

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble. 1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there…

[deleted]

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#63

Post by FL33TW00D »

rhet0rica wrote: post #42
feoren wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.

Hang on there a moment—you missed a few things: 1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death. 2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the pur…

https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#64

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

tzs wrote: post #53
hinterlands wrote: post #16

I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right. But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their m…

It would be interesting if one of those anti-aging moonshots succeeds but the treatment to stop aging only works if you had a pre-treatment that has to occur before puberty.

Or let's say you need to harvest organs from healthier people. Pro death penalty? The sci fi book writes itself.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#65

Post by hoseja »

rhet0rica wrote: post #45
spandrew wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit. And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design . Cancer…

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble. 1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there…

>a measurable contributor to cancer rates

Source: greenpiss?

Hormesis is more likely.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#66

Post by godelski »

cpgxiii wrote: post #48
rhet0rica wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble. 1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there…

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure e…

Sounds like you might know this but I'll add it for the public dialogue.

LNT is useful because you work with an abundance of caution when it comes to radiation. It's difficult to know what type of radiation someone received and where. Both of these can dramatically change the risk of exposure. It's not hard to measure in a lab, but an accident isn't a lab and you can't just go placing sensors all over every radiation worker's body (at least yet. Small sensors embedded in clothing would change this).

So what do you do? You purposefully over estimate. Because if your estimate is wrong, the human is much more likely to survive if you incorrectly assumed they received more than they actually did than if you error by assuming they got less than they actually did. Failure analysis is a critical part to any engineering or safety plan.

Why not over estimate as much when higher dosages are received? Well that's because it matters a lot less. As dosage increases all those nuances of where and what type matter less (they still matter).

It's still all highly complex and what I'll say is that if you haven't spent at least a year studying this stuff you're more under water than you think. It's great that there's a lot of educational material out there but unfortunately when it comes to complex topics like nuclear many of them do more harm than good. Pro nuclear armchair experts tend to be as uninformed as anti nuclear armchair experts. So like the LNT, it is always good to work with an abundance of caution. Especially when talking about complex subjects on the internet

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#67

Post by godelski »

privatelypublic wrote: post #55
cpgxiii wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure e…

I wonder how often people don't understand how radiation affects health- because nominal levels don't hit the news. but, oh boy, when a single Fukushima isotope decay is detected on the coast of California- its national news.

We're really good at detecting radiation. Like REALLY good. It's because we spent a lot of money during the Cold War trying to detect nuclear materials. This includes underground weapons testing, being able to detect underground nuclear signatures via satellites, and even very trace amounts on people's clothing because it can help detect spies. It then was found that these things could be used for tons of stuff, such as tracking not spies lol.

But seriously, we can detect levels thousands of times lower than what's dangerous. You can even get pretty good dosimiters for like $100 these days

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#68

Post by rippeltippel »

amy_petrik wrote: post #54
rippeltippel wrote: post #38

Aging well requires a both biological and lifestyle interventions. One company called Nuraxi [1] is geared precisely to support that, They aim at studying the super-agers in the Sardinia "blue zone", and build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based on the insights from super-agers. Sounds like a promising way to get personalised longevity recipes. [1] https://www.nuraxi.ai

> build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked prope…

My understanding of a "digital twin" is not as something that aims at simulating human biochemistry. It's rather a model that captures specific aspects, not necessarily biological ones. There's a good amount of literature on that subject, e.g. interesting meta-studies studies as [1] and [2], and more [3].

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10379674

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01073-0

[3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=digital+twin+health&hl=...

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#69

Post by yard2010 »

rozap wrote: post #60
tylerflick wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because growing old is a privilege denied to many. Maybe focus on the kids first?

Yes the VC class is famously very good at practicing empathy towards their fellow humans.

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot."

He is wrong though.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#70

Post by southernplaces7 »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #25
rhet0rica wrote: post #6

Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.

Aside from being an unpopular opinion, it's also a rather stupid one. I can think of no better way to say it. Virtually every technology currently used by the majority of human beings in the world to make their lives better in some way started as a privilege of the wealthy, but the tendency of a timespan between it going from that to something widely and affordably affordable has historically not only held ground but…

pfff, apologies for the syntax errors. They never fail to embarrass me.
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