91–100 of 156 posts
Someone smarter than me noted that all predictions of living forever always have one thing in common: it places the time when people start living forever within the lifetime of the predictor. Aubrey de Grey is 43, and he's predicting that this might be in place in 20 years.
I just have to shake my head at this. The only adequate word for this is arrogance. The arrogance to believe that we know enough about the processes of life to extend them indefinitely. We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are…
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Anything that happens after reproduction is in an evolutionary blind spot. Aging is the result of evolutionary neglect , not design.
I disagree. If my parent stays around and eats all my food, I'm carrying bad genes that cause me to die pre-reproduction.
Can I bet on the opposite side of this? I bet that nobody who is 60 now will live to 1000. Don't get me wrong, I would like to live to 1000... but I would be pretty surprised if my kids live past 150. I will be surprised if I live to 100. It's sad to think about, but our bodies wear out over time (cosmic rays and whatnot), and we don't have the technology to repair them efficiently yet. People still die from the flu!
You'll have to wait fifty years to collect. How confident are you that you'll live that long?
But remember, if someone who is 60 now lives to 999, I still win the bet. So I feel like I might have to wait more than 50 years.
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He used to be a lot more controversial a few years ago (Technology Review even had a challenge, asking biogerontologists to debunk his claims, though none really did a convincing job). He's slowly but surely making his ideas more mainstream by tirelessly speaking, debating anyone who wants to, organising conferences and editing a respected peer reviewed journal (Rejuvenation Research, iirc). If you think you have a g…
What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
That question doesn't make a lot of sense. This is not a Web 2.0 startup. It's a lot more fundamental than that, and a lot of the required tools and technologies have not been invented yet - that's what they are trying to do.
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If it's an imperfect mechanism, then look back at the huge chain linking you to the first living creature: adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / ... How come that chain hasn't failed? Basically, you're just rephrasing the "aging through accumulation of errors" hypothesis. The problem is, errors should accumulate along the chain mentioned above, too. Yet they don't.
The chain gets to weed out errors by starting with cells that got through functionally unblemished courtesy functioning error correcting mechanisms. Each new cycle gets a fully functional error correction mechanism, and is fault tolerant to the theoretical point of repopulation from a small point of individuals. An individual human body has error correcting mechanisms that do not benefit from being renewed every cycl…
When my intro to genetics teacher in college explained to us how aging in cells worked, he told us that one of his professors had explained to him that a "cure" for aging was about 10 years away. But that had been more than ten years earlier. My professor said that he had recently talked to that same professor again. The new ETA: about 10 years. This is one of those problems that seems easy to solve in principle, but…
The "reason" for aging seems almost self-evident to me. The goal is to pass on [mutated] genetic information. Post-reproduction, you're simply a drag on local resources. Hypothetical populations that didn't age and die would have killed themselves off due to lack of food.
Starvation is not the only way living creatures can die.
Just up the aggression a little, for example, and the death rate returns to a self-sustainable level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He used to be a lot more controversial a few years ago (Technology Review even had a challenge, asking biogerontologists to debunk his claims, though none really did a convincing job). He's slowly but surely making his ideas more mainstream by tirelessly speaking, debating anyone who wants to, organising conferences and editing a respected peer reviewed journal (Rejuvenation Research, iirc). If you think you have a g…
What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens
and you can look at Corral-Debrinski's breakthrough here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18771762
Basically it's now shown possible to move a mitochondrial gene into the nucleus and then have the proteins produced pushed back to the mitochondria for use. When done for the 13 important mitochondrial genes whose mutation damages us, then this will make it possible completely remove their contribution to aging.
There is good reason to think that this is a large contribution.
Context:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/how-age-damaged-m...
How much money: $1 billion over ten years to implement SENS fully in mice. Incremental amounts obtain incremental progress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "reason" for aging seems almost self-evident to me. The goal is to pass on [mutated] genetic information. Post-reproduction, you're simply a drag on local resources. Hypothetical populations that didn't age and die would have killed themselves off due to lack of food.
Anything that happens after reproduction is in an evolutionary blind spot. Aging is the result of evolutionary neglect , not design.
I agree. That's the only mechanism that seems to have the power to explain aging, other than magic or the Invisible Hand of the Creator (but the latter two have a huge assortment of other issues).