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Whether ageing can be cured or not, there are arguments for thinking about it like a disease. But there are major pitfalls, too.
The first depiction of humanity's obsession with curing death is The Epic of Gilgamesh—which, dating back to at least 1800 B.C., is also one of the first recorded works of literature, period. Centuries later, the ancient Roman playwright Terentius declared, "Old age itself is a sickness," and Cicero argued "we must struggle against [old age], as against a disease." In 450 B.C., Herodotus wrote about the fountain of youth, a restorative spring that reverses aging and inspired explorers such as Ponce de León. But what once was a mythical holy grail is now seemingly within tantalizing reach. As humans' understanding and knowledge of science and technology have increased, so too have our life spans.
[...] Maybe the ancients weren't wrong, and aging can be not only delayed but cured like a disease. Over the years, the movement to classify aging as a disease has gained momentum not only from longevity enthusiasts but also from scientists. In 1954, Robert M. Perlman published a paper in the Journal of American Geriatrics Society called "The Aging Syndrome" in which he called aging a "disease complex." Since then, others have jumped on board, including gerontologists frustrated by a lack of funding to study the aging process itself.
[...] However, labeling aging itself as a disease is both misleading and detrimental. Pathologizing a universal process makes it seem toxic. In our youth-obsessed society, ageism already runs rampant in Hollywood, the job market, and even presidential races. And calling aging a disease doesn't address critical questions about why we age in the first place. Instead of calling aging a disease, scientists should aim to identify and treat the underlying processes that cause aging and age-related cellular deterioration.
Medical understanding of that cellular deterioration began in 1962, when Leonard Hayflick, professor of anatomy at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, made fundamental breakthroughs to understanding aging: He discovered a limit to how many times typical human cells divide before they become senescent, or exhausted. Before then, scientists had assumed human cells were immortal. Hayflick also figured out that telomeres, which cap the ends of chromosomes and prevent them from fraying, much like plastic tips preserve the ends of shoelaces, shorten each time a cell divides. When the telomeres get short enough, a cell stops dividing.
[...] Many gerontologists distinguish between "health span" and "life span," the length of time someone enjoys relative good health versus the length of someone's life. Longevity while in poor health, pain, or with limitations that sap quality of life makes little sense. Fleming urges "regulators and public policy makers to embrace healthspan as an organizing focus for facilitating the development of medicine that target aging and chronic diseases." This shift would promote research on disease-causing processes, which could help us prevent more age-related diseases, not just manage them.
As gerontologists Sean Leng and Brian Kennedy put it, "Aging is the climate change of health care." The Population Reference Bureau predicts that 100 million Americans will be 65 or older by 2060. How will we care for this population? It's daunting to think about one's own aging, let alone the 16 percent of the world's population who will be seniors[sic] citizens by midcentury. A big-picture approach focused on the processes of aging—processes we share with nearly all living organisms—will put us on a path not only to longer lives but to healthier ones.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ze on Tuesday March 03 2020, @10:09PM (1 child)
I've looked a little into research on aging, and one impression I've gathered is there's evidence for it being a genetically programmed and regulated process that evolved by serving a useful role.
This doesn't mean it can't fairly be considered a disease; evolution favored sickle cell anemia in populations otherwise vulnerable to malaria, but that contextually beneficial function doesn't make the genetic condition any less pathogenic in its own right. A genetic disease can still have a selective advantage.
I think of aging similarly, that it has evolutionary advantages within some of the contexts most species have evolved from/in, but also that we humans can do better without it.
What survival advantage can be conferred by losing vitality over time? Well I think the most basic may really be the intuitive argument: it gets the old established paradigm within a given environment out of the way, so new strategies aren't automatically out-competed for resources by its prior dominance. This in turn promotes a robust diversity, enhancing the overall population's ability to survive varying circumstances, as well as enforcing higher overall turnover, adding up to essentially accelerate the evolutionary pace of these lineages. Especially in constrained environments prone to cycles of colony collapse, where short-term successful but long-term failing strategies could otherwise repeat more or less indefinitely. All in all, I feel like one would expect this stuff to happen in the statistical grand scheme, and then for beneficiaries of it to rapidly out-compete their relatively stagnant ageless counterparts in most niches.
Funny thing about humans, though, contrary to popular perception: we can learn and change within our lifetimes. It's not for nothing that character growth is an indispensable element of our storytelling, it's one part that is generally realistic.
I shouldn't need to particularly harp to the geek crowd that we can be life-longer learners, though :)
Especially if we didn't lose the mental and physical flexibility/agility of youth, and could reasonably expect a life long enough to continue growing through, rather than being resigned to one astonishingly brief span to settle into before fizzling out.
Worried about population growth? Already, it generally does not overlap with high standards of living and liberty, and if you could put off having kids indefinitely, most people probably would. I suspect the ones least likely to would overlap a lot with the ones least likely to partake of a cure to aging, so they'll tend to die off, anyway. Their kids will either do the same or (most, probably) defect if they're able.
We'll also be faced with the prospect of dealing with the longer term consequences of our own behavior. Maybe if You Personally, instead of someone's grand-kids, have to deal with the climate and population in 100 years, you'll be more motivated to make the sustainable choice. (Looking mainly here at the relatively few people who make bigger choices for us all than most of us are allowed to, but it's true for anybody)
Another common point of confusion, both exemplified and semi-corrected by the perceptual shift from lifespan to healthspan: the former is essentially defined by the latter anyway. It's like talking about the service life of a machine, and making a big distinction between the span it can technically be kept in some condition that can arguably and charitably be referred to as "running", and the span that can reasonably considered operating correctly. You can't really have an engine keep functioning in too poor of a condition to do so, it's magical nonsense. It's either in good working order, or it's breaking down. This idea of being eternally old is the same thing. Age IS the degeneration and vulnerability to disease, and the only meaningful way to extend lifespan is to extend healthspan.
I think aside from simple naivete, this confusion is bolstered by the myth (repeated in TF[SA] itself) that our lifespans have increased, the statistical impression of which is mainly down to declines in infant mortality rates. Correcting for that, all evidence on the matter I've seen indicates that adults don't really live longer now than they ever did. People have been living typically into their 70s-90s, and sometimes as long as ~120 or so, throughout history and well prior, by all kinds of historical accounts and archeological evidence. Modern medicine might bump the average up some for helping a few more make it that far, but I'm not sure how evident it is that it even manages that. Aside from averting a lot of the early deaths, the part it seems to have extended the most is just the actual process of dying (very profitably for some who aren't the patients or their families), and not much of anything prior to it.
There is still always the ultimate statistic, though: on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. As other commenters have pointed out, you probably can't even protect the physical existence of the universe itself forever. And most of even us immortals will probably get pulped into the proverbial chunky salsa or fall into a black hole or something by our 3rd cycle through ye olde "I can live forever if I just don't get killed!" / "Fuck fearing death, what good is indefinite life if I'm not taking risks!" hysteresis loop, long, long before that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @01:29AM
If turnover were important, such a thing as lobster would not be living twice as long as a human, now would it? And still, it does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#Longevity [wikipedia.org]