from the "who-wants-to-live-forever?" dept.
Biologists identify pathways that extend lifespan by 500%:
Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif., and Nanjing University in China, have identified synergistic cellular pathways for longevity that amplify lifespan fivefold in C. elegans, a nematode worm used as a model in aging research.
The increase in lifespan would be the equivalent of a human living for 400 or 500 years, according to one of the scientists.
The research draws on the discovery of two major pathways governing aging in C. elegans, which is a popular model in aging research because it shares many of its genes with humans and because its short lifespan of only three to four weeks allows scientists to quickly assess the effects of genetic and environmental interventions to extend healthy lifespan. Because these pathways are "conserved," meaning that they have been passed down to humans through evolution, they have been the subject of intensive research. A number of drugs that extend healthy lifespan by altering these pathways are now under development. The discovery of the synergistic effect opens the door to even more effective anti-aging therapies.
The new research uses a double mutant in which the insulin signaling (IIS) and TOR pathways have been genetically altered. Because alteration of the IIS pathways yields a 100 percent increase in lifespan and alteration of the TOR pathway yields a 30 percent increase, the double mutant would be expected to live 130 percent longer. But instead, its lifespan was amplified by 500 percent.
"Despite the discovery in C. elegans of cellular pathways that govern aging, it hasn't been clear how these pathways interact," said Hermann Haller, M.D., president of the MDI Biological Laboratory. "By helping to characterize these interactions, our scientists are paving the way for much-needed therapies to increase healthy lifespan for a rapidly aging population."
The elucidation of the cellular mechanisms controlling the synergistic response is the subject of a recent paper in the online journal Cell Reports entitled "Translational Regulation of Non-autonomous Mitochondrial Stress Response Promotes Longevity." The authors include Jarod A. Rollins, Ph.D., and Aric N. Rogers, Ph.D., of the MDI Biological Laboratory.
[...] The paper focuses on how longevity is regulated in the mitochondria, which are the organelles in the cell responsible for energy homeostasis. Over the last decade, accumulating evidence has suggested a causative link between mitochondrial dysregulation and aging. Rollins' future research will focus on the further elucidation of the role of mitochondria in aging, he said.
More information:
Jianfeng Lan et al. Translational Regulation of Non-autonomous Mitochondrial Stress Response Promotes Longevity, Cell Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.06.078
Journal information: Cell Reports
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday January 11 2020, @10:52AM (1 child)
Who would have thought that The Onion Router is the pathway to longevity? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:00AM
"TOR" brands itself as "Tor". [torproject.org]
JOKE ELIMINATED.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:35AM (11 children)
I don't think that's a good idea.
Imagine the Koch brothers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers [wikipedia.org] ) doing 5000% more harm.
I was having a toast then fucking scumbag David Koch finally bite the dust.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:49AM
Sure you get to live for 400+ years with these genetic mods...but one of the side effects is that you turn into a worm.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:53AM (1 child)
500% more time for you to get your panties in a knot over left-wing propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @06:23AM
Thats what I thought.
1) Why/how do these worms usually die?
2) What differences are there in life cycle and behavior?
I sounds loke they just selected for maladapted worms.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday January 11 2020, @12:13PM (3 children)
If your society depends on aging (disease) to weed the rich out, you're utterly failing to curtail the rich, something that is unlikely but not impossible. And a Koch brother or three dying doesn't actually solve anything since there will always be more budding oligarchs to fill in the void. Maybe there is someone alive today who will become a trillionaire.
Whine about the anti-aging research if you want, it's worth an eye roll. What would be really interesting is if anti-aging is perfected and there is a serious movement to ban it. Let's see medicine being banned for effectively treating diseases. Also, I doubt it will be expensive and only available to the rich in the long run unless it involves targeted biologics or some extreme surgical methods. If it's drug(s) or nanobots, it will become dirt cheap.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:06PM (1 child)
It probably won't work that way, though.
The c. elegans is short-lived because it doesn't handle these pathways. Humans are long-lived among mammals, so we are probably already handling the pathways that are safe to handle more efficiently. There are likely to be trade-offs, e.g. increased probability of cancer or fragile bones.
This is useful basic research, but don't expect a simple translation to humans...or even dogs. (C. elegans is, after all, a non-homeothermic species.)
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday January 12 2020, @01:54AM
I already covered that in another comment. Applying the 500% in C. elegans to humans is clickbait or a conversation starter.
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(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:25PM
Extending aging to a fivefold degree should be a lottery system afforded only to Whites or mutts with dominant White genes, who pass a certain threshold of intelligence.
Alongside that, we can cut aid to Jews and third-world filth. That will ensure that the aging-extension lottery winners can live out their extended lives being productive and not being stabbed or firebombed, or lectured about privilege on a daily-basis by the Silicon Valley Mossadnik Sayanim.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Saturday January 11 2020, @06:28PM
So, to get rid of a small number of people you don't like a bit faster than they'd be taken out by accidents and the like, you'd be happy to inflict earlier aging, infirmity and death on everyone else including those you consider friends.
Wow. Some friend you are.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 12 2020, @12:47AM (1 child)
David Koch was the better of the two; it's too bad Charles didn't go first. David at least did some pretty cool philanthropic stuff, like funding natural history museum exhibits in NY and DC. I don't know of anything that Charles ever did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @01:49AM
He digs up a lot of fossils. It's not his fault the people who buy them burns them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 12 2020, @06:38AM
Like employing a few hundred thousand people for a few thousand years? They'd be doing 5000% more good too.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:54AM (10 children)
I don't believe for a minute that extending our lives that much will be that easy. But if it can be done, what a massive change in human societies that would be If everyone could live 4 or 5 centuries. Would it get people to think longer term? Age discrimination in IT is well known by the age of merely 40.
Think what it would be like to have most people who were born in the 17th and later centuries still with us. Would they be critical of the massive move to automobile transportation, advocating for a return to horseback and horse drawn carriages? And these newfangled things known as indoor plumbing, electricity, and refrigeration, would they reject those too? Would you have not just your grandparents telling you that your generation is going to hell and to get off their lawns, but also your great grandparents, great great grandparents, and so on, going back at least 10 generations?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday January 11 2020, @12:36PM (6 children)
A 500% boost in C. elegans lifespan makes a great headline, but there is likely a lot more room for disproportionate increases at the low end than the high end. You can also get incredibly invasive with what you can do with a worm, whereas germline edits in humans do nothing for the billions already living and billions more who will be born in the coming decades before any treatment would become approved. The ultimate solution will probably involve continuous/active/repeated repair of aging-related damage.
The pace of technological and social change is now incomparably fast to what was experienced centuries or millennia ago. You can now feel like you've lived since the 17th century within your own normal lifespan, falling completely out of touch with people just a decade or two younger than you (whereas people born in the years 800 and 1100 could lead substantially similar lives). Perhaps this effect will decline after we hit an AI Singularity and all of technology and science is pushed as far as it can possibly go. We would reach a plateau of "enlightenment" with the year 2100 looking similar to 2525, etc. The only thing left would be exploration of the universe, which really is the final frontier.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 11 2020, @07:01PM (5 children)
Far as I know, caloric restriction is still the only method known that demonstrably works to extend life. It is of course not fun. Though, there's work ongoing to try to get the same slowing of aging through other means than restricting calories.
Many years ago I read a criticism that for studying aging, we're looking at the wrong animals. The animal in question was the lab rat. Said we should instead be looking at long lived animals such as crocs, tortoises, and whales. There also seems a tradeoff between longevity and fecundity. Rats, like most small herbivorous animals, are on the fecund end.
Yes, the Technological Singularity. It's a favorite of futurology. One thing about that is how notoriously hard the future is to predict. Yet a lot of futurology is fanciful rather than serious. SF such as Star Trek is a case in point. Rather than accept that we're extremely impatient (perhaps because we have such short lives?), we breezily conjure up various means of faster than light travel so we can get about the vast distances of space in human career timescales. Fearful stuff is more serious, but is often overblown. Gray Goo, for example.
Not much difference between 800 and 1100? By today's extremely fast standards, perhaps so. But tech was moving ahead. It's fairly well appreciated that the political fragmentation of Europe lead to an arms race. If you had picked the period from 400 to 800, when Europe went into a huge decline in the aftermath of the fall of Rome, then yes. And yet, though that era was known as the "Dark Ages" (of Europe-- other parts of the world were not backsliding at that time), I think the term "Early Middle Ages" has become preferred, because even though a lot of Roman tech was lost, and literacy and record keeping hit a nadir, technology was being advanced even then.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:14PM (1 child)
FWIW, caloric restriction isn't proven to work on humans, it's proven to work on rats, and I think mice. You can't really compare those results to the "16 hours without eating" results or the intermediate fasting results. There was also another result that, IIRC, wasn't proven for humans where there was a restriction in only one amino acid (tryptophane, IIRC), that yielded rats that lived twice as long...with side effects that they lost all their hair and went crazy.
That said, being only marginally obese, or not quite that, is probably the healthiest weight. But, IIRC, that comes from a balance between ability to fight off infections, and skeletal wear.
You'll notice a lot if "IIRC"s in this post, because a lot of the articles were things I read decades ago, when I was following that stuff more closely. I'm definitely *not* an expert in the field.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @06:53AM
How are you going to "prove it " in humans?
Here is a tip, most "side effects" of chemo drugs are probably life extending. Nausea and loss of appetite -> Caloric Restriction. Anemia -> Less iron toxicity. Etc. There has never been a single clinical trial that controlled for these effects, everyone just buys whatever byzantine mechanism they came up with via a chain of NHST results and call the real mechanism a "side effect".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 12 2020, @12:53AM (1 child)
And yet, though that era was known as the "Dark Ages" (of Europe-- other parts of the world were not backsliding at that time), I think the term "Early Middle Ages" has become preferred, because even though a lot of Roman tech was lost, and literacy and record keeping hit a nadir, technology was being advanced even then.
"Dark Ages" is the better term, because it describes exactly what happened then: literacy and record-keeping hit a nadir, as you said. That's the entire reason the time was called the "Dark Ages": we just don't know that much about it because people didn't bother writing stuff down the way they did in Roman times, or later after the Renaissance. It didn't help that a lot of information was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. And while some technology was being advanced then, slowly, it was nothing like the society and technology that the Romans enjoyed. It really was a huge backwards step.
The Christians, and particularly the Catholics, object the most to the "Dark Ages" term, because that's the time when the Catholic Church really had a huge amount of power, and "people had faith" (as I've seen Catholics write), as if that's somehow more useful than having running water, sanitation, specialization of labor, a functional judicial system, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @01:30PM
Or it was just made up by Catholic monks to make the facts fit their dogma. They took historical accounts of the same events from different perspectives and placed them sequentially to fill it in until they got the "right" year. Also politics seems to play a role, every noble lineage in Europe traces its family history back to Charlemagne. None go any further back to ancient Rome. In fact, there are zero lineages that trace back to ancient Rome and Charlemagne may have been a mythical figure. Seems like a politically convenient myth that was agreeable to all parties.
Then there is the fact that most of what we know about ancient Rome came from documents "discovered" by Poggio Broccilioni that somehow survived neglected in damp out of the way monasteries for 1500 years, yet zero originals survived until today. Then there is that Joseph Scaliger used those and the bible to come up with our consensus chronology that served as the calibration for carbon dating.
Joseph Scaliger's father was a famous man named Julius Caesar with a good friend Marc Antony who trained his son in making up elaborate accounts of fake historical events every day as a child (declamations). Oh, and he was also accused of fabrication his own family history.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday January 12 2020, @03:12AM
Life extension (slowing aging) is not exactly the same as anti-aging. One time boosts using genomic and lifestyle changes is not the end goal, repair of aging-related damage is the goal. Like repairing and maintaining a car. Put enough work in and replace parts as needed, and it could last for centuries.
One approach that could work as a stopgap would be to grow organs in the lab (some are trying to grow them in pigs instead) and periodically replace the heart, kidneys, liver, etc. This approach does not address the underlying causes of aging damage, is likely to be expensive, and introduces surgical risks such as infection.
I doubt that there will be a single magic drug that will cause uniform reversal of aging with no side effects. I think that ingestible/injected nanobots are the way forward, if they can be made to clear out inter/intracellular junk, attack cancer cells, swap out damaged DNA for fresh or repair errors, etc. If a mechanical nanobot solution is unrealistic or can't handle all tasks, some kind of stem cell therapy might be required.
I just picked two dates. Even if there are some changes, they are not as massive as what has been experienced in the past century. Compare Joe Serf's life to his great-great-grandfather's. It was substantially similar. In today's world each generation and even fraction of a generation is experiencing huge and rapid technological and social changes. The children being born in 2020 are going to live a roller coaster of a life.
Everyone is going to want faster than light travel if it is physically possible, even if people have long or indefinite lifespans. It would make exploration of the universe much more convenient. With anti-aging and without faster than light travel, interstellar travel would still be possible, and generation ships would be unnecessary. Anti-aging adds realism to interstellar travel since you can do away with the cruelty of the generation ship concept and just send people who want to go. If there is no need to travel at a significant fraction of light speed, that avoids kinetic damage from hydrogen atoms. Bonus points if you can put the traveler into a cryosleep or use VR to entertain them.
A "Singularity" event seems likely at this point, broadly defined as "strong AI" meeting or exceeding human intelligence. In the rush to doomsay the death of Moore's law, many advancements are being overlooked. Single-threaded and multi-threaded classical computing will become faster by orders of magnitude. The performance increase will be shocking given that many people have assumed we are near the end of the road. Separately, 3D neuromorphic architectures will be used to mimic the human brain. Room-sized hardware may not be required for "strong AI", and it may become possible to fit a human-level "strong AI" in a volume smaller than the actual human brain (about 1.0-1.5 liters). The "Singularity" hocus pocus after that is just the upheaval caused by having this technology available and using it to rapidly improve itself.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @01:10PM (1 child)
> carriages, ... electricity ...
Talk to the Amish, they seem to do OK without many recent developments.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:17PM
The traditional Amish require a low population density to be successful. Even then they depend on slow communications.
From what I was told, many of the modern Amish depend on jobs building refrigerators and freezers to remain solvent.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 12 2020, @06:48AM
I think it would. Sure, you'll have a bunch of short termers who keep having the same problems over and over for centuries instead of decades. But I think most people would grow out of that stage after a while. And actually seeing the change over centuries would make longer term change more real than the cloud building exercise it is now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SparkyGSX on Saturday January 11 2020, @02:19PM (15 children)
"scientists are paving the way for much-needed therapies to increase healthy lifespan for a rapidly aging population."
Really? I don't think what our already overpopulated world needs is for everyone to live a lot longer, effectively multiplying the population!
Now it would be nice if people would maintain quality of life longer when they get old, instead of retiring when they're already deteriorating.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @02:55PM
What are you worried about? The the people getting these anti-aging treatments will understand they can have no more than one child per couple . /s
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 11 2020, @03:39PM (10 children)
Treatment X is a one pill cure for atherosclerosis, arthritis, osteoporosis, dementia, macular degeneration, benign prostatic hyperplasia, organ failure, and cancer.
You are in charge of banning Treatment X. Godspeed!
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(Score: 2) by SparkyGSX on Saturday January 11 2020, @03:54PM (8 children)
Several of the diseases you name are debilitating and affecting the quality of life of (elderly) people. I specifically said I strongly support medicine that improved quality of life, but significantly extending the lifespan of a significant part of the population, especially the richer parts which already consume and pollute way more than their fair share, would have a huge negative impact on the resources and environment.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday January 11 2020, @04:36PM (6 children)
Treat the diseases of aging, and you are treating the underlying causes. The end result is likely to be a reversal of even the cosmetic effects of aging, and an indefinite increase of the productive and creative lifespan of the individual.
Jevons paradox is being falsified with recent efficiency increases [spectator.us]. Newer technologies will probably continue to reduce resource consumption and environmental damage for a given standard of living. Advanced robots, strong AI, fusion power, and asteroid mining (orbit-to-surface) could have a major impact.
Birth rates are declining and population may plateau in the 11-14 billion range. Birth rates have declined more in countries that have higher standards of living and resource consumption.
Anti-aging does not eliminate sources of death. It would allow for a lot of people to work to address any resulting problems. Give it a century.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @05:18PM (3 children)
That article you cite is bunk, Completely ignoring global warming and not a word towards the 6th mass extinction.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 11 2020, @05:58PM (2 children)
Any void left by the Anthropocene's mass extinctions will be filled by more adaptable life forms. But for those craving a little more biodiversity, DNA collection and de-extinction is on the table. Whole genome sequencing is becoming cheaper than ever.
If you want massively reduced emissions in the near term, than we need something like fusion power sooner than the ITER plan, and cheaper electric vehicles with better battery technology.
There is a possibility of reversing warming using stratospheric aerosol injection.
The world has only agreed to cut emissions to a certain extent [prospect.org]. Standard of living trumps the possibility of future harm. Luckily, it looks like aerosol injection will cost relatively little compared to the scale of the world economy. So the problem can actually be ignored until it needs to be fixed. And if that doesn't work, then maybe the Malthusians around here will get what they wanted.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:55PM (1 child)
I haven't heard of any proposal for geoengineering that didn't have the possibility of making things *much* worse, and the nations haven't been adhering to the (insufficient) reductions that they have already agreed to. Some have, but I'd need to look closely before I'd be certain that they weren't just exporting their pollution.
Also resource consumption is, in and of itself, not sustainable. And it hasn't been declining much, it's just been shifting around as costs have changed.
Also, I don't think you have a good grasp of the evolutionary time scale. Yes, species will, eventually, be replaced by something else. In a few million years. The replacement will be developed in parallel, so it's not "a few million years/species", but it's still longer than humanity has thus far existed. And don't expect the new forms to be "more adaptable", merely adapted to different conditions.
For the short term fusion power is an infeasible solution. Perhaps if we'd gotten it working a decade ago. At the moment we've got to depend on a mix of small fission reactors, solar, wind, and specialized for local conditions. And the "small fission reactors" haven't yet been proven...though some are in advanced design approval state.
Aerosol injection into the stratosphere is a really bad idea whose saving grace is that you need to keep doing it, or it will go away. It cools the equator and temperate areas more than the poles, and thus weakens the jet stream even more (and it's already been weakened by polar warming). Actually, the best geoengineering idea I've encountered derived from a failed attempt at wave-power: Basically it was you take a very long pipe, and pump water in at the bottom, carrying with it a bit of bottom mud to bring to the top and spread it about as fertilizer. This *might* work, and there aren't any obvious (to me) problems with it. It could result in lots of plankton growth at the surface, some of which would sink to the bottom as it died, taking carbon with it, and some of which would be food for fish and whales. It would be a bit expensive, but it wouldn't take much power, so it could be solar powered, it wouldn't matter if it occasionally stopped flowing, etc. Actually it might even generate a bit of power if you hooked it to a generator, but not enough to pay for maintenance, and the generator would add to the maintenance, and for this purpose you want to maximize flow for input effort. (Note that you'd need lots of these, and they'd be most effective in "ocean deserts" which can be recognized because the water is blue.)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 12 2020, @07:10AM
That's true of any action, including doing nothing or going the currently approved mitigation pathway. It all has the possibility of making things *much* worse. Would be nice to get some evidence with that conjecture so we could start to make some educated decisions.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:29PM (1 child)
This is only true if you're recommending something like mitochondria replacement therapy, as well as arthritis and other blatantly obvious diseases. Even then there may be a problem similar to that experienced by over-trained neural networks.
And you're only looking at a fraction of the problems caused by increased population. Even if per capita consumption of resources were to decline to the current mean accompanying rising standard of living, the current rate of use would destroy the planet. And an increased population would mean that the current rate of use would not be maintained. (Also, I don't think ephemeralization will be that successful. That's a really extreme position.)
That said, birth rates *have* been declining...but it's been largely constrained by economic factors. (Should I get a new car or another kid.) Lots of things to spend your money on has a tendency to decrease population growth rates, but mainly for those on a limited income. Increase wealth and this decreases. Similarly Social Security and retirement programs act to reduce population growth because now parents don't need to depend on their children to support them in their old age. (Not that they could in this society, but...)
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 12 2020, @12:58AM
Sorry, this is blatantly false. Birth rates aren't declining because people don't have money, otherwise we wouldn't have so many children in poverty in the US. The simple fact is that, as standards of living rise, and people get access to reliable contraception, they willingly have fewer children. This is almost an epidemic in places like Japan and South Korea. It's very simple: kids are not only expensive in modern society, but they also require a lot of work. Why bother pulling your hair out trying to deal with 6 kids when you can have none at all, or just 1 or maybe 2 (even 2 is still below replacement level remember). Exactly how many couples do you know with more than 2 kids? Have you ever asked them why they don''t have 4 or 6 or 8 or 12? Hint: it's not just the money.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday January 12 2020, @03:23AM
But when aging vs diseases of aging are compared... turns out the people who live the longest also are sick the least, and the extremely long-lived are the healthiest. So extending life (reasonably, not hundreds of years) and improving health are probably one and the same.
This is where I should note that if you treat age-related thyroid decline (which we can do today, but usually don't) probably half of the "symptoms of aging" go away, and both health and longevity are much improved.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @11:51PM
So basically you want one substance that will help with diseases involving degenerating connective tissue and inflammation?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @03:44PM
Except that birth rates are kinda falling in many places. So that'd be a win to them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 12 2020, @07:03AM
Actually, I think it does. The number one complaint about any real or imagined problem that is alleged to happen in the distant future is that we don't care about it because we won't be around to be inconvenienced. Well, now you would be.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday January 12 2020, @09:34AM
So what age do you think people should live to? Jeanne Calment made it to 122, is that a reasonable "natural" limit? If we develop effective anti-aging therapies are you going to be advocating for compulsory termination at 122 years old?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday January 11 2020, @03:48PM (2 children)
Sounds great at first pass. It's just that nothing in your body is probably built to last for 400-500 years is it? Unless they are also helping to maintain or upgrade the rest of your body I'm not sure I would want to live 500% longer and being trapped in the prison that is your failing body.
Just grabbing some quick data from the CDC. Remove all cases of violent deaths, suicides etc and 1/4 people that die today die from heart related issues, quickly followed by our good friend cancer in all it's wondrous shapes and forms, lung/breathing problems, strokes, alzheimers and diabetes. So by just living longer as an organism getting some of these are probably quickly going to approach 1 and have to be dealt with. I'm sure the medical-industrial-complex are going to love it. Most everyone will probably also have to replace most of their teeth several times over during that 400-500 year long life, most everyone will probably have to just get all their teeth replaced. Your bones will have to be strengthened. The list just goes on like this. But I guess it could be worth it. I'd do it if it was an option for sure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday January 11 2020, @06:47PM (1 child)
Fortunately, pretty much everything in your body is self-repairing, to the point that we seem to still have most of the genetic "equipment" to completely regrow limbs and organs, if not for other "equipment" that actively interferes in the process for reasons not yet completely understood.
Moreover, most of the diseases you mention are age related - i.e. the likelihood of them developing increases with age, usually along an exponential curve. Most evidence so far says slow the aging process, and you spend a whole lot more time in the low-risk end of the aging spectrum. Even if you completely stopped treating such conditions, average lifespan would increase dramatically due to much later disease onset. Personally, I'd rather live to a ripe mid-life 300 and die of untreated heart attack with centuries of potential life still in front of me, than be kept alive to an aged and infirm 80 through extensive medical effort.
We know mammals can be essentially immortal - the naked mole rat being perhaps the most dramatic example. After the first few years of life and maturation, a 'rat's expected chance of dying within the next year actually falls slightly with every year of additional age, and the trend seems to continue indefinitely. Unlike humans and most other animals, where the chance of dying within the the next year increases exponentially with age.
Of course there's still violence, accidents, etc to consider. If we don't develop impressive regenerative medicine there'd probably be a lot of multi-centurians that are still in excellent metabolic health, but hobbled by the untreatable remnants of past problems. Could even be that suicide in the face of declining quality of life becomes the primary cause of death - I see no problem with that. We're long overdue to address the profit-driven death-phobia that's overwhelmed our culture for the last few centuries.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @10:07PM
We haven't studied the naked mole rat anything like long enough to say "they never naturally die".
As for humans, one form of arthritis is caused by the body's self-repair not being perfect. I recently had an xray to check on something and was told I'd got extensive bone spurs at every joint of my spine, but that the only treatment was to cut me open and saw the spurs off, being careful to avoid sawing off the nerve trunks that were right next to them. My podiatrist said something similar, though less extreme, about my feet. And I'd barely noticed a problem yet.
So don't expect your body's "self-repair" systems to work forever...at least not as what you think of as "self-repair". After all, the things doing it don't have a blueprint that they look at to see what the body should look like, they have a recipe on what to do in which chemical environment. And it didn't evolve expecting to survive forever. It might be possible to design a genetic code that would work (in principle, this is quite far beyond the state of the art), but the first thing to be improved would probably be the fidelity with which genes are copied. I think our current system is a bit more complex than the current repair mechanisms can hold stable. (Thus some forms of cancer. I'm excluding environmental insults from this problem.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by zzarko on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:08PM
... in 3,2,1, ...
C64 BASIC: 1 a=rnd(-52028):fori=1to8:a=rnd(1):next:fori=1to5:?chr$(rnd(1)*26+65);:next
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ron on Sunday January 12 2020, @03:52AM
Odd fact -- all mammal species tend to live the same number of heartbeats. Faster heartbeat, shorter life. Slow heartbeat, long life. Mouse, elephant, coyote, giraffe, lemur... all about the same number of lifetime heart beats.
All mammals, except for humans. Humans get to thump their pump about three times as much as the rest of the mammalian species during one lifetime.
(This is, of course, an average. Your mileage may vary.)
In other words, we live about 300% as long as nature originally intended. So we may only get another 66% on top of what we already live (to match the 500% other mammals might get -- assuming mammals even get the 500%)
Another 30 years would bump the average 80 year lifespan to 110, which some people already manage. So, it sounds like, for the most part, we're already there.
(Score: 1) by VacuumTube on Sunday January 12 2020, @09:15AM (1 child)
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned David Sinclair. https://genetics.med.harvard.edu/sinclair/people/sinclair.php [harvard.edu] He's a geneticist who rather strongly believes that the cause of aging is damage to the cellular mechanism that guides cell division in accordance with ones DNA. He thinks that science is close to formulating a pill that will work better than exercise and caloric restriction in prolonging life while avoiding the degeneration associated with aging. He makes a pretty strong case IMHO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @11:54PM
So he's going to cure aging but can't even keep his certs up to date?