First gene therapy successful against human aging | Hacker News Reader

First gene therapy successful against human aging

bioviva-science.com

29 pointstsaprailis10 comments

pseudoscience at its finest. A CEO injecting herself with her company's experimental gene therapy, written up as a press release? This is a comic book plotline masquerading as marketing, not science.

While I agree with the criticism of publication, there have been 7 Nobel prize winners due to self-experimentation. On top of that:

In a remarkable 89% of instances, the self-experiments obtained positive results in support of a hypothesis or valuable data that had been sought. In the remaining studies in which results were either negative or inconclusive, some of the negative results could be viewed as beneficial in directing investigators into more fruitful avenues of research.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298919/

Its definitely nice to know (pending, you know, some actual peer-reviewed analysis of this case) that telomere-lengthening treatments are possible in humans, but that's only half of a "successful therapy against human aging." What are the actual health effects? We still understand aging so poorly that no single biomarker really represents "biological age," and certainly there is no scientific consensus on what the root causes are (which may or may not include: telomere degradation, mitochondrial DNA damage, breakdown-resistant protein plaques, weaker epigenetic signalling, and the list goes on.)

She's gonna give herself the cancer.

People are going to get very angry if Haves vs. Have-Nots becomes Dies vs. Die-Nots.

Only until they are dead.

Over my dead body!

Let's hope this actually works and is the first step toward preventing aging.

So let's say this isn't a bunch of bullshit, what benefit does she stand to receive from having her telemeters becoming longer again?

Isn't this how "I Am Legend" started?

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