Anti-aging stem cell treatment proves successful in early human trials
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
What you say is true for species that don't have language or civilization. But since humans have technology, evolution happens in our minds, not in our DNA.
And new ideas don't necessarily require new people.
> radical decisions
Like what?
> People living longer will stay in power longer and keep the status quo alive.
What kind of prediction is that?
> What kind of prediction is that? A prediction like any other. I think we tend to become risk averse as we age, risk averse people don't like changes, without change you don't have a chance to fail, or succeed. If people to live longer I would think that every other stage of life would start to stretch. Take presidency as an example, its a four year cycle. If life expectancy was 200 years, would it not make sense to have presidents for 8 years? Would you retire after 30 years or 60 years?
I don't think so. You're generalizing. Actually I would think that the opposite can happen.
experience gives, sometimes false, impression of knowing with some degree of certainty that a certain direction is wrong or won't yield results. young people don't have that bias.
conservatism is instead aversion to even agree with the results themselves if they don't conform with one's worldview.
this is pure speculation on my part though.
Also, it's difficult to predict how immortality would affect human psychology, let alone how the technology would work. Perhaps we will be able to 'freeze' someone in their mid to late twenties, at some optimal point of physical health, maturity and risk taking behaviour.
I personally don't think we can take the very old and keep them alive forever. This will almost certainly result in a permanently sick state requiring constant therapy to maintain. The chance of getting cancer will approach unity at some point. Not exactly the ideal of immortal youth.
How many wars do you think anyone would want to fight if we didn't have an endless streams of the young who are willing to die on the battlefield?
How many murders are committed by people over 30 vs under? How many people die in car accidents after 30?
There's something to be said for having a world dominated by people who are mature and understand the value of their own lives.
Would it? In modern, low reproduction societies the dominant interpretation of the universal "honour thy father and thy mother" focuses on care. Even the slightest resemblance to a chain of command that might be present earlier stops at adulthood. But with people forever overshadowed by their undying ancestors, we might see a massive resurgence of the competing interpretation which sees it as a natural power structure. If that happens, well, welcome to pyramid scheme hell.
We've got killer robots for that now.
>How many murders are committed by people over 30 vs under?
I'd guess the majority of murders have been caused by people over 30 declaring war.
>How many people die in car accidents after 30?
Self-driving cars sounds like a good solution
>There's something to be said for having a world dominated by people who are mature and understand the value of their own lives.
Yes, of course the elderly possess great wisdom, but they are also highly inflexible when it comes to thinking of new solutions to new problems. The imaginative power of the child is something highly undervalued and suppressed in our society.
Well, since US elected national office is pretty much 30 and over, that's the only way wars can be declared.
But there's a reason why there's the movie cliche of the old cautious king being toppled by the young warmonger. On average, young people are a lot more prone to violence. Put them in charge of a nation, and I have no doubt that wars would increase rather than decrease.
Yes, of course the elderly possess great wisdom, but they are also highly inflexible when it comes to thinking of new solutions to new problems.
But a lot of that is because your gray matter doesn't work as well as you become elderly. If that weren't the case, we could have young energetic minds that also are wise dominate in society.
Would a hard wired prejudice include being fundamentally biased against old people?
Within the context of the pie-in-the-sky subject we're discussing, calling for citations seems kind of pointless. We're all just speculating and talking about what-ifs.
I suppose my main concern is that if learned prejudices (against race, religion, ideology, age, economic status, etc.) cannot be eliminated by regenerating brain matter, then a potentially fatal error could arise for society since some prejudices can be virtually insurmountable for many humans. Such an error is often solved naturally when the leaders of the previous age die out.
Just like when a computer system has become corrupted or broken, turning it off and on again can be the most simple and effective solution, so can death and rebirth be an effective solution for when our collective mental processes become corrupted.
I often read stories about innocent younger people dying from something tragic; However, why do I almost never wake up to, "<evil tyrannical dictator> has unexpectedly and peacefully passed away in their sleep?"
Brave new world I guess?
In the last half century give or take some years, half of Europe and Latin America nations have successfully and peacefully made this transition. And only Venezuela has returned to dictatorship.
Do you think Putin will ever be overthrown?
No idea. Formal democracy is still in place, so there's hope.
Would you think "whew, I really dodged a bullet there", or would you think "fuck that clone, I don't want to die!" ?
That whole mindset is utterly alien to me. I guess it all comes down to how you feel about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity
And clearly death doesn't end the dictatorship.
At any rate, very few people are actually working on “immortality”. Most of us squander our time bullshitting on the Internet. There’s little danger of solving immortality for several generations.
Just because only a few people could afford a CT scan when it first came out doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep developing it for the wife benefits we will see in the future.
(I leave this as food for thought and an explanation of why I downvoted you. We're off-topic though and shouldn't continue this thread.)
On the pro death side I think the book Risen Empire has quite interesting take on that as well.
Edit: Put in the wrong link to a 24hour long video, fixed now
Pity I'm not a writer, I think it is a good idea for anti-utopia about the world where people work to get a permission to die.
If there is a mechanism in our bodies that creates an artificial maximum of life, like a telomere - then you would be right.
It also could be possible that avoiding the frailty of age means the avoidance of death. Stay healthy and you stay alive.
We only want to keep living because of sentience.
If you really cared about humanity, you wouldn't impede death.
It would lead to serious fragmentation of the human population with people from generations ago still alive.
Not to mention the collapse of economic structures many of which are based on young v old generation.
Apart from that hundreds of generations competing for resources.
Not to mention everything around us evolving except humans.
That's an ideology masquerading as wisdom.
It would be nice to have a browser extension that would show me all reddit/HN posts pointing to the current website.
It is interesting if it works, but lets wait for the next phase before assuming it does.
The second trial was a randomized, double blind study with placebo group. Again no adverse affects were reported and physical improvements were noted by the researchers as "remarkable".
"There are always caveats associated with interpreting efficacy in small numbers of subjects, yet it is remarkable that a single treatment seems to have generated improvement in key features of frailty that are sustained for many months," writes David G. Le Couter and colleagues in a guest editorial in The Journals of Gerontology praising the research.”
This work is a prime candidate for being misrepresented as showing that this stem cell treatment is effective for age related health issues.
There are 30 participants in the phase 2 trial. There are two treatment groups (100M and 200M) with different dose and one placebo group. Each group has 10 participants.
None of the treatment groups showed adverse effects.
There is a difference between asking "Are there any adverse effects?" and "are there positive effects for parameter 1 to n"? If you ask the second kind of question and do not correct for multiple hypothesis testing, you will make many errors.
The small dose treatment group (100M) showed improvement in many parameters vs placebo, whereas the other (200M) showed improvement in fewer parameters vs placebo. Since no corrections where made for testing, this only tell us that there where no statistically significant adverse effects.
As I noted initially, I think it is interesting. Once we have seen the results of a couple of large studies, we can talk about the effects of this treatment.
What strikes me is our lack of preparedness for advances is anti-aging treatments that will inevitably come. Even adding as little as 20 years to the average lifespan will have enormous (devastating?) implications for the economy and society. Especially if the treatment will be expensive and not available universally.
I keep hearing about the urgency to focus on research in the safety of AI, but I have not noticed any urgency regarding the consequences of anti-aging medicine.
Because that medicine is usually a hoax of some sort. Saying that, people are living longer and longer, and changes are being made to prepare for that. More people = more houses and jobs. In the UK having a pension is mandatory now etc
2nd, we've already added those 20 years of average life in most places, without much anti aging. Antibiotics, sterile surgery, vaccination, geriatric medicine. Childhood deaths went down a lot. Mid life deaths too. Old age is much longer than it was with life expectancy at retirement trending towards 90.
We've already had the economic/societal consequences in the west/north/rich places. The first (childhood survival) too in the form of population explosions still in play in some places.
I doubt anti aging has bigger effects than that within the next 50 years, even if life expectancy at birth leaps to 100 tomorrow. Anyway if it really slows aging it'll extend people's productive middle life, which is mostly good economically.
Edit: so you can use them to create "healthy" versions of whatever you need.
Are there rich/powerful people who are benefiting from anti-aging technology already? I'm thinking of Robert Mugabe (age 93) who regularly goes to East Asia, as an example, for medical treatment, but there seem to be others.
https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/72/11/150...
Phase 2 trial article:
https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/72/11/151...
(I might have been an early investor.)
The scope of the possible in the near term is to find way to incrementally improve the condition, not produce a sizable reversal, but that is an improvement over the current situation, given that there is no effective treatment. The closest thing to a standardized, proven, reliable class of stem cell therapies involves the use of mesenchymal stem cells, sourced from a patient, or from lines of cells grown and engineered for transplantation with minimal risk. The primary outcome of mesenchymal stem cell therapies, or at least the reliable outcome, is a reduction in the systemic, chronic inflammation that accompanies old age. While it is entirely possible that other mechanisms are at work, the cells typically don't last long following transplantation, and thus it is the brief signaling changes that must produce benefits that can last for months or longer.
Chronic inflammation is a major problem in aging. It drives progression of most of the age-related conditions, and high levels of inflammation are certainly considered to be a major component of frailty syndrome in the old. In the context of a general treatment for frailty based on reductions in inflammation, the focus is less on the acceleration of specific age-related conditions over time, however, and more on the immediate consequences of constant high levels of inflammation for cell biochemistry, pain, cognitive function, joint function, regeneration, and tissue maintenance. Many aspects of age-related dysfunction are to some degree being actively maintained in their current impacted state by the presence of inflammation - take away that inflammation, and the problems subside a little, back to the lower level of harm and loss expected due to accumulated cell and tissue damage.
In recent years, it has become clear that chronic inflammation, as opposed to the normal short-term inflammation resulting from injury or infection, disrupts the finely tuned dance carried out between tissue and immune system needed for regeneration. This is an emerging theme in the investigation of how senescent cells cause aging, for example, as these unwanted cells are potent sources of inflammatory signaling. So if we see unreliable or marginal benefits from stem cell therapies that look like enhanced regeneration, it might well be that this is at root a short-term reduction in the age-related disruption of tissue maintenance - perhaps enough to allow a little reconstruction to take place in some patients. This is speculation, of course, and the cellular biochemistry is challenging to investigate; we should probably expect a first generation of moderately reliable therapies in advance of complete understanding of their mechanisms. Here is another point to consider on this topic: if the inflammation model of benefits is correct, then clearance of senescent cells should be at least as good a treatment for frailty as mesenchymal stem cell transplant, and probably better and more lasting.
But a decent number will surive and since they'll have the arduous task of rebuilding civilization (in a much more thoughtful way this time) - such treatments would prove all the more useful