Longevity and anti-aging research: ‘Prime time for an impact on the globe’
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMFST20xHwk (1.5x speed is fine)
He seems to think that anti-aging science has speeded up drastically recently, both in terms of the science itself, the funding and the popularity. I really love what the SENS Foundation is doing in terms of spinning research avenues into startups, since most investors are far more likely to fund high-risk investments than non-profit ones.
He also mentions other positive developments in terms of legislation and advocacy.
The longevity field might be seeing an EV tipping point moment. Nobody cared until everyone spins.
Whether they would get more research funding from accepting investment instead of donations or if the mission would survive is a separate topic.
This is also encouraging:
"Gazette: Are there regulatory hurdles? When we've spoken in the past, you've mentioned that the FDA considers aging a natural process and therefore won't approve drugs to treat it.
Sinclair: I've been part of a group that talked with the FDA, and they are willing and also quite enthusiastic about considering a change that defines aging as a disease."
Only 29% of Americans over 55 think climate change will pose a serious threat in their lifetime :(
In fact, the headline stat of that linked survey is "56% of Americans over 55 worry a great deal about global warming".
If we manage to extend the expected (or even just possible) generic lifespan of normal people - that will be one of the best promoters of environment-thinking of normal population. Because suddenly the choices they make today become very real in terms of impact on the environment in the next 50-100-200 years, because there is a good change that this same person is going to be living at that time.
Then there's also other (more economical, but you could say that's caused by psychology as well) reasons, such as tragedy of the commons.
People fearing flying more than driving are not afraid of the relative chances of dying (which are low either way). They are afraid of the feeling and experience of spending long time in a falling plane knowing that you are going to die, being stuck in one seat and not being able to do anything about it. This does not happen when you are driving, if there is an accident, you usually either die instantly or in some rare cases receive some injuries, but at least then you can lie at the site of the accident and hope that medics will come. It's not the same as being stuck in a box for 10s of minutes knowing you are most likely about to crash to a painful death. You have to spend time in that experience, to feel it, in a completely hopeless state. That's why people afraid of flying, not because of some statistics.
Even if we lived 120 years in average, do you think the game would change a lot, I don't. I don't see drastic changes in young people today, yet they'll most likely be alive in 60-70 years. And for argument's sake, even if it does we still end up with much more people living on the same resource limited planet at the same time.
You can already bump your life expectancy (and end life quality) quite a lot by eating health, exercising, quitting drinking/smoking. Most people don't do it because it's too much effort and "that's not life", again individualism/short sightedness.
We need a cure for laziness / individualism, then, maybe, we can start talking considering longevity.
This is exactly the reason these scientists are focusing on genetic and other medical ways to increase lifespan, which are going to be packaged in products that can be used without effort. One might say what they want about people not wanting to expend unnecessary effort, one might call it lazy or just smart, or a drive of progress, it doesn't matter. The fact is if you give people a method that requries less effort, more people will use it. Thus we will have a greater general effect on the population with these methods.
Giving lazy people the opportunity to continue living lazily longer while ravaging the planet ? Welcome to transhumanists paradise I guess.
Let's see how we handle the incoming retirement issues, that'll give us a good indication (less workers, more retired people pretty much everywhere in the west, peaking in the next few decades).
Living long won't help much if it just means more people consuming our limited natural resources and weighting on our social infrastructure. At any rate most country would shift their retirement age accordingly and life would be the same but longer, I fail to see the appeal of that (albeit it's the ultimate realization of our "us vs nature" western mentality)
We should figure how to live well before we try to live longer, and we still have some things we're nowhere close to figure out (energy, pollution, retirement, increasing pop, &c.)
But all of that only applies if everyone has access to this tech, which I doubt. Most likely it will be a "cure" for the rich.
Seems to me that scientists are working toward goals that kind of look nice on paper (curing aging, genetic modifications, &c.) without stopping even one second and thinking about the moral/social/economical consequences down the line.
Many medications stay expensive because not big enough number of people are affected. Also don't think U.S. only: how do you stop people from going to China to get the cheap (but well tested) copy of a medication?
Thinking longer-term, it's that plus being restricted to a single planet.
Before anyone says being multi-planetary is a pipe dream, it's historically true that what ends up happening in the longer-term tends to always to be something that would have seemed ridiculous and unrealistic at the time.
Of course, there's all sorts of questions here of the practicalities (eg costs) and the timeline (eg life extension could happen well before being multi planetary).
My primary point is only that it's not necessarily true that death will always be the only thing keeping the population in check.
Generally as with any powerful new tech, inventors/scientists fail to anticipate worst possible usage for it, which is how it will be (also) used.
There would be no way to anyhow regulate it, people would go to great lengths to get it (just look how some are OK with driving animal species extinct just to get potence medicine which is proved to be not working).
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we can avoid it, but it will bring some nasty consequences before it will become a net gain for mankind.
Unless in an aging-free world, for some reason non-psychopaths are more likely to give their power to psychopaths than the other way round, I think we don't need to worry.
As for "only the rich" there are only two kinds of tech roll outs - cheaper alternatives to the existing or for the rich first. The previous while impactful tends to be less groundbreaking by definition because it isn't anything "novel". The latter is how it always has been.
We always here "but what about the consequences" but I have yet to hear a proper forecast. Which means it ammounts to stopping development for imaginary fears, pointless. The time to stop is if there are problems in testing /after it actually exists/.
It is one thing to say cancel carbon nanotube body armor or structural components due to being too carcinogenic - it is another to stop development for fear it will somehow create a new ice age, grey goo, or similar.
Well, maybe not the last one, but still an important one. Nick Bostrom has a great story describing the underlying philosophy in the fight against aging:
https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
And here it is in video form as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
I can't help but think that this would also completely retard scientific progress. Imagine tenure that lasts a milenium or more. We would still be discussing scholastism.
And for every Stalin, you brought in a few Buddhas and Gandhis.
2) Again, that depends on how you approach innovation which has little to do with age. What would have to be instituted is probably rotation based on tenure, similar to presidency terms. If a professor is still deemed innovative, they can stay in charge.
In fact, such a system would be vastly superior to the current one where once tenured, a professor is almost immovable for many years. It would also help with the publish or perish part if extended to lower levels - you'd get more chances.
Most importantly, if the basic needs are met, you just gained access to a huge pool of genius engineers and scientists by sheer numbers. Imagine if, say, Feynman or Hawking or Knuth or even Leibnitz and Newton were still around, and cooperating... No matter the academic structures.
No amount of longevity is going to fix that, in contrary it could contribute to entrenchment of those behind curtains as permanent puppet masters. And we all know that if power corrupts, then semi-eternal power ...
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IMO there is one thing that seems to be truly unique and irreplaceable - consciousness and its continuity, and control over it. That is probably going to be prized.
Of course, Stalin was so popular that huge crowds showed up to honor him, and 100 people got crushed in the crowding. Over in Spain, Franco was apparently so popular that they never bothered to oust him at all. So if you don't like dictators like Stalin and Franco, that means you also don't really support democracy, since in a democratic system these people would have also been in power due to massive popular support.
Losing leaders to aging has historically robbed us of great leaders too, don't forget. Elizabeth I was considered one of England's best rulers, her reign considered a golden age of 40 years. Marcus Aurelius is considered one of Rome's best emperors, and he was infamously replaced by the horrible Commodus after he died. I wonder how history would be different if Marcus Aurelius had reigned for another few centuries.
edit: I think Neil deGrasse Tyson says it a lot better than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3G9LOJZTmM
I'm not saying that economics should even have any say in making people live longer (I don't think the purpose of life is to make the economy work well, it's the other way around), but even from the point of view of economics, we would want to make everyone live longer.
If, at 60, you have paid off your mortgage, amassed some savings, and seen your adult children leave home, then you can consider it. However, by then, you only have 5-7 years left until your pension kicks in and 10 before cognitive decline starts to take hold (either may have already happened), so you will probably just plod on doing what you already know. You might not even have enough time to really get to the interesting part of being a whatever-your-new-career-is.
If at 60, you are still in the prime of your life, with 60 more years on the clock, and 30 more years of full cognition and physical fitness available to you, then the idea of a career shift becomes more attractive.
Even without the affordability question, there is likely to be a point in most people's careers where the pursuit of mastery stops and the doldrums set in. The longer the working life, the more likely you are to reach that tipping point at a point when you have time to do something about it.
The real trick then becomes raising babies entirely through automation. Of course, any automatic system up to the task may be smart enough to just colonize the planet itself.
What if we did send a ship on a thousand year journey, and learn more about building fast ships than if we hadn't? Such that the second ship we send, would be quicker than the first ship we'd have sent if we waited a few decades?
It should be easy to find a hot broadcasting object in space and rendezvous with it. The crew might face some future shock.
Other theory states that 100 years war between France and England lasted so long because there were left 0 leaders older than 30+ years old and these guys were not good at negotiation.
Elderly Researchers Are a Drain on Publicly Funded Science [ https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2019/03/16/elderly... ]
It is entirely subjective and for all I care wrong until proven otherwise.
People already live quite long, so it takes a long time for longevity to take any significant effect.
If a 20yo man became immortal today, he will be 100 in 2099. Who knows what kind of world we'll be living in then?
My point is : longevity is such a slow motion process that its impact on society is not as relevant as the pace of technology in other fields.
I'd much rather be able to learn like an 18 year old for my while life and die at 70 then be a senile man and live till 100
On the other hand, the promise of remaining able bodied until you die from an accident might reduce the number of children because you don't have to have children that take care of you when you're too old to take care of yourself.
A lot of the world can barely afford dirt cheap medicine from decades ago. They aren't going to be able to afford state-of-the-art anti-aging treatments for a long time.
Exactly, so if we don't sterilise people who get anti-aging treatments, what's to stop them from having a litter of children every century or so ?
So prepare for some very old rich people ruling the planet who will live much longer than the serfs.
But imagine a world where we have, for example, 100-120 year old rulers while the average people live 70-80 years.
That's an extreme example, and the figures have moved since that article was published, but currently a wealthy citizen of Scotland can expect an extra 25% life expectancy compared to a citizen raised in relative poverty.
With every advance in medicine, your chances of outliving your money go up as well. Better feed the pig!
In short, the actual overhead needed to produce useful citizens in today's complex society is enormous, relative to the total lifespan of that person.
It wasn't a problem in the hunter-gatherer days because we didn't need much education to learn some simple non-written language, nor much training to go throw a spear and kill some animals and cook them. Things are very different now.
Extending useful and healthy human lifespans would change that equation, and be a huge boon for modern society. Just look at how many women end up postponing having children, or giving up on it altogether, because it just doesn't fit in with a high-paying career. As a result, developed nations are seeing negative population growth, which isn't sustainable.
In fact, among the most consistent things you can see is the accumulation of iron, and to a lesser extent other minerals, such as calcium. The body seems to have a really big trouble regulating those minerals, it doesn't even have its own way to get rid of excess iron, the only way you can get rid of it is blood loss.
Now, what does it mean? One thing, the body doesn't really makes much distinctions when absorbing metals so that when there is excess iron, it cannot absorb other divalent metals without poisoning itself with iron. So it cannot absorb manganese without absorbing too much iron, and manganese is essential for preventing oxidative damage.
A second thing is, the experiments on rats show that lanthanum (and possibly other rare earths) change the homeostasis in the brain so that the amount of iron decreases, while it normally accumulates with age. Multiple rare earths have been shown to bind preferably to proteins, usually over calcium, but possibly also other metal ions, zinc seems to be a kind of universal element that can bind to almost any place that isn't taken. Neurons even seem to dramatically increase in capacity (with each neuron carrying its own signal, instead of many almost exactly the same thing over and over) as the concentration of lanthanum increases in vitro. (it's worth noting though, that lanthanum has been seen as an essential nutrient for decades in China, so if it cured aging, it would be known)
I thing we need to consider the possibility that there is no such a thing as aging, but is the result of some sort of imbalance caused by early agriculture, metallurgy, or whatever human activity that changed the environment in a way that our bodies, and other mammal bodies have no way of dealing with. The rumors of longevity from history and various isolated places are seen as myths, but they may not all be.
Both iron and manganese are transported by the same molecules and the nutrients inhibit each other, e.g.:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2058577
The need of Mn for MnSOD also shouldn't be controverisal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOD2
lanthanum changing the concentration of iron in the brain: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037842740...
Review of lanthanide effects, cites the higher affinity of certain lanthanides to proteins: http://www.actabp.pl/pdf/4_2000/1107.pdf
Lanthanum increaseing the capacity of neural transmission, (together with https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31646-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00198-7?utm_sourc...: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Acute-functional-neuro...
The longevity myths are well known, there are local myths of 100+ year old mountain men, (caucasus + some other range in south asia) and the myths of ancient "golden age" when people didn't age are almost universal, and many of the earliest written sources insist on "implausible" ages of certain people. Surprisingly many religions (virtually all, in fact) agree that people started aging when they previously were not and longevity was the normal state until aging was inflicted on people, only the reasoning why it happened varies. - all the abrahamic religions, a very important part of hinduism mentioned in many texts, the greek religion, sumerian, etc.