Science of Aging Is Focus of New Bakar Research Institute
ucsf.edu
ucsf.edu
I could comb through the article sentence by sentence maybe, looking for something worth discussing, but you could do that with any article.
We spent too much time thinking that aging is something inevitable, unaddressable and thus not worth studying too much.
Now that many scientists are ready to dive into the topic, some low-hanging fruit is likely to be picked within a decade or so.
I'm also quite keenly interested in not dying, and I'm also sick of people talking about "a cure for cancer" being possible but "a cure for aging" somehow not, let alone a healthy discussion of researching mitigation for aging to keep people alive long enough to receive the cure.
But, I feel like that - the ideology, even if I quite like and agree with said ideology - is the only thing this article has going for it. The article's link could 404 and nothing of value would be lost, as long as nobody touched the title.
The scope of these two things is wildly different. To cure aging, we would have to solve seven* or so problems of a similar scope to curing cancer - and one of those problems is, in fact, curing cancer.
* According to the sens foundation:
http://www.longlonglife.org/en/transhumanism-longevity/aging...
A possible answer is "keep the immune system in its youthful state and it will take care of any emerging cancer cells and terminate them with extreme prejudice without you even noticing". Natural killer cells are basically unstoppable once they home in on a target.
E.g. prevention, not a cure.
So with that in mind, another problem that needs solving is "curing autoimmune disorders", a thing about which we currently know sweet fuck all.
I'm sure we'll run into other totally huge, near-intractable problems that we need to solve before curing aging. So if you're in your 40s like me, it's still prudent not to get your hopes too high for a nice long extended life, let alone remaining "forever young".
So does anyone know what actually happens if the body's neuro-endocrine-immune systems are too damn smart? What is an overly well-regulated body like? Is that medically good or bad?
After 1 year, there are 60,000 cells 1 mutation away from cancer. Year N there are N * 60,000 cells. Such a simple model results in linear increases in cancer risks over time without any other effects from age.
More complex models can get very close to the observed annual risk of cancer adjusted for age etc. The question is how much this is just over fitting the data.
There are corrective mechanisms that animals including humans use to control cancer; even if a cell mutates into something dangerous, it does not mean that a malignant tumor follows.
Mice, who have much fewer cells than humans, get cancer much earlier than we do. Elephants and whales, whose cell count exceeds that of humans by several orders of magnitude, seem to be actually less prone to cancer than humans are.
This is all about the ability of the body to squash individual cancerous cells or smallish tumors into nonexistence before they have a chance to take hold. As long as this self-defensive mechanism works, everything is fine.
Thus the multiple mutation model. That said, it’s not like these risks are identical in all species, just that their related. A nematode can spend less energy lowering cancer risks than a blue whale.
We have so many more important and urgent problems to take care of. Not even technical ones, but societal ones. Let's not even talk about the fact that any meaningful advances in the field would benefit the top 0.0001% of the world and would never trickle down to the rest of us.
If we could stretch people's healthspan to 90 or even 110, the resulting society would be much happier and could spend more money on the other important urgent problems.
> Let's not even talk about the fact that any meaningful advances in the field would benefit the top 0.0001% of the world and would never trickle down to the rest of us.
You are literally writing this on a device that 50 years ago would cost millions. It somehow trickled down to you and me.
I fail to see why something that would be almost universally demanded could stay outside of common reach forever.
Consider that just the cost of DNA sequencing, arguably an interesting and important biotech, went down six orders of magnitude within 20 years. It is literally 1000000x cheaper than in the mid-90s.
Not to disagree with your point, but the performance of Neural Engine in a new iPhone would cost about $200 billion in inflation adjusted 2013 dollars of implement at the prices of even a 37 year old 1984 Cray X-MP.
You fail to see how the elite would keep advances letting them live longer/healthier for them ? You probably don't have a very fruitful imagination then. What about a 250 years old Jeff Bezos ? 250 years old Putin ? The only limit to these people is literally ageing and being mortal
Do you think people who aren't able to live decently and afford food at every meal in 2021's America would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ? Do you think people dying in 2021's America of diabetes because they can't afford insulin would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ?
> You are literally writing this on a device that 50 years ago would cost millions. It somehow trickled down to you and me.
If you fail to see the moral difference between typing on a computer and "curing ageing"... I don't know what to say to be honest
GP's not alone, maybe you're not too, but the point is, GP's point of view is not a snowflake. This person sounds mentally able, keeps her tone gentle, and make sensible arguments. Maybe it could be a wise move for you to reassess a logic you seems to adhere to a bit too much, so that there could be room for discussion? Because, liking it or not, anti-ageing medication and aging prevention is already here.
> What about a 250 years old Jeff Bezos ? 250 years old Putin ? The only limit to these people is literally ageing and being mortal
I can imagine that very well and frankly, this seems to me the only downside to the whole process. Yes, this is troubling.
> Do you think people who aren't able to live decently and afford food at every meal in 2021's America would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ? Do you think people dying in 2021's America of diabetes because they can't afford insulin would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ?
Not everywhere is America, in fact, 95 per cent of the world is not America. Single payer systems might do just the thing you consider absurd.
How Americans respond to that is up to them. Also, looking at Americans in general, their general problem is not lack of food, but excess thereof. Most American health problems are caused by overeating.
> If you fail to see the moral difference between typing on a computer and "curing ageing"...
This is Hacker news, not Preacher news, and I haven't addressed the morality of the intervention at all. You are shifting the goalposts, it is fairly clear that I addressed your "trickle down" argument in my rebuttal. Technologies that are expensive in the beginning tend to become cheaper over time and "trickle down" to the less wealthy precisely in the way that you denied. Look around the very room you are sitting in, most things there would be way less affordable to your grandfather.
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> and I haven't addressed the morality of the intervention at all.
This is the root cause of all the troubles we're facing with tech today. Spend everything on the tech, nothing on the morality of it. Break things and think about the consequences when it's too late. I don't believe we should, or even can, discuss these separately, especially for such matters.
"Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme." Rabelais
Theoretically. It's also a massive money printing industry full of for profit companies with little to no scruples. The problem, again, isn't "What are the consequences of something in a perfect world, with morally perfect people who only want the best for humanity?", the problem is that every systems are corruptible and most are corrupted, playing god won't do any good in such a framework
> Why research medicine at all if we don’t want to actually prevent death?
Because it makes tons of money. That's why most companies prefer researching and selling symptoms relievers instead of cures. Spend any amount of time to research about the pharma industry and you'll quickly understand that it's not so much about "preventing death" and "foster health/vitality"
How well it does this and what else might do better is a matter for frequent — and loud — debate, but it is certainly better aligned than the feudal setup which preceded it.
Anyway, here is a link to some open-sourced generically engineered spider-silk producing yeast, to demonstrate that advanced cutting-edge biotech is getting to be as accessible as computing was getting in the 80s: https://youtu.be/2hf9yN-oBV4
Fortunately, with 7.8 billion people alive today, we have some capacity for multitasking.
So, there is a chance of doing the first steps and finding out that there are other aging-related problems beyond the age of 110-120. Some of them may prove to be unsurmountable.
That would probably mean "just" a much longer generation span. People used to have their first kids at 17, in fact they still do in places like Niger or Chad. But in the rich part of the world, length of a generation is now around 30. I can see it being 60 if people live to be 120.
the solar system is pretty big. The galaxy is incredibly large, the universe...
That said, this remains true even if we don’t solve ageing. Exponentials grow faster than polynomials like “volume”.
Also, scientific advances can make treaments cheaper. E.g. modifying bacteria to produce insulin is cheaper than extracting it from pigs.
Do you want to work until your very last breath ? Because this is where we're heading. This is exactly the kind of problem I'm concerned about when people start talking about "curing age".
https://www.liveinhomecare.com/elderly-in-japan-are-wearing-...
> Also, scientific advances can make treaments cheaper. E.g. modifying bacteria to produce insulin is cheaper than extracting it from pigs.
Yes, but again, scientific advances without societal advances = doom. Look at the price of insulin in the US, it's the living proof health is much more complex than "X = Y, hence Z will be cheaper and everyone will live happily ever after"
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1431F/production...
How about we all end up as scientists who work on discovery?
I've been laughing about this fact for years. Give a guy a billion dollars and all of a sudden he wants to live forever.
This is a great research subject and all but how did UCSF end up with 4 (now 5) institutes related aging in the first place and why isn’t this entirely replacing them?
Is this the excessive administrative bureaucracy in academia I keep hearing about?