Japanese scientists develop vaccine to eliminate cells behind aging
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. At the depths of covid lockdowns, GDP was down 20%. Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity. To avoid another 10 years of my parents death is something I'd do a lot for. Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else.
3. This approach is scientifically sound. Certain aspects of aging cures are approaching engineering levels of work rather than pure science. We simply know that many diseases are caused or amplified by senescent cells. And we have ample evidence that elimination of these cells reverses diseases in complex mammals, as long as you don't remove too many, too quickly. The rest, is the engineering problem of how to remove the right cells at the right cadence.
4. This is the kind of thing biohackers should hack on. Find an aging part of your skin, and attempt to convince your body to kill the senescent cells. If you succeed, you will have benefited humanity, become beautiful, become wealthy, and be remembered forever (is there any other fundamental need humans have, not covered)?
Let the race begin!
This research and all similar research (and sentiments like yours, which I strongly agree with) remind me of the classic Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.[0] It feels as though we are finally on the cusp of learning the shape of the armaments that will one day slay the dragon. And I wish the world could band together the way we attacked COVID to attack this problem.
>the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.”
TLDR: a big dragon (represents aging) kills tens of thousands of people every day, until the people invest in technology to defeat it, and then vaguely wish they'd started the research sooner.
Come on. It's like more than half a century ago some economists predict because of the improvement of technology and the overall production, most people only need to work 4 hours per day.
aaand now we have a lot of people working 12 hours a day over the wire already. GDP is the millstone that when it's bigger it grinds more soul - because things are operated in scale as technology develops, individuals can only grab every opportunity they have, in order to participate in the economy, even when the opportunity is outstraight abusive.
There will be new jobs but new jobs are either rockstar economies like being social media celebrities, or bullshit jobs that people have to scratch their head and come up with overpriced bullshit products from nothing and marketing those as the best thing ever.
It's not unlikely we ended up working 16 hours a day pointlessly in the so-called metaverse half a century from now on.
And what for? If I retire, I want to enjoy it… the last thing I want is to go back to work
That would be worthwhile, right?
Yes, we as a society have historically made poor decisions about what to do with productivity and lifespan increases. Let’s work on making better choices _and_ enhance our lifespans.
It's just the stress on GDP which makes me feel alarmed - historically speaking, things like GDP are always excuses to convince people they're goals worth following before we improve things like inequality or the quality of life. Do people now generally feel happier than half a century ago since GDP has drastically increased? Or the mental health of a large fraction of us was deteriorating all along over the decades?
It almost feels lies like "let us focus on delivering the features first, we'll get back to the technical debt once we have time" in some organizations - there are always new features, and always room for development, other things are always overlooked or keep bare minimum.
Back to the specific topic of increasing lifespan. Inequality is a problem much harder to solve than the technology itself. If we don't solve it carefully, it's very likely to be more harmful than helpful to the world. The right to live and the right to reproduction are the two most sensitive things to creatures - fundamentally it's much more risky than inventing the Internet or plastic surgery.
I can't help but think what I saw in the hospital - people with cancer and with no money giveaway their painkiller to drug dealers in exchange for some dirty motel nearby. Meanwhile, I know there are old, important figures who live in the hospital and spend several years of the average person's income per day, taking up a large fraction of scarce medical resources, equipment, and wards, just because they're old (many of them have no serious problems, just in case) and "important".
Think about the ancient tyrant who spent a lot, searching for immortality elixir died from poisoning. He became a laughing stock because the elixir didn't work, but it wouldn't be so funny if the elixir works. Nowadays, rich people can already fight cancer much better than poor people. Just imagine, how it feels when you know the first 0.1% of powerful figures you know (name the first 3 at least), are going to live for the next 500 years, but not everybody else?
...but the bigger question would be - If this protein encoded a protein that identified cells which should always be eliminated in old age; why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them?
It's more likely that there is some trade-off which we have not discovered yet.
Evolution doesn’t optimise for length of life, just propagation. A number of species have evolved to have very short life cycles because that enabled greater propagation. Presumably shorter lives generally confer greater adaptability as it increases the opportunity for evolutionary change
Chromosomes have a limited number of telomeres, each time the cell divides the telomeres become shorter. If your cell runs out of telomeres it can't divide anymore. This is one of the primary mechanisms the body balances repair against cancer risk. Current max of human life is about 120. If you don't "solve" the telomere problem you are not going to extend life past 120, though you may have more people live that long and may improve quality of life in later years.
Our species has a good balance that lets us live well past reproduction age, presumably because there is evolutionary pressure (benefit) to having elderly people around to pass on knowledge, help raise grandchildren, etc.
You can do things that extend the telomeres, but that makes cells more likely to reproduce out of control (cancer). This is a very hard "problem" to solve because cell final death is so important in preventing cancer. We are not even close to solving this, it would require revolutionary biological understanding.
Nanobots at some point may be able to essentially destroy bad/old cells, and maybe feed/nourish good cells we want to keep, and when cells can't divide anymore, could those be replaced with ones that could ?
I think back to the movie Bicentennial man, where he made completely real working human / robot interchangeable parts that basically allow for increased life and better health. Sure it's a movie, but we can 3d print organs and things, so it's not outside the realm of possibility...
In a sci-fi hypothetical where nanobytes can do arbitrary behaviors, sure, maybe they could intelligently do that. But that's an extremely complex thing.
My point to my original post is really that if anyone hears a "longer life" breakthru that doesn't even mention telomeres, I immediately move on. If they moved the needle on well-being of the elderly a bit, that's great. But nobody's "solving aging" without telomeres.
This seems like part of the puzzle. First repair the damage, then extend the time span, and the more you do this the more opportunities you have to find an optimal solution.
I think the only thing that will actually work is for entirely new bodies to be built and for our minds to be copied over.
It's not immortality but that is probably as close as we will get, and once we can do that then extending our current body's lifespan will be exponentially easier.
Clearly some tradeoffs are less relevant today than they were to a tribe of cavemen. Even if grandpa is in great shape, he will have a hard time hunting thay wooley mamoth, and having him around too long will be too many mouths to feed.
Also it's hypothetically possible to give everyone a ripped physique without gym memberships, downside of this would be increased protein consumption.
I think that evolution selects mostly for reproduction and not longevity. You don't have to live very long to have many kids (in like caveman / hunter-gatherer type of context as this is where evolution is basically), you just need to have great genetics. I guess sticking around for a few years after to protect the kids and provide for them is a bonus, but that part may be handled by the tribe too. But there's not much to be gained (from evolutionary point of view) from an individual living up to a 100 years or so.
This (the measuring, at least) is mostly a solved problem.
I disagree. I’m familiar with the world happiness report. I don’t think that would be an adequate measurement to replace GDP with.
There seems to be annunderlying assimption that GDP is a good meaurement?
In UK we had reduction of life expectancy, wages, trade and production of physical goods while GDP grew. The only sources of GDP growth seem to be never-ending rise of house prices and inequality.
For example being in nature brings you happiness. BUT this is only in well developed countries and among people with enough wealth to live comfortably.
Money does not make you happy but it gives you much more opportunity to be happy.
That’s actually not correct. By that argument the happiest country should be the United States as it has the largest GDP. However the United States ranks #19 on the World Happiness Report: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
I would be genuinely surprised if older people are happier than younger people.
Almost all advances of civilisation are created through unhappiness about something. Would a state of total happiness stop creativity?
What would that mean in practice?
Not to mention... funding.
There are a lot of things that could be tweaked, but at a gross level it’s pretty consistent. In fact the recent, seemingly politicized, accelerated approval of aducanumab certainty caused a lot of turmoil and appears to have been a mistake.
When I was gestating my mother’s colleagues apparently couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take the miracle drug thalidomide (much less even aspirin). Lucky for me! In general I think the medical side of FDA works reasonably well.
Human experimentation is limited and carefully managed for very good reasons. Killing people to extend other people's lives is not a good tradeoff.
It is social, political and psychological major changes. Revolution may be. Good luck.
The whole idea behind the current pandemic is that people need to die, via vaccines, or the virus, or the media.
Soon we won't have a planet to live in. I am sure mother nature will find more subtle but beautiful way to eradicate us.
But, hopefully we leave this small planet and explore other planets in near future.
Missing /s?
Nature's remedies are more normally quite blunt and brutal.
Your way is depressing and dystopian AF.
Obviously it should only be used by the poor, so they have longer to find happiness. Someone has to blow the horn and push the wheelbarrows.
Why would that be your conclusion? It's 10 more years of life. It's not 10 more years of better life. It's a little more of the same.
That 10 years is "experienced" as only a short increase in local time. Whereas before 33% of your life would have been 28 years old, afterwards 33% of your life would be at 31 years old. So life events would happen a couple years sooner or later but you wouldn't feel the difference.
It's not like world hunger would end. In fact we would need more food, because more humans would be alive at any point, because people are dying later. The senior citizen voting block would increase, expanding the lobbying power of senior citizens, which has a disproportionate unfair effect on the young. Which will get interesting as time goes on seeing as the birth rate has been declining steadily.
It also means your retirement would not last long enough anymore, meaning you would either have to work longer or harder or save more in order to retire. Social security dates would also have to change, and paycheck contributions may even have to increase. But corporations won't want to increase wages (as they never want to) so your money won't go as far in retirement, and inflation would act on it over a longer time, reducing it further than before. And since it would be a voluntary vaccine, as we have seen from the COVID-19 insanity, just having a life-saving vaccine available is no guarantee people will take it. So there would be controversy over whether to extend social security, and some significant amount of the population is going to get screwed over.
Finally, as the wealthy will live even longer, more wealth will get tied up in private ownership for longer, extending the wealth gap. Copyright would also take even longer to expire as it's based on how long since the creator died. There's tons of other random ways that arbitrarily extending the life of a portion of the population will not immediately lead to the greatest good that could be done for humanity.
Call me crazy, but I think we could do much more good for humanity today than just making it take longer for them to die.
Yet another opportunity for boomers to fuck over their kids' generation by squeezing them out of the workforce again, and the lingering around longer than ever before, creating an unprecedented drain on social services that their children will have to pay for. Can't wait!
Sure, f*ck climate change, let's just live and suffer longer
- the GP haven't said "fuck climate change", you did. There is no contradiction there, we can try and solve more than one issue at once.
- climate change objectively speaking kills way less people than ageing and will continue to kill less for the foreseeable future. You grandma (or grand-grandma) wasn't killed by climate change, neither will you.
- I don't know about you, but my life is not full of suffering, climate change or not, and I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. If yours is, I suggest looking at reasons other than climate change.
- We have to retrain every generation of scientists and engineers before they can contribute to solutions for any problem, climate change included. Increasing the amount of output per trainee by half goes a VERY long way towards solving our issues including climate change.
So, you are fixating on "healthy" and "long" life and you are SO afraid of death that the idea of aging cure seems to be attractive. Delusion, greed, and aversion are classic poisons that are the root cause of all human suffering.
So less jobs for young people.
(b) In the future, there will be more humans than jobs anyways thanks to automation and this is a problem we are going to have to face one way or another. Social contract will change, and the economy will need to be refactored commensurately.
They're not "things" that exist in a limited supply.
You can think of them as relationships between people.
When population increases, no one worries that society will "run out" of friendships or marriages. Jobs work the same way.
They do exist in a limited supply. When a factory closes down and outsources all the jobs in a town, your job goes away.
When a robot starts doing your job, you are not needed anymore for that job. People in ivory towers expect that you should easily retrain and find new jobs that does not happen for the average joe.
When an immigrant is willing to do your job for less money or less safety, you dont get that job unless you are willing to compromise.
Now with all this you are going to have older people not retire then you are reducing the job pool for younger folks.
> Jobs work the same way.
In reality smart politicians can tap into the fear and frustration of average folks when good paying jobs run out and they promise they will bring back jobs, so voters vote for them.
I should have said "fixed number".
The US population is now twice as big as 1955. If the number of jobs had stayed fixed since then, unemployment would now be at least 50%.
This is clearly not true, which disproves the "fixed number of jobs" theory.
Not sure why you are disproving your own theory.
Perhaps you just missed the point I am trying to make.
A-Females are willing to marry B-Males, but B-Females are not willing to marry A-Males. This creates lots of abundance for B-Males and lots of scarcity for A-Makes.
As for jobs, in theory they can always be created a new. But in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
My point is only that if the population increases, that percentage will stay the same. The number of marriages will increase proportionally.
> in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
If that's true where do all the current jobs come from? How come almost everyone can get a job?
And they're going away anyway soon enough, as automation develops.
Seriously though, the majority of humans never see material upward mobility in their lifetimes, and a world without mandatory low-wage jobs per se isn't necessarily a world without upward mobility.
As humans are able to automate activities that span the creation of everything we find valuable, from resource collection to manufacture to transportation to design to art, that necessarily limits the economic efficiency of using humans for labor. The last 3 years have demonstrated that creative tasks are highly susceptible to automation, with most artistic automation approaching or exceeding human performance as proofs of concept. The next decades will see an ever decreasing landscape of activities where humans are more effective than software.
Jobs are endeavors defined around the exchange of money for labor. It does not make sense to pay more money for less effective labor - i.e. if I can pay $30k usd for a burger flipper robot, I won't have to pay for 2 full time burger flipper jobs. It makes no sense to hire people for labor that can be automated.
We're a long ways away from being able to automate everything, but the trend is clear. Jobs don't make sense under our current technological path. We either have to eliminate progress in that direction and artificially enforce a human preference job efficiency limit so as to maintain a "sufficient" number of jobs, or start exploring new economic models that let us transition to post-scarcity economics.
We are, however, going to see a time where anything humans can do, machines will do better. Using humans will be inefficient, and companies will be out competed if they don't automate. We can either prepare for that and try to make things fair, or assume new jobs will arise that will make meaningful enterprises available to people through innovation and novel opportunities that haven't yet been conceived. It seems clear to me that the latter is basically invention of make work, and we need to prepare for post scarcity.
We don't need agi. We have Moore's law and "good enough" algorithms to achieve human parity performance. We should figure out a better measure of the value of human time than jobs and employment.
Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?
By now this has become a trope. "Researchers develop new treatment for {UNTREATED_DISEASE}" ... in mice.
Mouse models of human disease are very limited in their predictive ability. There's a lot of research that needs to follow this before there's even a hope of a human trial, let alone vaccine. And the failure rate for treatments at the mouse stage is quite high.
Some of the comments on this thread treat this research paper as the announcement of an an imminent anti-aging vaccine. It's not.
So it’s very likely that some of the advances we see today that are still in clinical stage will hit the market in 5 to 15 years.
Edit: typo
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-ra...
Though 1/3 of my meals are Soylent, so even that doesn't seem entirely terrible.
Mice on MDMA for example could easily be having the best time that any mouse has ever had.
Hmm
I don't want to think about what the others go through when things go wrong, though...
I've seen more comment section finger wagging in response to science articles, offering such wisdom as correlation isn't causation, XYZ "isn't a panacea", research into treatments to mitigate or avoid cancer "don't cure cancer", statistical confidence of 95% falls short of absolute proof, and any number of extraneous add-ons that make caricatures of the research and then bat those caricatures down.
It reminds me of this quip from the Onion, back in 2009:
"All that in just six years? Wow, that's so amazing. If you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic. And I'm being sarcastic because I don't understand the significance of the study."
And a twitter account:
https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice
https://jamesheathers.medium.com/in-mice-explained-77b61b598...
I get what you’re saying but it’s safe to assume that this concept is already baked into almost everyone’s discussion on matters like this.
Experiments on humans happen very frequently. They're called "clinical trials".
It will be interesting to know how long can we extend that live of mice. I guess that before immortal human beings we should achieve mice immortality.
Also, if something really bad goes on mice, we can avoid having that happening to humans. Which I would also value a lot.
I mean, it seems to me experimenting on mice might be worth it.
There is virtually no relationship whatsoever between what works in mice and humans. Such headlines are completely ridiculous by now: the track record of applicability is a train wreck.
Figuring these things out is hard.
Humans are good at doing things they've done before, or imitating actions they've seen or heard before, but learning something entirely new is very very difficult. We have more scientists alive and working on problems now than ever before in human history and still the mill of innovation turns slowly.
It's like saying a rock and a plant share fundamental atoms with each other. Biology even from one close specie to another is so mindbogglingly unpredictable that we don't have good models. In 2021.
This is a common theme in anti-ageing research. When you administer some cariacature of poor lifestyle, it is much easier to find ways to improve things. The long running calorie restriction experiements in monkeys illustrate this well [1,2] - in monkeys being fed a bad diet, calorie restriction works great. In monkeys eating a kinda normal monkey diet, calorie restriction doesn't do much (and the unrestricted healthy eating monkeys live longer than the calorie restricted junky monkeys). Peter Attia had a good podcast with Steve Austad where they discuss this, albeit paywalled.
Unfortunately the style of experiment in the OP is good for publishing papers but hardly advances knowledge or helps us to explain anything.
It is much more difficult to demonstrate improvements in healthspan in animals that are living well. The ITP experiments have shown a few drugs can do this, with rapamycin being the most broadly effective.
[1] Junky monkey: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2812811/ [2] Healthy monkey: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11432
Can't get to the paper using all the usual tricks, so it's hard to say what exactly they're immunising with, which could answer a lot of my questions.
As someone who works and publishes in a related field, this particular phrasing should be interpreted as meaning that Fisetin is unproven as a senolytic.
Cells becoming senescent is a mechanism that exists to prevent them from becoming a possible tumor, due to DNA damage.
The problem with senescent cells is that accumulation of them results in tissues not functioning correctly. Eliminating them should make tissues function better.
After all, your own immune system gets rid of senescent cell, but as we age, I believe your immune system is unable to keep up.
All I can say is that the paper overwhelmingly uses the term "senolytic", which means to "kill off the senescent" (I'm assuming that it refers to senescent cells), as opposed to "senostatic", which means to "delay senescence".
Additionally, the concern brought up by the paper, is that senescent cells are known to be resistant against something called "apoptosis", which is a term to describe "programmed cell death". The goal of the paper is to explore a compound—fisetin—for its senolytic capabilities. Whether it is successful at finding that, I haven't fully read the paper to see if they have identified fisetin as a senolytic, or a senostatic agent.
With that said, however, some of the graphs in the paper does highlight that as fisetin dose increases, not only do senescent cells get depleted, but so do total number of cells. If we were working with a purely senostatic agent, relative to a control, the senescent cells would be much lower, but the overall cell count would be much higher, which is not the case with fisetin. Does this mean that fisetin is a senolytic? Maybe not; it could just indiscriminately target all cells, resulting in fewer cells. Or maybe it is. Who knows.
Or maybe my logic about cell counts regarding senostatic vs senolytic may be entirely wrong.
Whatever it is, I haven't read the whole paper.
But not all senolytics are created equal. They differ in what cells they work on, how powerful they are, and how specific they are (the ratio of senescent to healthy cells they kill).
Here's a quote from the article
> Many of the existing drugs to remove senescent cells are used as anti-cancer agents and may cause negative side effects. Side effects from the new vaccine were fewer, while its efficacy lasted longer, the team said
Death is necessary to allow new ideas and change to be brought into the world. Death is necessary to prevent wealth and power accumulating into fewer hands. Death is necessary for others to enjoy the right to bear and raise children.
EDIT: 2 minutes go by and this comment has already been downvoted 3+ times. At least respond before you downvote.
Maybe in 2A Jesusland death is the only option, but in other parts of the world there are taxes and proportional representation and euthanasia.
Yes, there are problems, but saying that death (and more specifically aging with all of its shitty slow painful consequences) is great (okay, you said necessary), because it somehow "solves" other problems is a logical fallacy.
Plus, "actually" aging is one of the things that causes inequality, because wealthy people live longer thanks to having access to better healthcare, food, lifestyle, etc.
There's the general fear of death that drives a significant portion of human morality. If we can't die, we don't fear risking doing things that would result in our own deaths, or the deaths of others. Suddenly we can inflict a lot more harm and give a lot less of a shit what people think, because what are they gonna do, put me in jail for 1,000 years? I'm just going to live for infinity after that...
Aging is a significant source of perspective. As people age, the way they think about their lives change, the way they approach risk changes. Those changes in both thought process and lifestyle are probably one of the biggest contributors to how human societies work. We have probably never had a human society without aging people, so we don't know what a society without their influence would look like.
If people continue to be born, we would eventually run out of space. At that point you reach a new form of political crisis: do you kill people to make space? Do you shuffle them off the planet in rudimentary space stations? Do wars over resource contention increase? Certainly different "seniority" would lead to new social classes.
Death is a necessary part of evolution. If we eliminate death, we have to alter living people's genomes to respond to biological threats, mix up the gene pool, adapt to new problems and somehow try to predict unexpected ones. All of that is currently science fiction; we have no idea if we would get it right, and could end up basically destroying the species from hubris and ignorance. Nature has a pretty good handle on it.
Cultures should change over time, and people need to change with those cultural changes, but it's basically impossible for individual humans to completely change their entire cultural makeup. Can you imagine if people today lived alongside people from 3,000 years ago? We would end up separated not just by nations, but by epochs. It would just further segregate people and cause tension. The world would be so much more complicated than it is today.
Death is part of a process of cultural natural selection. It creates and changes and influences more than it destroys. Entire peoples are wiped out and new ones emerge, languages die and are born, knowledge is lost and created, practices are abandoned and instantiated. Shakespeare was dramatically influenced by death; it's a major plot point in basically all of his writings. Imagine if death simply didn't exist in his world.
For instance, if eternal life could be bought, the first one to buy it could be the richest man in the world. Parent is not happy with the idea of an inmortal ruler.
In the mean time, I would like to stay younger for longer. And older people are still afraid of death, even if they are not healthy.
term limits.
what I'm trying to say (besides that the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy is aweeeesome!) is that these problems are already here, and are already solvable. regular dictators consolidate their power in a 5-10 years. corporations/memes/ideologies/religions are already immortal. and so on, and so on.
aging and death is basically a disease of the poor. the solution is not more aging/death, but less poverty.
Throughout history there have been plenty of people in power and rule to see the errors of their ways and induce lasting real positive change. Sure there will be growing and transition pains but I for one welcome the impacts that human longevity will bring longer term.
But it sounds like cells reaching that limit, cause other effects(inflammation, etc.) that are perhaps even worse for lifespan. So this wouldn't be an anti-aging vaccine, but would reduce symptoms of aging.
[0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-grape-seed-lifespan-m... .
What happened?
But then we could implement an immortality lottery, to give everyone a shot. That could be the devious slogan: “everyone gets a shot”. Devious because not everyone does, of course.
If you win you get the vaccine and live forever, but your friends and family aren’t included.
Feel free to apply again next time Halley's comet is visible.
You forgot to mention Excel and Word.
But of course a vaccine against aging isn't a ticket to immortality. Death comes in all forms, if you vaccinate against aging, another leading cause of death will come along.
Why not? Surely that would depend on how much it costs to make, maybe it would be cheap as chips?
Oh, I see you completely subscribe to the customer theory of value, where price is dictated by "how much is it worth to the client?"
In that case it would have to be a subscribtion. Or, once you get the shot, the company ownes you. Come to this of it, the two situations are actually the same.
Or we will end up an immortal ruling class cartel...
I wonder what immortal oligarchs would even do…
that ‘modern’, ‘developed’ civilizations haven’t devolved this way yet isn’t because we’re all so cultivated now, but because we’ve lived in an unusual period of extended growth and excessive abundance which keeps destructive competition at bay. but infighting (i.e., tribalism) has been rising over the past 50+ years and is threatening to overthrow that period of prosperity and civility.
From Lilli Lehmann's How to Sing, page 108 (originally authored in the late 1800s):
"No woman of less than twenty-four years should sing soubrette parts, none of less than twenty-eight years second parts, and none of less than thirty-five years dramatic parts; that is early enough."
Yes, humans can be violent but we are obviously more predisposed to be cooperative otherwise we would have never made it this far as a species. You can't put 10,000 unrelated members of any other species in one place and not expect chaos, with humans it's no problem as long as everyone involved has food in their bellies and the promise of going home after a few hours. That's our real defining trait, getting along with each other, our intelligence wouldn't do a lick of good if we didn't have that.
27-29 is probably exactly the maximizing range, for this reason.
I guess it comes down to: is the capacity of strategy developed as a result of age, or as a result of experience?
we’d still get the most bang for buck if our age was ‘frozen’ in the late 20s because experience would still accumulate regardless, but we’d have maximized the combo of physical and mental growth. it’s only obvious in retrospect how immature we are at 18, both physically and mentally, or even at 25. that’s why sports is such a neat test bed, because it taxes both facilities enough to tease out these otherwise unnoticeable dynamics.
If I want to be a bit cynical... In the future we will likely find that these cells serve an important purpose and that we can't just eliminate them. The research needs to be done though!
As an aside, to spite anti vaxxers I’m on a mission to get every vaccine I can. I want my bloodstream to be like the Library at Alexandria before it burned down.
What vaccines do is move some books to the front of the building, so your dentritic cells don't have to spend a few days finding them.
You want the right books at the front. A mission to move all the books to the front is perhaps misguided.
The problem is that IgMs are not very specific. They bind to a lot of things, but they bind poorly. In the library of Alexandria analogy, it's like a book that happens to mention a subject you care about, but only in passing.
Vaccines (and infections) result in your immune system developing IgG. That's the hyper-specific books for the pathogen you care about.
So it's not that the book wasn't at the front. Your immune system has to write the book on the fly, during the fight, using chopped up pieces of pathogen gathered by antigen-presenting cells.
Is that actually how it works in any sense?
It’s like getting a superpower in a video game!
And, vaccines have general positive effects of health: https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
Infections can be the trigger for auto-immune diseases. We're not sure precisely how, but there seems to be a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Your immune system is very much not playing games, it's in the business of reacting on a hair trigger, and doing more damage to foreign bodies than it does to your own body. It has an intricate system to avoid turning against yourself, but the system can fail.
If a B cell that produces auto-antibodies falls through the cracks, it will not die. You now have the problem of being in a permanent fight against your own immune system, with a variety of unfortunate results.
Now that's a lot of scary outcomes, and thankfully those diseases are uncommon. The system almost always works well. But it's a very complex system with ugly failure modes, so I wouldn't encourage you to poke the beast too much.
For example, Japanese encephalitis is rare in Japan, but only because many Japanese people have been vaccinated against it. It's endemic in most other parts of east, southeast, and south Asia. It kills 10K+ people every year, and it spreads through mosquito bites just like malaria. But most travelers only worry about malaria.
If you believe that vaccines may have potentially positive effects beyond their original scope, you must also be ready for the opposite, potential negative effects beyond their original scope. If you don't, you are just being brainwashed by big Pharma.
It would make such comments much more meaningful and honest.
It’s more like rare candy in Pokémon, which isn’t as good as naturally leveling up your Pokémon.
Vaccines could potentially trigger some dangerous side effects, however rare it is.
Subjecting yourself to immune response, which for some vaccines can have high amount of reactogenicity, is having your body undergo heavy inflammation, a fair amount of tissue damage, etc. The people that just treat vaccines like they're a wheatgrass shot is pretty strange.
Discovered that vaccines spike sugar prety significantly after getting my two shots this year. Won't be getting boosters anytime soon as the side effects were gruesome.
Just skimming the CDC list of common vaccines in use in the US, do most really need vaccines for everything: anthrax, Japanese encephalitis, polio, rabies, smallpox, tetanus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yellow fever? If you're not traveling outside the US and living a fairly normal life, most likely not and some of these have potentially nasty yet rare side effects. If they were given/taken at the scale COVID vaccines were, many would die from such side effect who otherwise would have lived healthy lives, all because they took an unnecessary risk trying to prevent a very low risk. COVID is an exception because of exposure and transmissibiliy, the rare side effects are worth the risk for most people because the chance of getting it and having a life ending result is relatively high.
TB, tetanus, and rabies may be useful vaccines for some professions or life exposures in high risk cases, say veteranarians and healthcare workers, but for the most part, you probably don't need it. If you travel a lot to certain locations and say do missionary type work or whatever, perhaps some others make sense as well. Should every sexually active person take PrEP regularly since HIV is a potential risk to everyone? No, there are populations of risk exposure where it makes sense though. Your dentist only takes x-rays every so often because the x-ray exposure increases risk of various forms of cancer. You could get x-rays more frequently to detect issues that might not be obvious to your dentist but it's pretty low risk, there has been a lot of study into the rate of progression of disease and risk tradeoff to help your dentist determine a reasonable frequency for x-rays vs radiation exposure.
If you start looking at your regular risks, you take many risks across a lot of aspects of life every single day, even in a modestly safe life style, from hopping in a car to picking up takeout at a local resturaunt or even walking down a street. A massive unknown asteroid could be on a collision course with Earth right now that results in mass extinction ending the human race or a gamma ray burst from inside our galaxy could set the atmosphere on fire and radiate us all to death near instantly... they are all non-zero yet incredibly low risk to our understanding probabilisticly. They're so low and some even inactionable that we need to ignore them and/or treat them with low priority and continue on with life.
It's good to have a preventative mindset and take preventative action to try and control and manage risk, but in order to do this effectively, be sure you assess your risks, or have someone knowledgable (like a doctor when it comes to vaccines) lay it out for you so you can make a good decision about what you should or shouldn't do. If you truly can do the assessment yourself then by all means do it but it doesn't hurt to explain your assessment and rationale to someone knowledgeable to make sure you're not overlooking something. It certainly is possible to perform a better risk assessment for yourself than anyone else will be able to because you can know your behaviors and exposures better than anyone else but be careful playing this game.
As for the rabies vaccine, I don't think you can just ask for that to be administered -- unless, I suppose, you lie about being bitten by a random animal. As an aside, I have amusing memories of my own rabies vaccine 25 years ago -- a series of injections of thick syrup into my butt.
> Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries.
Also, you should think sometimes about aspirin and Spanish fever phenomena.
> The hypothesis presented herein is that aspirin contributed to the incidence and severity of viral pathology, bacterial infection, and death, because physicians of the day were unaware that the regimens (8.0–31.2 g per day) produce levels associated with hyperventilation and pulmonary edema in 33% and 3% of recipients, respectively.
5% death in military vs 1% in sanitoriums which used heat therapy. Its amazing what modern medicine did back then, and you know... history repeats.
I'll check if you post in a few months. Otherwise, thank you for your contribution to science. In the mean time, don't recommend taking up competitive soccer.
There is something that already exists that's free. Multi day fasting to induce autophagy. It's not pleasant or as convenient as getting a shot/taking pills but it's been perfected over the last couple of million years with no side affects except discomfort. You might also try adding a dose of exercise (more discomfort) and cutting out things like Fructose (20% of the American diet) completely.
So it's designed to make humans immortal? Sounds like it's more likely to create zombies than destroy them. I half suspected the article to say that this vaccine was a product of the Umbrella Corporation.
It will probably be incredibly cheap to make and administer, but not a silver bullet.