Two research teams reverse signs of aging in mice
science.org
science.org
We’ve made cured nearly all diseases in mice, including baldness, Covid, cancers, heart disease, and now have made them reverse aging and practically immortal.
Very few of those treatments have worked in humans and even fewer have made it into commercial viability.
That’s the kicker isn’t it. “will”, not “does”. As someone who is not in the field it’s hard for me to get excited before you can at least say they’ve reproduced it with another species
I hope you are correct
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/health/reversing-aging-scn-we...
Even if it’s trickier than that, there are probably lots of ways to selectively restore the epigenetic information in specific patterns or specific sites that might help chip away at disease.
Somewhat related link from quick googling:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002192582...
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/fasting...
The book really likes to crap on big pharma and conventional medicine for largely ignoring fasting as a medical treatment for a litany of diseases, since it’s not very profitable to tell your patient to just stop eating for a while.
While I think the discoveries are cool, I can’t help but wonder if the ultimate goal is to encapsulate anti-aging in a profitable pill form that might have the same effect as a dietary fast.
I’m more in the thoroughly convinced category.
“Who profits?” is a great heuristic.
Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his work on autophagy, which is triggered by fasting and has anti-aging properties. And yet it seems you have to go seek out low-carb/fasting sources in order to hear about it. As if people who care about anti-aging directly wouldn’t care about it. (Well, maybe I’m wrong and autophagy is more well-known than I have the impression of.)
In this particular case, there are many natural experiments we can conceive of that demonstrate why fasting alone is highly unlikely to significantly impede “normal” aging in humans in the lab. That’s before we get to how effective it could actually be as a treatment.
And while we’re following the money, there are many powerful entities that would love a “free” aging cure to juice their demographics…so why don’t they use it?
A heuristic is not evidence, as you should know.
I say that it is a heuristic, you conflate it with evidence, and then you say that’s exactly the point (that it’s not evidence)? You’re not saying anything that I haven’t said originally.
Your supposed counter-example is beyond facile. Who-benefits presupposes that the agent has the means to affect some outcome. But no human could have arranged the rotation of the Earth.
Lifespan (2019) by David Sinclair.
Also he narrates the audiobook, and he has a very suave and calming voice.
I’ve seen multiple people over the last 15 years say that we’re 3-5 years out from a breakthrough that will result in 120-200 year lifespans. Yet those breakthroughs have yet to materialize.
Of course that alone doesn’t mean they are trying to scam people or are perpetrating a fraud, but there seems to be a lot of hype with little to show.
He pushes some theoretical "cell repair" supplements like NMN and resveratrol, but he is repetitively clear they're experimental, and that his evidence is anecdotal.
I understand he is invested in them, but I don't jump to "fraud" because of that.
His team had other groundbreaking results, such as partially restoring damaged optical nerves in mice by injecting a virus in the eye[1].
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-restore-...
Used to be that the burden was laid on scientists not to be merchants...
It puts a bad taste in my mouth given the fact that Sinclair tries to brand himself as someone who puts the interests of humanity over his own.
In the video below Dr. Brad Stanfield discusses the controversy:
When an egg and a sperm cell come together to form a new cell, you have two aged cells coming together and somehow from that you get a cell with age zero. In 2006 a Japanese scientist named shinya yamanaka discovered that this age reset actually happens a few days after fertilization, in a process where the epigenome gets reset to baseline by a chemical signal of 4 different factors. Express those factors, and any cell in your body becomes a pluripotent stem cell. For this he won the Nobel prize.
What this new research is attempting to do is to do a soft reset of the epigenome- to reset cells to a youthful state without completely reverting them to stem cells. They are also attempting to show that you can cause a mouse to age by inducing breaks in non-coding parts of dna, which indirectly causes degradation of the epigenome. They claim that it is epigenetic drift, not genetic alterations, that causes aging.
There’s nothing about this research that seems peculiar to mice. I’m not a biologist but to me, it passes the smell test of at least being plausible- although I think that correctly resetting the epigenome of every different type of cell in the body is going to be a very, very complicated task.
And yet over the years I can see (but still hide) the hair at my temples receed ever so slightly, some wrinkles on my forehead get a little more pronounced, I notice my energy levels are not what they used to be and my pace of learning has ever so slightly slowed down. When I think about it it frustrates me to no end that these things will probably only go down hill from here. Slowly but surely. And so if I could I would love to intervene even more. There are so many things to experience, so many things to learn, so many things to create, I feel like I could comfortably fill 200 years worth of stuff in my life simply based on my bucket list but most of them either require or are more fun in a young, healthy body. So for purely egotistical reasons I want research like that to succeed and be available to me rather sooner than later.
It would probably be best for me to come to terms with the fact that aging just happens and make the best of it but this attitude feels impossible to adopt.
I've been bald-ish since I turned 20. I'm nearing 40 now and baldness has had zero negative impact on my life as far as I can tell. It certainly has zero impact on my longevity or my ability to enjoy myself into midlife.
The same can't be said of getting fat, or weak, or immobile. I'm fitter than 90% of my peers and that's been a great investment.
So why not focus on the stuff that will make you last longer/better? Including mental health and acceptance ;)
EDIT: Something tricky about this thing is that once we reach that magical cut-off where we are supposed to dread the Grim Reaper (26 years +) then any kind of deficiency can be attributed to Getting Old and something that can’t be remedied if you have already filled up your whole life with anti-Grim Reaper activities. But it could also be a temporary phase. Maybe one, for example, isn’t really getting slower mentally but might just need a little vacation?
There’s a small chance it increases your chance of death [1]
Results: The intervention was terminated 6 months early because of an excessive number of deaths in the tretinoin-treated group. Post hoc analysis of this difference revealed minor imbalances in age, comorbidity, and smoking status, all of which were important predictors of death. After adjusting for these imbalances, the difference in mortality between the randomized groups remained statistically significant.
Conclusions: We observed an association of topical tretinoin therapy with death, but we do not infer a causal association that current evidence suggests is unlikely.
Maybe in the future the prison system will allow inmates to choose between serving a full sentence or taking enough specific epigenetic damage which equates with a particular sentence.
For instance, a prisoner is given a 10 year sentence: 1 year must be served but the other 9 can be deferred by taking the injection, damaging the epigenetic modifications, and synthetically aging 9 years.
Does the 1 year need to be particularly brutal so that synthetic sentencing is a viable option? I don't know - maybe it already is. I think I would take the injection.
(Also, I find it amusing how people find increasingly inhumane ways to treat their fellow humans, and with such imagination. It's also sad that this idea of excessively long, "Monte Cristo-style" punishment has become the norm, especially for non-violent crimes.)
Immortality is a problem though unless it comes with complete independence/freedom and lots of variety. I'd hate to be immortal and still have to work, pay rent/mortgage/taxes :)
I am joking of course, but with the rise of the internet and digital media, I think it will become easier (and more common) to rely on storage other than our own memory to keep track of our lives. From personal experience, small things like phone numbers and birthdays have already moved from my memory to digital storage and I am not sure if it is a bad thing overall.
OTOH, I'd love to, because the former is WAY more important than the latter
Work would be more relaxing, knowing it isn't make or break, lol
People will continue to die from many reasons if aging is somehow cured.
I don't pay rent, mortgage and taxes already as mortal. Well at least not income tax, can't avoid health insurance and social insurance, which ain't called taxes. But I still have to technically work, although if I really wanted I could already retire with my savings.
Though I'd still prefer to be immortal paying all of those, I mean if you don't like it I assume you could always killed yourself or visit Canada, where they do it for you.
At this point it should be clear to everyone that very few treatments that work on mice actually translate effectively to larger animals, not to mention primates. We've been curing diseases in mice for decades, including aging, yet very few of those have produced meaningful treatments for humans.
Not that we shouldn't keep doing research, but maybe wait for primate studies before getting exited about it.
Do cameras and screens often end up reversing images due to base assumption mismatch / confusion?
This article is much more interesting and well developed IMHO: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01530-6
It finds that activation of endogenous retroviruses induces cell senescence and is associated with ageing phenotypes. It also affords a more tractable therapeutic approach eg antivirals or vaccines.
Yeah, stopped reading at that point, there are always negative/side effects, unless you clearly state them, I don't trust you. We are only slowly learning truth about COVID vaccine, which affected DNA much less than this would.
Different from a claim that there are none.
> Janesich and Young stress that their results, both
> original and new, in no way imply that those vaccines
> integrate their sequences into our DNA.This is just simply nonsense. A far -better- argument would be essentially Steve Job's take on death. Which was "I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete....Without death, there would be very little progress." Your argument has been disproven countless times, and will continue to be.
Your head is full of nonsense. Something like 85% of animal and plant diversity on Earth has disappeared in the last 50 years. According to a study by the World Wildlife Fund, more than a third of Earth's natural resources have been destroyed by humans in just thirty years. And yet deforestation has increased to an alarming rate. Have you heard of Climate Change? Guess what's causing that? It is estimated that humans use 173% of the earth's resources every year. You mind explaining how that is sustainable? We're pretty much screwed, and the last thing we need is more people.
Biocapacity can be increased with technology and sustainable energy. Our impact on environment can be eliminated with technology and sustainable energy. These are not a problem at all; we just need to utilize more energy.
Assuming humans never destroy literally all multi celled organisms on Earth, I think this rediversification is guaranteed to happen after some amount of time.
Is the number of species really important at all, or is the preservation of the basic genetic drive the important thing?
There is a race between humans destroying their own capacity to destroy and humans destroying all life on Earth. I would bet on the former.
The parent says, "There's too many people on earth already", you reply "Steve Jobs said Death is great and necessary", these seem like sympathetic points to points.
If this happens, that's your future, you will be the old person that you're consigning to "live somewhere else".
My interpretation is that the most important resource is not minerals or land, but people! The more people who work on improving things, the better the world becomes.
8 billion heads is better than [your preferred population number]!