There are a lot of hucksters in this area but I think some of the investments will produce good results. It’s definitely better to pour VC money into longevity research vs “Uber for X” or blockchain.
Whenever I ask people what the real crypto projects are they still give a very abstract handwavy buzzword-heavy answer like you just did
Zoom out and think of the entire blockchain algorithm at a level above the incentives of a singular agent.
It's very much like having a superhuman Paperclip maximizer that has a invented amazing techniques of say, iron ore extraction but this localized advance is squandered in pursuit of an absurd goal of creating the maximum possible volume of paperclips.
Of course there is not a single agent on earth who pursues bitcoin mining with the goal of wasting energy and compute resources but it is the aggregate end result. Bostrom similarly argues the the objective function of a complex system such as an AGI may drift entirely from its original intent leading it to optimize for things we absolutely do not desire and this malignant drift is an emergent property.
The similarities to blockchain are uncanny.
Which is terrible. It means that there are all sorts of barriers in place to developing drugs or therapies that prevent or reverse aging -- because you couldn't get FDA approval for something that it doesn't consider disease. It’s hard to even get the studies approved.
More details:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-new-goal-growing-old...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/19/1061070/is-old-a...
I don't see how that is a significant barrier to an anti-aging drug that actually works. Pick any one of the many recognized medical conditions that is strongly correlated with old age, like osteoporosis. Prove that your anti-aging drug effectively and safely treats osteoporosis in the elderly. The FDA will approve it. If your osteoporosis treatment also cures wrinkles and gray hair as a side effect, the FDA won't object. And once the drug is approved for one condition it can be prescribed by off-label for other conditions. Everyone will quickly learn what it's useful for, just like how people started using semaglutide for weight loss when it was "officially" still just a diabetes treatment.
That’s exactly what’s being done to work around the problem. However there might be some treatments that work well in advance of a disease and aren’t effective after the disease is present. It’s as if fire extinguishers can be funded but not flame resistant building materials.
There are chemoterapies etc for cancer treatment approved by FDA (and its analogs in other relevant countries), which kill a ton of healthy cells along the way, and why is it considered safe? And there are many other approved drugs with severe adverse effects, why are they considered safe? While the only adverse effect for Yamanaka factors is cancer, which manifests with a long enough (month(s)) treatment to reverse cells the whole way back to pluripotency. And when Yamanaka genes are applied for a short time (~2 weeks), there are literally no adverse effects in mice.
By waiting for osteoporosis to manifest to have an approved reason to begin an approved treatment, you violate the Hippocrates oath, which states that prevention is better than a subsequent cure.
At least, that's how the articles about how "we know this field has a reputation for scammers but we're legit honest" phrased it.
With a GCSE grade C in biology, I can't tell what's a scam and what's a legitimate breakthrough, and I'm also mindful of the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect.
Longevity research = Maintain the health equivalent of a young person, indefinitely.
So longevity expands regular medicine to include interventions in everybody (at least all adults) regardless of normal health, as early as possible, to halt or reverse age related loss of functions and maximally delay death.
There's no diagnosis when you start treatment.
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/11/04/nothing-is-right-about-...