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Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

Alchemy promised similar goals by more mystical means. Taoist practices for life extension go back thousands of years. They would have seemed like actual possibilities to someone living then, too. Just providing some perspective. Medical technologies certainly hold promise, but it may well be another 1000+ years before a meaningful breakthrough occurs. Or it may never.

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> Alchemy promised similar goals by more mystical means. Taoist practices for life extension go back thousands of years.

Neither of these were based on the scientific method, a proven process for discovery and knowledge refinement.

Animal models do not always, and in fact quite often not at all, translate over to humans.

We all know this, but it is worth bringing it up on a regular basis.

Can you name a 'model'? Not sure what you mean?

"animal models" is a fairly standard phrase in research: When people research depression, alzheimers, cancer, etc., they generally start with mice and work their way up through monkeys before coming to human trials. For many conditions there's specific "lines" of mice that have been bred or even genetically modified to exhibit those conditions in a reliable or extreme way. Depression is particularly challenging since you can't ask an animal how it's feeling, and frankly nearly all animals used in laboratories are understimulated, removed from their natural habitat, and probably a little "depressed". (see e.g. the "rat park" studies (https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-tea...) that showed that rats were much less likely to self-administer cocaine if they were in an environment that let them have a more enjoyable/fulfilling/natural life otherwise.)

So anyway "animal models" just means "an animal mice/rats/monkeys/etc. that we have decided has enough of the same symptoms of the human disease that we can use it to study treatments of that disease", and it's fairly common for something to work in mice but fail in monkeys, or even to work in both mice and monkeys but not work or have very undesirable side-effects in humans. (side note: one of the least discussed things in pharma is how they source the first humans for trialling a new treatment, which does carry non-trivial risk to the human "guinea pigs" - it's generally people who are poor and desperate.)

Thalidomide tested harmless in murine models but was a famously potent teratogen when tested in pregnant humans. 1

1 https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/studies-thalidomides-effects-ro...

At some point stuff gets tested in humans.

Science is not magic. It has produced some magical results but it is just one way of obtaining knowledge. I have seen nothing in my casual perusal of the age extension literature that makes me think it’s any more than modern day alchemy, hoping for some magical compound that grants immortality, from trace evidence of beneficial properties.

I think age extension is likely possible, and that it will require continual rewriting of the human genome to regress cellular aging, fight cancer, and repair damage to the brain and vascular systems - and all other organs, really. It will require a stupendous technological investment and infrastructure and require much better knowledge of the human brain and cognition than we have today. Certainly nowhere in the next 100 years, we do not even know the causes of or have effective treatments for common forms of dementia, and our cancer treatments are frankly barbaric.

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