Is aging a disease? | Hacker News Reader

Is aging a disease?

reuters.com

95 pointskenhty72 comments

Reminds me of this excellent read about how our perception of age and dying taints our ability to even consider it a problem we can work on and correct:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

Let's use some criteria from Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/real_diseases_unasking_the_quest...).

1. Biological? Yes

2. Involuntary? Yes

3. Rare? No

4. Unpleasant? Yes

5. Discrete? No

6. Medicable? Yes

So aging has many aspects of what we call disease. Of course, the implied question that everyone cares about is is, "Will humanity be better off if we devote more resources to curing aging?" The answer to that brings much more baggage, and depends on your moral and religious views.

Ageing is pretty discrete - at least if you're looking at the accumulating damage, rather than the bio-machinery that creates it as a side effect. Complex mechanism -> simple damage -> complex symptoms because the simple damage is body-pervasive.

Out of that list, I think unpleasant is what separates a disease from other biological phenomena. You can say the same thing about human growth (the early parts of aging), but it's not unpleasant until later.

I'm not even sure that's the right question. If you're asking about spending government money on it or donating to a charity in support of it, then it's the right question. If you're asking whether private research in to it should be forbidden by law or made impractical through regulation, I think it's not the right question. A better question might be "Is there any compelling reason to forbid this?".

Story is 2 years old. http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.12809,y.2011,no.4... is slightly newer more in depth treatment by David Gems, the person quoted.

The following is more tangentially related to the article then a direct comment about the interesting points it makes.

An interesting hypothesis I read about aging was that it's an anticancer mechanism necessary to become old enough to reproduce.

The cellular metabolic process creates a lot free radicals that cause damage, while the body has built in mechanisms to repair the damage at high rates of replication the chance of damage resulting in turning on an oncogene increases.

In order to combat this the body slows down its division process to prevent the likelihood of cancer but as a side effect we experiencing the symptoms of aging and inevitable death (usually by cancer if you live long enough to get it).

Not sure if any of this is accurate, but the idea is interesting and something I hadn't thought of. It also introduces problems since if at all accurate trying to prevent aging may result in higher cancer risk.

Talk of this also reminds me of a quote I like (from http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/13/longevity-science-needs-...):

"We all express the symptoms of a fatal, inherited degenerative condition called aging - or so the joke goes. It's a dark joke, but there's truth to be found in it, as is often the case in black humor. Unfortunately, all too few people think of themselves as patients suffering aging, and fewer still would call themselves patient advocates, agitating for research leading towards therapies and cures for aging. This is a sorry state of affairs: given that our time is limited and ticking away, the tasks upon the table should always include some consideration of aging.

What can we do about it? How can we engineer a research community, funding and support to make real progress within our lifetimes? If you don't spend at least some of your time on this issue, then you're fiddling while Rome burns. Time is the most precious thing we have, and we live on the cusp of technologies that will allow us to gain more of it - but those advances in medicine won't happen soon enough unless we work at it."

This is a question that crops up regularly - and it does so entirely because of the regulatory structure that exists in much of the Western world, such as that imposed by the FDA. In essence the FDA only approves medicines for specific, recognized, named diseases. Therefore you cannot legally, commercially treat aging in the US, as aging is not recognized by the FDA as a disease, and there is no path towards reversing that situation.

(Though let us be clear, the idea of a named disease is a nebulous entity: "Alzheimer's" probably covers at least three distinct conditions, for example, and it's much the same for Parkinson's and many other diseases that were named early and only now are being split out into their various etiologies. Ultimately at the level biotech is moving into now, names for collections of symptoms and similar-looking damage go away in favor of treating specific mechanisms that get you there).

To show just how much of a cost the FDA imposes just by this regulatory aspect, you might look at sarcopenia: it has cost millions of dollars and years to date and will cost millions and years more to lobby the FDA (meaning put dollars into the pockets of lawyers and appointees) to recognize sarcopenia as a condition. Until that happens, there will be no serious commercial research into the numerous potential mechanisms and therapies, because you can't sell the results in the US.

Now multiply that by the thousands of potential named conditions you could carve off the bulk of mechanisms that is called aging. Look at the SENS Foundation research pages for a primer on the underpinnings:

http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes

So given this ridiculous state of affairs, pretty much par for the course for big government, therapies for aging will never happen in the US for so long as the present regulatory structure exists, and for so long as there is no massive medical tourism and global research and development exchange devoted to circumventing it. That latter community is only just getting started, when considered in the grand scheme of things.

But most people are blind to all of this, and think that the FDA is actually a force for good - because they don't see the opportunity cost and the progress that didn't happen. In fact, the FDA and its equivalents overseas are the biggest obstacle to significant medical progress in this age of revolutionary advances in biotechnology.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/the-fda-is-a-dest...

For more reading on the "is aging a disease" thing, you might look at:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/05/talking-point-is-...

"Because aging is not viewed as a disease, the whole process of bringing drugs to market can't be applied to drugs that treat aging. This creates a disincentive to pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs to treat it," said Gems.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/07/sage-crossroads-p...

Why, despite the great range of potential applicable biotechnology, do we not see hundreds of millions of dollars invested in startups attempting to address the aging process? The answer is buried in this New York Times article on Sirtris: "Dr. Westphal and Mr. Sinclair stress that they are not working to 'cure' aging, a condition that, so far at least, is common to all humanity and that most physicians do not consider a disease. 'Curing aging is not an endpoint the federal drug agency would recognize,' Dr. Westphal says dryly. Instead, both men say, they are working to ameliorate the diseases of aging."

...

LARRY MILLER: [When] I was heading aging at Glaxo Smith Kline, the issues that I faced were that I was very interested in developing medications for frailty and weakness in muscle for when people get old because when people get weak they usually stop eating and then they fall and break a hip and end up in the hospital and die potentially, but the regulatory apparatus isn't there yet. Sarcopenia isn’t recognized as an official disease by the FDA, so the pathway to get drugs approved for frailty and to get more people mobile and into society is just not there.

Well, they can say that anti-aging treatments are just supplements for "healthy aging", since such treatments don't cure a specific disease and supplements don't have as many regulations as medical drugs. The bonus is that these supplements would actually work as advertised as opposed to vitamin pills.

Good luck trying to convince the FDA that a gene therapy to allotopically express mitochondrial genes throughout the patient's cells and add suitable RNA mechanisms to transport the relevant gene products back to the mitochondria again is a supplement.

The FDA is already trying very hard to regulate the supplement industry in any case - that's a lucrative battle for lobbyists these past few years. The moment that it looks like "real medicine" is being marketed as supplements, the FDA will gain its mandate to regulate supplements and suddenly you won't be able to freely buy them anymore. That is pretty much the endgame anyway, given the rapacious ratcheted growth of government in the US, but there are certainly ways in which it could be accelerated.

Sort of connected to this, but from the other end, our requirement to classify everything as a disease has pretty terrible repercussions across society.

As an example, my mum's a doctor and has worked in wards in which old people die. There's a requirement for a "cause of death" for each person to die in a hospital. Often this was given as pneumonia or similar for people who essentially died of old age. Unfortunately, someone looked at the statistics and discovering that lots of people were dying of pneumonia decided that it needed to be treated, and so now with aggressive treatments people who are at the very end of their lives are kept alive until something else comes along and kills them. The reality is, once your body has reached a certain point likelyhood of survival falls very quickly, and treating a single disease is simply a very brief and ineffective way of dealing with that.

Interestingly, although human lifespan has been increasing year on year, it's not an indication that we're actually living longer. What's happened is that things that kill you in early to mid life - heart attacks in 50 year olds, viruses and infections and injuries that 20 years ago would have been deadly - have been reduced. The outlook in terms of years of life for someone that actually manages to reach 80 or 90 has increased very little - perhaps 1 or 2 years over the last 50. (I read this somewhere but I've lost the source - I'll try and find it).

The single thing to treat, the thing that is the precursor to all other things, is ageing.

The life expectancy increase in old age is actually better than you say, and that may be due to great improvements in treating heart disease and cancer.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/07/on-elder-life-exp...

It is true, however, that the bulk of historical increases in life span at birth are due to the reduction in infectious disease burden. Infectious disease both kills people young and adds systematic damage to the survivors such that their life expectancy is reduced.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2004/12/plasticity-of-l.p...

So the progress [in life expectancy prior to 1950] was largely due to saving lives below age sixty-five, especially children.

But after 1950 the improvements to life expectancy have largely been due to saving lives after age sixty-five, to this extension of life, to this giving - adding years to the life of older people.

So it's been a remarkable shift, and the shift has been due to the fact that since 1950 we've had various kinds of interventions that could help save people from heart disease, that could intervene with various infectious diseases that were killing very old people, so the antibiotics and so on helped older people a lot.

      The single thing to treat, the thing that is the 
      precursor to all other things, is ageing.

I do not agree. My grandfather died at 99 years old. He was able to work his land until 98, lived a full life and died with no regrets. We were sad of his passing, but we accepted his death and were happy that he died fast, without much struggling.

You know what's really sad? A 22 year old boy dying of an unnoticed heart disease that led to a sudden cardiac arrest. This happened to an acquaintance of mine and it was freaking sad, as this boy was robbed of a chance to live his life.

Ageing is not the problem. The problem is that we are nowhere close to treating chronic diseases like cancer or heart diseases. The problem is that we don't even know for sure the cause of obesity or diabetes, passing baseless assumptions and flawed studies around that cause more harm than good. The problem is that we have no idea how to treat allergies and based on recent trends allergic asthma will soon be considered an epidemy. The problem is that we haven't even cured the freaking common cold.

Medicine, as far as I'm concerned, is still at the stage of alchemy. Dreaming of increasing the maximum lifespan or even of immortality is a romantic notion, but I would be happy if young people had a chance of living their life, instead of dying of diseases that have been around forever.

I think your simple way of looking at this is actually part of the problem.

If you want to get beyond the alchemy stage then more money needs to be put into research. For some people, ageing is a problem and they will spend lots of money to alleviate the symptoms, and to prevent a "premature" death.

There are many companies who will invest lots of money in an effort to capture this segment of the population. By doing the basic research for one segment, you are actually building a foundation of knowledge that will benefit all segments. For example, a device that can monitor the heart of an 80 year old can also be used on a 20 year old.

My grandfather died at 99 years old. He was able to work his land until 98, lived a full life and died with no regrets.

Your grandfather was much luckier than most.

Ageing is not the problem. The problem is that we are nowhere close to treating chronic diseases like cancer or heart diseases.

Very few 25 year olds suffer from cancer or heart disease.

Nopes, He is right.

People had healthier lives even until a while back. I agree life expectancies were less. But that is because of wars and epidemics.

People would live in binary conditions. Healthy or dead. Unlike today people are left hanging in between, without total cure, and at the same time without good quality of life after treatment.

Organ transplants in my country(India) and other fatal diseases are worse than death. In fact death is more preferable than miserable conditions where a person is half cured. Its like the body wants to die, but is just chemically alive. Its expensive too.

This is the biggest failure of current day medicine.

Young people dying is sad, but it's also uncommon in the west. My grandfather died at 85. At that age, death can be in the form of almost anything. Complications from fevers, urine infections, the onset of age related diseases. It's amazing just how quickly someone that age can go from a physically and mentally alert person to death.

The root cause of all that is ageing. Your grandfather is certainly the exception. Ageing weakens the immune system, it leads to cell death, it increases the likelihood of cancer, it increases the likelihood of alzheimers, it leads to brittle bones and muscle wastage.

Chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease are caused by ageing. Yes, sometimes young people suffer from these, but they're exceedingly rare. If you consider it a goal to increase the lifespan of your population as a whole, you change that by targeting the things that affect everyone. 0.6% of all cancers are diagnosed in the 15-24 age group. If that rate was kept up for life to 100, cancer rates would be 6% of what they are now. 55% of people in the same age group are killed in car crashes or by guns (in the US). If you want to save lives, that's where you focus.

The Institute of Medicine has a great report that explains why waiting until you know what a disease is before treating it is so damaging:

http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2011/Relieving-Pain-in-America-A-...

The current system is a complete farce. The vast majority of chronic illnesses that western medicine purports to treat don't even exist in any meaningful sense, they're just made up in order to make the medical system seem more 'scientific' in order to make money and justify taking away people's freedom.

> Therefore you cannot legally, commercially treat aging in the US, as aging is not recognized by the FDA as a disease, and there is no path towards reversing that situation.

If the FDA doesn't regard aging as a disease, then any treatments devised to prevent or reverse aging are not treatments for any disease; so wouldn't the FDA, under this policy, have no role whatsoever in regulating aging treatments?

Not considering aging a disease would seem to put anti-aging products entirely outside the FDA's reach.

Nope. Treatments would almost certainly involve synthetic drugs, which are prohibited by the FDA unless approved. But they can't get approved because of some Puritan regulation (thou shalt not use medical science to improve thy life, only to treat diseases). Yaay moralizing bureaucracy!

In essence the FDA only approves medicines for specific, recognized, named diseases

This reminds me of Melanotan[1], a drug developed by the University of Arizona to boost skin pigmentation in order to reduce the chances of skin cancer. The only way that testing and approval can proceed is for it to be applicable to the treatment of a specific disease, and prevention doesn't count.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afamelanotide

Couldn't they classify that as a beauty product and get approval?

(This was only half ironic. "Brown without soap... cough.. sun", etc.)

The FDA advisory panel recommended last week that Truvada be approved for prevention of HIV[1]. Low molecular weight heparin (enoxaparin) has been approved for the "prevention of deep vein thrombosis" for years.[2]

In other words, the following:

> The only way that testing and approval can proceed is for it to be applicable to the treatment of a specific disease, and prevention doesn't count. (emphasis mine)

... is not true.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57432491-10391704/tru...

[2] http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/uc...

SENS isn't exactly trying to "cure ageing" they are trying to "make old people healthy". The side effect of that would be that you don't die. All the causes of ageing are things that can be re-framed as diseases of old age, and attacked as such.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines

"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

Something I noticed the other day: Genesis 6:3 says, "My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years" (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6%3A1-4&...).

Interestingly, if you look at the list of the verified oldest people, only one is over 120 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_peo...).

What is this an argument for? Sure, this argues against a literal interpretation of the truth of the Bible, as somebody has lived more than 120 years.

If I start another religious cult and claim that humans won't live for more than 130 years, am I suddenly more valid?

What exactly is your point here?

The parent comment might just be pointing out an amusing coincidence.

The christian bible also claims that a man gathered every species from the earth and saved them from an angry god's globe-encompassing flood by stuffing them all in a big boat. What point are you trying to make, exactly?

Who says he's trying to make a point? This is something that I, as a religious hacker, find pretty cool (even if I am browsing HN from church). No one's saying this "proves" anything. No one's trying to convert anyone here, and no one's threatened anyone with hellfire and damnation or whatever. Can't we just go, "Oh, cool," and move on?

Job 42:16-17 "After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation."

The Old Testament also suggests Abraham lived to 175; Genesis says Enoch lived to over 360.

Given BCE life expectancy I think it's safe to interpret all these numbers as "poetically large" and leave it at that. :)

Average life expectancy during those days won't give a good picture of things.

Infant mortality was real high and those lived long, lived real long. A lot of them died in epidemics and wars.

Hi Thomas - Yeah, and Methuselah was said to live to 969. There's some commentary on that here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_myths#Hebrew_Bible).

Yes, it's a good clue that we can live much longer than we do. The author of Genesis would not have written that if it was completely unknown.

We also know from Roman records that we have only just reached their lifespans, and still they were healthy for a longer percentage of their lives than we are (infant mortality aside.) It's not unreasonable to think that even the Roman lifespan was a decline from that of earlier civilizations like the Hebrews.

So - it is wrong?

There was some research headlined on HN within the last year that suggested aging was nature's response to cancer. Something like: if our cells replicated at a "young rate" for all our lives, replication mistakes would have us dying of cancer at a higher rate. So nature slows down cell replication to prevent cancer growth.

I'll try to find the link. Feel free to reply with such if you find it before I do.

I think that if a cure for aging is invented tomorrow, I won't be able to benefit from it. Why? Because it will still be in clinical trials by the time I die.

The simple solution is to pour money (and lots of it) into the goal of clinically reversible cryonics. At low temperatures, aging vanishes along with all other metabolic activity -- cancer, viral infection, and so forth would all be stopped in their tracks. This buys precious time that can be used to develop a cure for pretty much any condition whatsoever.

Cryonics could also be cheap. The energy costs for a large scale cryonics facility are much lower than for small-scale due to the square-cube law. (Square the surface area and you get a cube of the volume, for any shape of container.) So the more the merrier.

isn't it necessary for evolution? Also to keep a balanced variety of species in a self sustaining system such as earth. I suppose without aging, population control would fall squarely on parasites (such as viruses), plagues, natural disasters, and wars over domination of limited resources. Actually i suppose we could be wired differently where organisms don't feel a need to have as much offspring.. But that reinforces the evolution problem.

What evolution problem? Evolution happens regardless, but why should we be bound to the limitations of nature when we have the potential ability to rise above them?

Yeah, look how far transcending the limits of nature got us. The planet is polluted and rapidly warming up; and biodiversity, food and water supplies, and other natural resources are dwindling, all because of us trying to get out of the niche nature had provided us.

You want to see the same thing in nature, put some yeast in a bottle full of sugar water. They won't think much about their waste products or the limits of resources either. Nature is full of boom/crunch scenarios. You are seeing a biased view because you are seeing the ecosystems that lasted - ones that oscillate perhaps, but average to balanced.

Humans and our works are as natural as ants and anthills. All creatures strive to expand - humans, uniquely, have the ability to apply choice to the matter. If anything it's our ecological thinking that is "transcending the limits of nature".

the way i see it as a evolution problem is two fold. Evolution happens via generations of species. if a single generation is around indefinitely, it is not evolving. Secondly, the units of species with inferior genes (in evolutionary sense) are also around indefinitely with ability to continue to have offspring slowing down the process of that genome being filtered out of existence

You're making the mistake of assuming evolution is progress; that's not how it works. Evolution is adaption to the current environment, that could be progress or devolving, whatever works better. Older genes are not inferior.

Secondly, evolution works across great timescales, doubling or tripling lifetimes won't stop evolution. There is no evolution problem.

Thirdly, if people could live indefinitely, there would still not be an evolution problem, there'd be a population and resource problem, which would change the environment thus accelerating evolution by selecting those who could survive on fewer resources or those capable of obtaining resources.

Other than among humans and animals under the care of humans, don't almost all animals die from causes other than old age?

That doesn't show that aging isn't necessary, but it indicates that aging doesn't have to continue until it becomes a cause of death.

Evolution has no intent. It's just shit that happens. And we humans are at a technological point where we can modify our culture, our technology, or our own biological nature much faster than evolution, making it a non-issue.

The only thing really necessary for evolution is production of offspring and accumulation of mutations. If you think about it, organisms that divide themselves to reproduce themselves, such as bacteria, some algae, and even cancerous cells, are essentially immortal, making copies of themselves and living with the identity of the original organism until the copy acquires mutations.

Lifespan is merely something that wasn't selected for in the evolution of multicellular organisms, while the production of strong offspring was selected. Lifespan is something we can manipulate, and indeed we have, especially in the past few hundreds of years. When we figure out how to avoid irreversible cellular damage indefinitely, then we will have beaten death.

isn't it necessary for evolution?

Yes, in the same way that it's necessary for people with bad eyesight to be eaten by bears.

It isn't "necessary for evolution" but rather an inevitable consequence of evolution. Quite different. Aging species outcompete ageless species in near every niche, with a few interesting exceptions. That says nothing about aging other than how effective a strategy it is in evolutionary competition - if living every moment of life in agony was an effective strategy, we'd all be doing that. See:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/we-age-because-th...

Evolution in the natural sense, of course, has little to do with our future now that we're getting our hands on the controls of biology, and then technologies that can replace biology. Though in the general sense it will play an important role in every culture build by humans.

Whatever you call it, it's terrible and it's fixable (like other diseases), so we should work on it.

I never understood why the FDA won't approve drugs that improve an aspect of our body, but only those that treat something.

A lot of it comes down to the risk vs. benefit equation. The FDA decides to approval/deny new drug for marketing by (attempting) to balance the benefits of the therapy with the drawbacks.

This is why a drug like Tysabri (used to treat MS) can cause a potentially fatal brain infect (PML) and the FDA still gives it an "OK" to be marketed.

And it's also the reason why it's so hard to get obesity drugs approved. Huge population + small risk = a lot of patients harmed.

The FDA considers a healthy human to be the "optimal outcome". If you want to improve an aspect of human health beyond that, you'll have to show that there are zero risks associated with it.

Yet another title with question mark. Aging appears to be more of a feature and not a bug of organic life.

With respect to what design goal?

the success of the dna based replication. not a design goal indeed.

It makes life adaptable to a changing environment.

Humans, due to their highly evolved brains, have accumulated such a vast amount of knowledge that we can adapt our environment to suit our needs as we have been doing for the past centuries. And if our understanding of genetics deepens to the point where we can directly manipulate our biology we won't need the comparably crude trial and error methodology that is mutation and selection anymore. This would still fall under the evolutionary advantage our brains give us.

It hasn't deepend to that point yet tough. It's still trial&error genetics and medicine. Being smarter than nature is a tall order.

I'd say the long term success (Millions of years) of humankind is still not sure. Does not seem very stable at the moment, climate change and the potential destruction via nuclear bombs and so on...

1. Nature is not "smart", it is not a conscious entity. So neither can we outsmart it nor can it outsmart us. 2. I strongly dislike the dichotomy between nature and humans. Our species is part of the natural world same as any other. Investigating into influencing or even controlling our evolution means we are making good use of our evolutionary advantages (i.e. the highly evolved brain).

i agree, anything we score, adds to the score of the nature; finally we are nature.

Aging also kills. So we'll be living longer life and healthier life if we find a cure for aging.

Am I to assume that since the title ends with a question mark that the answer is no?

You can help raise awareness of this issue here: http://questions.sciencedebate.org/forums/149344-the-top-sci...

Thanks for submitting the interesting article, and thanks for the interesting comments already posted by various HN participants. I'll respond generally to those in this comment.

From the article: "A study published last year by Danish researchers estimated that more than half of all babies born in wealthy nations since the year 2000 will live to see their 100th birthdays."

I had the privilege of reading that study, "Ageing populations: the challenges ahead," Lancet. 2009 October 3; 374(9696): 1196–1208. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61460-4

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2810516/

and then discussing it with one of the collaborators of a study author in a "journal club" at my alma mater university. Detailed studies of life expectancy at advanced age in a variety of countries show that various lifestyle changes and other changes result in a worldwide trend of increasing lifespan, such that "Very long lives are not the distant privilege of remote future generations—very long lives are the probable destiny of most people alive now in developed countries."

The top-ranked HN comment as I post my comment here says, "In essence the FDA only approves medicines for specific, recognized, named diseases. Therefore you cannot legally, commercially treat aging in the US, as aging is not recognized by the FDA as a disease, and there is no path towards reversing that situation." The comment has already been challenged by a knowledgeable participant here as not fully accurate,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968515

and in any event is not relevant to the worldwide research effort (exemplified by the study I have linked here) into the worldwide trend of longer lifespans in the developed world, because the FDA regulates medical treatments only in the United States. (I have lived in a developed country other than the United States, and am well aware that many treatments that are not approved in the United States are prescribed by physicians in other countries and researched by researchers in other countries.) The FDA is not shortening lifespans in the United States, despite what some advocacy organizations say to the contrary.

I have had multiple ancestors who were born in the 1800s live into their nineties. And my wife's ancestors, born in a poor country then in the undeveloped world, managed to have quite long lifespans. So we are accustomed in our family to thinking about the implications of long lifespans. Oddly, heritability of longevity is actually LOWER than the heritability of most measurable human characteristics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/health/31age.html?_r=1&...

It could be that anyone, even someone without much of a family history of long life span, might meet the prediction of the study linked above that a young person born after the year 2000 in a developed country is as likely as not to live to the age of 100.

Thus far we are making incremental progress, all over the world in a variety of human societies, increasing human lifespan and life expectancy at most ages. Meanwhile a number of forms of fundamental biological research are still just in their beginning stages. In particular, the issue of "missing heritability" in disease research

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831613/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3059431/

suggests that we have a long way to go to identify biological pathways in living human beings that make a difference in how long individual human beings live. The ongoing progress of science-based medicine

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/category/scien...

is slower than desirable partly because all human researchers, in whatever regulatory environment, struggle to overcome their own cognitive biases as they attempt to determine what treatments work in reducing all-cause mortality and morbidity. And the huge role of lifestyle factors in mortality and morbidity

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658866/

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

suggests that as causation of disease and early death becomes more clear, we will not necessarily find that all human beings choose to reduce their risk of early death to the same degree.

To sum up, the submitted article was quite interesting. It reports, "There is now a "groundswell" of specialists in aging, says Dillin, who are lobbying the world's biggest drug regulator, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to consider redefining aging as a disease in its own right." If by "aging" those lobbying scientists mean "all-cause morbidity and mortality," that could be a good reality check on outcome studies of treatments for specific diseases. As it is now, people are living longer, year after year after year, and in some places they seem to be living to a healthier old age than ever before. Continuing that trend is a likely outcome of ongoing efforts both to evaluate disease treatments more scientifically and to understand better at a fundamental level how human physiology works.

It really makes me sick to my stomach that so many people spend the time and resources on "figuring out" aging and how to stop it. Humanity's #1 problem is overpopulation. So let's...make everyone...live longer??

We don't need to stop or slow down aging. We need to accept the fact that everything that's alive eventually dies. "When" is arbitrary (with the exception of people under 30 dying). Prolonging the inevitable is a waste of resources, and an enormous burden on society.

All these horrible diseases we get when we get older are a product of the fact that our bodies exist for so long. Normally, we'd just die, but modern medicine keeps the body alive so the mind can rot instead. But at least you're alive!!! Also, if people are retiring at 65 and living to be 120, then everyone who is actually productive has to support all these bags of living organic tissue hooked up to machines for another 60 years. For what purpose?

You're born. You grow up. You have children. You retire. Then you die, and you make room for everyone else. This is one thing we don't have to sit around questioning. Nobody deserves to live forever. This whole "I have to live longer!!" ego trip is sickening.

What's sickening is the way you devalue life by thinking you're helpless to sustain it.

Life is just another phenomenon subtended by physical law. We, as intelligent creatures, have the tools necessary to use those laws to our advantage.

If you're not willing to use those tools, that's you're prerogative, but don't look down on those of us who would like to make the most of our time on this earth.

What's sickening is that you think sustaining life is valuing life. On an individual/egotistical level, perhaps. On a global level, not at all. If I die, life goes on. If you die, life ends. See the difference?

"Make the most our time" and live indefinitely are opposite concepts. Making the most of the time you're given is an honorable goal. Extending life for unknown reasons besides "living longer" doesn't make logical sense, and is a large waste of resources for people who are actually productive. Let's say you're 80. Should you spend $100K to live another 10 years or would you rather your grandchildren go to college? Pick one.

Extending your life is devaluing everybody else's life. There's plenty of life out in the world that benefits when someone dies, either through consumption of raw material or reappropriation of resources. Dying is not devaluing life, it's celebrating it by returning what's given to you for others to use.

> Should you spend $100K to live another 10 years or would you rather your grandchildren go to college?

I'll take "false dichotomies" for $200, Bob.

Or, to put it less facetiously, how much money do you think you could make with 10 years of healthy lifespan? And how much value do you think you would add to society in that time? Life is not a zero sum game.

That's an interesting view, but I'm wondering about your response to some apparent consequences of that view.

Would you say that you think society should stop using as much life-prolonging medicine as it currently does, so that people die earlier? That would help with overpopulation, and it's the corollary to your view that society shouldn't make new life-prolonging medicines. Or do you think the current medicines are fine, but we shouldn't make any more? If so, then what makes the current level of medicine so special and desirable, compared to medicine a little stronger or weaker?

Aren't you on your own "ego trip" by letting yourself keep living? After all, aren't you part of the problem of overpopulation? Shouldn't you kill yourself, and make the earth that much better? Or is your view that you living is a necessary sacrifice, because you can hopefully convince many people to have less children or kill themselves, and it will be worth it overall? Or would you say that people who have already been born should keep living, but people who have not been born yet should be prevented from living, by encouraging people to have fewer children? If so, what's so special about the people who are already living compared to the people not yet living?

You bring up some excellent and thoughtful points. I'll try to respond to most of them. I think that resources spent in the goal of prolonging life are wasted resources. For instance, if you run a country that has two years of usable oil left, do you spend all of your time and resources searching for more oil, knowing full-well that it will run out again, or do you devote your resources to finding another source of energy? I believe that spending time and resources prolonging human life is time that could be spent fixing other problems we have. Cancer comes to mind.

You're basically asking me what's the point of life. My answer would have to be two-fold (although it's probably more of a spectrum). From a biological standpoint, it's to reproduce and spread my DNA. From a personal standpoint, my goal in life is to be happy without harming others. A somewhat selfish goal, yes, but one I think I share with many other people.

Killing myself would be a drop in the bucket as far as humanity is concerned, and if stopping overpopulation were my ultimate goal, I would do a lot better by using the life I was given to change the world thusly by convincing people to have less children. I don't believe new life shouldn't be created, but rather life would a lot better for everybody if there were an equilibrium between production and consumption.

As far as medicine is concerned, I think it has already gone too far. My grandfather is/was a great example. He had an aneurysm in his late 60s. He was rushed to the hospital and "saved," but over the course of 6 years, slowly degraded into a bag of mush. He would have moments of lucidity where he knew he was completely demented and understood the gravity of the fact that he was losing his mind, but most of the time he was a vegetable. His last years were spent in confusing agony. If you asked me, he really died the day he had his aneurysm. I know of many others that have shared this same fate.

Should we throw away what medical science has done in the last 100 years? No, I don't think so. Some people are just destined to be vegetables before they die.

My point is that this world is getting smaller and smaller. We're starting to realize that our resources are limited. It is in humanity's best interest to not spend resources prolonging life, but instead use those resources for making life better for the ones who are alive.

Your thinking - IMO - is affected by your experience with your grandfather, and I can understand that. But consider that for many people, myself included, the thought of dying in the future is a burden (not THAT big, in my case, but it's there) that we carry with us for a large part of our lives. On top of that there is the thought of our parents, spouses etc dying before us. I think that sucks more than the chance of life prolonging medicine going wrong. You know, VERY few people actually want to die even when they are debilitated by old age.

I don't want to have to die, and I don't want other people to have to die either. I would be delighted to spend as long as it takes solving the overpopulation problem once the problem of dying is dealt with.

Will you kill yourself soon? (I don't ask this in a offensive way)

> You have children

Doesn't seem like a good idea if you claim that overpopulation is an issue

Reply on news.ycombinator.com