Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice | Hacker News Reader

Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice

theguardian.com

427 pointsMizza231 comments

From Aubrey De Grey:

Short answer is it’s not all that big a deal in biomedical terms. It’s a great discovery in terms of understanding mitochondria, and it provides a new way to rejuvenate mito function, but it doesn’t tell us that rejuvenating mito function in isolation in an otherwise still-old animal is a good idea -- and there have for many years been other ways to rejuvenate mito function which have not led to longer lifespan in rodents, notably acetyl-L-carnitine combined with alpha-lipoic acid (which has been marketed as Juvenon).

Aubrey De Grey is younger than I am, but he looks old and haggard, much older than I look (and much older than my younger sister who is almost exactly his age looks). I don't know why people take anti-aging advice from Aubrey De Grey. His advice has meager uptake or support in reliable sources on human medicine.

AFTER EDIT: I see the first reaction to this comment was a silent downvote, which evokes my desire to learn. Now that we've established that you disagree with me, would it be all right for me to ask what facts I should consider to change my opinion that Aubrey De Grey's anti-aging advice is not correct? What positive rationale can you provide for taking his writings on his favorite topic seriously? What evidence can you provide that he is on to something that the National Institute of Aging[1] isn't researching adequately already without him?

[1] http://www.nia.nih.gov/

ONE MORE EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think the most helpful to me was

As far as I know, Aubrey has not claimed to have invented any working anti-aging treatments so far

because I've been curious for a long time why Aubrey De Grey receives so much mention here on Hacker News whenever research on aging comes up, but so little mention in any of the extensive medical literature I read. So he is one guy with some interesting ideas (interesting to people here, at least) but perhaps just one guy among thousands working on anti-aging ideas. I wish anyone well who is devoting time and attention to reducing the harm of aging processes in human beings, but I try to cast my net searching for information more in the waters of medical reports than among people with a famous online presence as such. Thanks for the follow-up, and for letting me know what you really think about the unedited version of my comment, which still appears at the top here.

Since you asked so politely, I'll attempt, albeit somewhat hesitantly, to offer some feedback.

So looking back on my encounters with Aubrey, I can only say he seems perfectly content appearing old and wise. In fact he's well known to be anti-interventionist (for the meantime) and does not endorse supplementation or other strategies other than basic obvious health advice (eat well, exercise). This is in contrast to his friend Ray Kurzweil, who on the other end of the spectrum is ingesting 100+ pills daily.[1]

In terms of the HN reaction, I too admit at first, to an immediate emotional desire to downvote. On the one hand, I respect your breadth of knowledge and am grateful to your usually educational summations, but on this occasion, the dismissal seems shallow. The sense one gets, is that you're not really taking him seriously as a biomedical gerontologist, as a researcher studying senescence for the last 20 years. Instead it feels (at least to me) like a dismissal more slightly more appropriate, to a salesman peddling snakeoil.

So lastly, and perhaps most importantly, setting aside emotion, the dismissal was logically flawed. If a researcher produces findings and chooses not to follow them (by your implication the reason for his old and haggard appearance), it has little bearing on the validity of said findings. There may be many good (and not so good) reasons for not following the immediate implications of ones own research: Akrasia[2], lazyness, "wait and see". For example, theoretical research (eg murine models -- such as FTA) occurs long before a drug, has passed all the relevant safety tests in humans, and enters the market.

hth

[1] http://bigthink.com/videos/the-top-3-supplements-for-survivi...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia

As far as I know, Aubrey has not claimed to have invented any working anti-aging treatments so far, so I don't see that his personal appearance is relevant. He's promoting scientific research, not marketing a cream.

Feedback? Sure. You're doing the "appeal to surface appearance" argument. Not sure, but I don't recall that argument from Critical Thinking 101.

I will acknowledge that the article about him on Wikipedia has a talk page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aubrey_de_Grey

like few other biography of living person (BLP) articles I have seen in years of editing Wikipedia. Wow.

First time I've seen Jimmy Wales jump into a discussion. In Aubrey's defense, in this case:

"I am entirely unconvinced by the quite frankly bizarre claim that the credentialed experts on the board of Mr. De Gray's foundation don't 'count' towards respectability since they are 'conflicted'. Conflicted in that they endorse his work? It makes no sense. Also, be very careful that you are not edging into uncivil personal attack by hinting darkly about his bona fides as a scientist - he has a Phd from Cambridge University based on 'The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging'!"

You were likely downvoted for your rudeness, and fallaciousness. How he looks has no relevance to his ideas, his work or this thread.

Wow, For a second I thought maybe someone hacked your account and posted that. Others have already pointed out what was the flaw, so I hope you get why exactly you were downvoted.

Where are you getting this from?

Calorie Restriction for Life Extension mailing list.

  Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine
  dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age.
  The addition of this compound led to the radical reversal
  in the ageing of the mice.

While this is pretty cool, it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), meaning more energy "currency" for the body's machinery to work with [1] [2] (someone please comment if my understanding is incomplete). Used as a general lifestyle drug †, grandma isn't suddenly going to look like a sorority girl, but she may feel like one - a scary thought indeed!

Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions; although, that doesn't quite seem to be the case in this specific instance since this compound will probably just improve the quality of the last couple decades of a person's life rather than drastically extend it. What's the difference between curing disease/prolonging natural life vs unnatural "anti-aging" technologies? At what point do we start grappling with the issues of immortality? Personally, I believe that the mentally-deteriorating effects of everyday life, including what one may call "sin," will be too much for the modern human to retain his/her sanity after a certain point. I for one would rather face death.

[1] http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?C00003

[2] http://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00190+C00003

† I say "lifestyle drug" here to denote elective treatment, although the effects of natural aging and death dying probably do not fit in the technical definition, which is to treat "non-life threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, impotence, wrinkles, erectile dysfunction, or acne"

“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden

It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it.

The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?

>Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it. The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life.

You'd be surprised. A lot of pulp philosophy is indeed crap.

But most peoples lives, and the systems we structure our everyday and working lives on, are analysed, to a T, from various angles, and found lacking and wanting.

And when you find you are being crashed by those systems (as people eventually do), or that they don't work properly, there's a philosophical explanation of their workings written 100 or 2000 years ago that's perfectly logical.

To put it in another way, reading into (good) philosophy, is like reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers among Java people struggling with Java EE in early 2000, and understanding things from 10 levels higher and also that there are far better ways to go about it.

Oh, and no, good philosophy is not just about technicalities of reality and understanding, like Hume or Kant or Quine etc -- the only kind some geeks will accept. Regular moral, political, ontological, existencial etc philosophy, with seemingly "imprecise" language, is just as isnightful in other ways, if you spend the time to understand it.

I would just point out that most of modern philosophy is not really like this. I think most people think philosophers spend there time arguing about ethics, when this is only one tiny part of philosophy. A good chunk of the current discussion in philosophy of science, for example, centers around epistemology to varying degrees as it relates to current discoveries in genetics and neuroscience. The top philosophers in these fields are far from armchair scientists.

The overlap in philosophy of the mind and computer science is also particularly striking. I studied both in university and often found myself taking what amounted to the same class at the same time, but in two different departments. I work quite a bit with machine learning nowadays, and I learned 90% of the background I needed in my higher level philosophy courses, not my CS courses. I have often thought of CS as something along the lines of "applied philosophy".

Obviously, this is not meant to be disparaging towards CS. I love CS and it is what I have made a career in; I think they are different, but equally interesting and useful.

If I wanted to learn the parts of philosophy that apply to machine learning, and how they apply, where should I look?

Not the OP, but I have some interest in this too. Knowledge Engineering is so closely linked it's an obvious place to start (but in some ways Linguistics is even more interesting - and useful). But for Knowledge Engineering (from the philospipical side), start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

Useful bits:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Semantic_theory_of_truth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori

Then go the other way (Assuming you know relational database theory):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework#...

You'll find the two concepts meet somewhere around

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic

Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Metaphysics, Philosophy of Biology, and Symbolic Logic are all common Philosophy courses that have strong connections to CS, machine learning, and the biological models often behind (or inspiring at least) ML. Lower level Philosophy courses typically focus on the historical philosophy that most people think of as the entire discipline. It has been said that all philosophical debates go back to Plato or Aristotle, but this is hardly the case in these disciplines.

Philosophy of Mind probably has the closest connection to ML in particular though, as most of the course I took anyway was devoted to Turing Machines, neural networks, etc.

As far as general CS goes, Symbolic Logic is the most essential. Most CS programs cover this stuff, but subjects that might get a 1 week treatment in a typical Discrete Mathematics course would get a full semester in a typical Philosophy program.

As far as general scientific thought and skepticism go, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, and Biology are key. If you want to dip your toes in this sort of thing, check out Francis Bacon and the falsification principle, along with Thomas Kuhn and his theory of scientific revolutions and paradigms.

One last note: most people think about philosophy in terms of broad prescriptive pronouncements. Think Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche, Aquinas, Kant, etc. Most contemporary philosophers are more concerned with specific analysis of claims made by a paradigm, in which they explore whether or not these claims a) mean anything b) are internally consistent and c) lead to further implications. Coming out and making some completely new claim is exceedingly rare. An example of this (a bit contrived) in the context of ML and Biology would go something like:

1) Computer Scientists claim that neural network algorithms mimic biological brains. 2) What do we actually know about how biological neural networks work? 3) How do neural network algorithms typically mimic this? 4) Based on the current research, it turns out that neural networks in algorithms differ from their biological counterparts in X, Y, and Z ways. 5) Based on the efficacy these algorithms, how can we explain their ability to "walk like a duck and quack like a duck" without actually being ducks? 6) Assuming a reasonable advancement of this technology, is it reasonable to believe that we may reach a point when X, Y, and Z might be addressed?

TLDR: if you got bored reading what I wrote above, you will probably abhor the ridiculous density and verbosity of most contemporary philosophy. Hey, I tried :)

Many universities link these disciplines (and Psychology, and Linguistics) explicitly -- Its called Cognitive Science. I majored in it and couldn't imagine a better thing to have studied.

More accurately, professional philosophers don't have any particular standing to discuss "serious philosophical issues." At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?"

(I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)

>At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?"

Yes, many people. In civilised countries that are not all about "pop culture" and where science is not supposed to be half about marketing stuff to people -- people very much care what philosophers think about those issues.

In fact, what people care is what THEY think about those issues (that is, they want to make up their mind).

In this context, philosophers are essentially just more devoted thinkers, with a better command of the history of ideas, so people use them as guides.

Now, in the US, it's mostly pop culture, low quality op-eds and marketing/advertising driving the popular understanding of such matters.

I guess the equivalent would be NYT best-seller non fiction books (still, quite a low standard).

> In civilised countries [...]

Name one.

I'll give you several: most Western European countries with "public intellectuals" and a vibrant public discussion, from Italy to France.

In France, "philosopher" is a very common title for a public intellectual to hold.

I sure have. Ethicists are immensely helpful in discussing these topics, especially bioethicists.

You should live in france.

PhD?

"Philosophers" haven't had "serious philosophical issues" with this topic since Spinoza. Heck, even the Stoics. It's theology that has a problem, not philosophy, where theology crafts its ideas, very often, from the architectures of philosophical thought. Outside of a theological context, there isn't much of a debate anyway. Again: the Stoics.

We do ask philosophers about "right to die" and "permissibility of stem cell research from humans". Philosophers outline the conditions under which we rationally approach these things — they obviously do not license or themselves permit such behavior. No one asks a philosopher if that philosopher personally thinks some act is okay or not okay... I'm just not sure what to say here. That's not what philosophy is about, but I have a strange feeling that "it's all personal opinion anyway" really motivates this idea that philosophers do not contribute meaningfully to law and morality.

They inform ultimately what becomes legislation. Bertrand Russell was all over popular science in the 20th century. So was Bernard Williams. Dworkin. HLA Hart. The countless articles on ethics on JSTOR. All the philosophical journals. Stacks and stacks on anthologies collecting debates on abortion. ExPhi puts current opinion in the context of great thinkers of the history of philosophy, and helps us understand why we have the opinions we do have.

We don't ask them to describe the scientific innerworkings of these techniques. We do ask them to explain these things in broader cultural terms, and in that case the Scientist often times plays Philosopher, where that person so too must pick up a great work of Philosophy.

Ethics Committees are real things. I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's radically in error and shockingly misleading...

> No one asks a philosopher if that philosopher personally thinks some act is okay or not okay...

I've seen counter-examples of this in newspapers, where they have them weigh in with their opinion (on the news pages, not editorial), being quoted as an expert.

Like how the Daily Show calls its "news correspondants" "experts"?

Being an expert on ethics and describing one's stance is more than just opinion. It's a trade. We expect philosophers to have distinguished opinions, opinions they have defended and examined, partly inherited from history of philosophy itself. A philosopher can give its personal opinion, but usually they identify it as such. We do often want to know what the person thinks, in which case we're asking the person, not the philosopher. The person just so happens to talk like they do most of the time.

That's not what philosophy is about, but I have a strange feeling that "it's all personal opinion anyway" really motivates this idea that philosophers do not contribute meaningfully to law and morality.

A lot of it is American anti-intellectualism. We very strongly object to the idea that the challenges and struggles central to our lives are not unique but have actually been fully considered by others, maybe even centuries prior. That would mean we aren't the author and star of a uniquely great story.

Of course, if that person went to Orel Roberts University then we'll gladly listen and believe every dumb thing he has to say.

My only objection to life extension, philosophically speaking, is a political one. What if life extension becomes another tool of dominance for the rich and powerful? An eternal, dystopic corporatocracy sounds pretty damn horrible to me.

Yeah, and hence moral education(which imparts critical thinking and rational moral values) of next generation seems like the most important task to me. Why too much money and power are not the most important things in this world and showing them examples of how they can corrupt you. Learning, sharing and making the world a 'better' place is what should motivate next generation and we urgently need to find a way to bring about that motivation. Right now most of the behavior revolves around what was selected by natural selection and we need to find a way to overcome that(atleast see if it can be overcome).

But do we really know what we are supposed to teach them? Imagine this magic pill was available three hundred years ago. Imagine what the world would be like, if people who believed slavery was part of life, and that women were inherently inferior to men, were not only alive, but still calling the shots.

We are not sure what will work but thats why new models need to be experimented starting now. Coming up with tools for teaching critical thinking and morality should be on high priority in SV. Yes, magic pill invented 300 yrs ago would have had devastating consequences. But I am not sure whether that sort of thing is practically possible. It seems there is somewhat direct correlation between scientific revolutions(like renaissance) and moral values of the society(dont have data to back that up, just using history as an example).

Agree. someone who would have 100 years of experience in any matter would be invaluable. theres a lot to gain rather than to lose.

The flip side to that argument is that right now life is short, and so I try and fit as many wonderful experiences into it as I can. If life were long I could put everything off until tomorrow. And that doesn't sound good to me.

I've thought about this once or twice before. I wonder how we would view life if we didn't die from aging or disease, but only accidents, like a fire, car crash, gun shot, etc.

What would happen to religion? Do you choose to continue aging, die, and take your chances with the heaven you've been saying exists, or do you take the new pill, and live forever? If you take the pill, what does that say about your faith in the afterlife?

Do we fear death even more? If I'm going to die in a few decades of old age as my health deteriorates, I might as well enjoy my prime, and take some risks now. If I die, well, no big deal, I was going to die soon enough anyway. If I'm married, 60 years old, and my wife dies, that would be a sad day, but let's not kid ourselves, we're getting old. If your grandma passes away, well, it was her time, she lived a long life.

But, if we live forever, we fear those accidents. If your wife dies in a plane crash age 60, how does that affect you? You might have expected to spend the next ten thousand years together, and she's gone. Do we stop taking these risks? Do I step in a car, or on a plane? I'm willing to take that risk now, but if I knew I could potentially live forever, I wouldn't want to risk dying with so much time still remaining.

Do we enter the world of virtual reality? Why leave my home, I could get hit by lightning, I could get shot walking down the street, hit by a car, or attacked by animals. Why don't I lock myself in an underground bunker facility, and connect to the world through virtual reality? I toss on the goggles, and I enter the VR world where I meet with friends and family, and go on wild adventures, because I can take these risks in the VR world. If I die, I respawn. My body is safe in the bunker, while I pretend to be outside.

I am assuming in the very far future even if you die of an accident/gun shot etc they should be able to resurrect you as-is, like you are with all your memory. It will be like you fell asleep and just woke up!

If anything, I vote for the simulated reality thing. Its like once you are dead, they should be able to take your brain out and connect it to a simulated paradise which would run forever.

You can't live forever because the universe won't last forever. The earth will die out much sooner, of course.

Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.

There's a classic A Softer World comic that's been turned into a t-shirt that says "I would rather die screaming than live forever." There are downsides to the kind of extreme prudence that planning to be around for centuries would imply.

Also, there's a fantastic novel from Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire that is devoted to exploring the tension between living to continue living and living in the moment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

>I would rather die screaming than live forever

I'll take the time to work through my problems thanks.

Among other things, a commitment to "live forever" is a statement about acceptable risk tolerance. Ever wanted to climb mountains? Take up skydiving? Drink too much sometimes? Eat foods that are bad for you? If your goal really is to live forever, the risk profile of doing anything that doesn't minimize the expected value of the long-term risk to your person is probably unacceptable.

You personally might rather live a vastly extended span than spend the time you do have skydiving, parasailing, climbing mountains, and doing whatever it is that allows you to enjoy your life to its fullest for however long you have. But that's a real, legitimate choice, and choosing to take risks and experience everything you can is a perfectly valid choice -- even if there's a very real risk that something will go wrong at some point and you will indeed "die screaming."

I never said a thing about not taking risks or having fun but those are my choices. I'd rather not be forced to die from some sort of disease, or just old age completely outside of my control.

Well, there are obvious limits to that argument. Even a hundred years ago, it was common to die in your 60s. Taking on a new career or new relationship at the age of 60 would be ridiculous. Today, it's still a bit unusual but not unheard of.

Given a longer life, I think we would come up with new ways to motivate ourselves, and new challenges. This isn't an insoluble problem, it's a business opportunity for Tony Robbins.

That said I'm not sure a human being could ever fully escape ennui, so maybe there is some upper limit. I don't think 80 years is even close though.

I'm full steam ahead myself. I am fascinated by the idea of Open Aging.

But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it.

There are cultural analyses to be made, if not merely to gain an understanding of how activities like this will affect culture and influence opinion.

Cultural nihilism and cultural solipsism are less sophisticated than cultural relativism, and these probably do more harm than good. No one should really critique from cultural apathy — I mean, just, why? "I don't care, so you shouldn't either"? Really? That's just picking your nose at the Weird Kids table.

> But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it.

It isn't anti-intellectual to question the validity of any analysis. Your argument, taken to its conclusion, provides as much protection for the previously mentioned analysis of Miley Cyrus's dance being a grounded argument to make, as it does for my claim that she was subconsciously invoking the goddess Kali.

FYI the guy's name is actually Patrick Nielsen Hayden. He's an award-winning editor for Tor.

http://nielsenhayden.com/name.html

This post fills me with questions. Foremost: What makes anti-aging technology unnatural compared to other medical treatments? To take one example, the smallpox vaccine was initially considered unnatural, and an affront to God[1].

[1] http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html

I think it's fair to call most medical treatments unnatural. That doesn't make them bad, but it should make us thoughtful and careful. Natural systems are often, thanks to evolution and adaptation, complicated and delicately balanced.

I think reflexive appeals to tradition and novelty are both kind of dumb. But if people are going to err, I'd rather they erred on the side of tradition: at least that shit has been demonstrated to work in one fashion or another. I always try to keep in mind examples like Eben Byers [1], the THERAC 25 [2], and rabbits in Australia [3]. All sorts of stupid ideas look appealing at first.

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

[2] http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Effects_on...

Eben Byers was a victim of quack medicine, much like people nowadays who try to use magnets and sugar water to cure cancer. Bringing him up in a discussion of real medicine is frankly an insult to the researchers who do this stuff.

Once you're done stroking your outrage gland, you might note that I didn't suggest an equivalence between these researchers and, well, anybody. I was talking about ideas made appealing by ignorance, ones that are dumb only in retrospect.

The patent medicine Byers took was legal. Indeed his doctor recommended it to him. Unsurprising given that its seller, William J. A. Bailey, offered doctors a 17% kickback to prescribe the stuff. Even after this product was banned (because it finally killed a rich guy?), Bailey was never prosecuted, and continued to sell radium-related products after this. He died wealthy and free at the age of 64, nearly 14 years after killing Byers, and who knows how many other people.

It's a fine example of what I was talking about, where erring on the side of the shiny and new was not a good heuristic; the people who stuck with the traditional and natural did better for themselves despite Bailey and Byers surely scoffing at them.

One of the Therac-25 victims died 3 months later from cancer. Presumably the same cancer they were trying to treat, and thus avoided needing a hip replacement for the radiation damage. If your life is in such extreme danger from the disease itself, it can be worth taking risks with novel treatments. I'm sure some very old people with nothing to lose will be willing to try anti-aging, no matter how risky.

The supposedly good idea I'm referring to for the Therac-25 isn't radiation therapy. It was using software to make something snazzily digital, but in a way that ignored the novel safety issues with digital devices.

With your attitude I don't think we would ever invent or discover any medicine or treatment. Agreed, natural systems are complicated and delicately balanced, but we have Physics, Math, Chemistry and Computer Science to help us understand those delicately balanced and complicated systems. Please give some credit to Human Intelligence that itself is a product of millions of years of evolution. I often hear people saying "X can't be done because evolution perfected it". I call it bullshit. Evolutionary systems are not perfect and can be improved with right tools and we do have the tools.

You seem to be arguing with a bunch of things I didn't say, while ignoring the things I did.

I'm a giant fan of technology, and there are many amazing advances in medical tech. But I'm not a fan of thoughtless adoption of something just because it a) sounds good and b) is shiny and new.

Sorry, I fat-fingered on the downvote button with my iDevice, I meant to vote you up (because of the first paragraph specifically, not so much the rest).

Could someone counteract me, please?

Done.... Just you make a little sport in my stead and get a thinner thumb will you?

Just kidding.

Thanks!

Maybe I'll consider thumb-thinning surgery instead ;)

Sounds unnatural.

That's a nice way to get at least a few upvotes for them, since I doubt you'll get just one taker.

Wouldn't this treatment system create an immense selection pressure against irrational belief?

So kids born to families who think its an affront to god would not have the social / cultural / monetary resources to even begin to compete with kids born to more rational families?

Not that I'm saying a selection pressure against irrational belief would be a negative or a problem, I'm just saying it would be strongly selected against?

Only if people who take this anti-aging have more offspring. It's quite possible the opposite would be true.. "oh there is no rush, maybe next decade"

I was thinking more in terms of reproductive success of kids who have enormous very old and presumably wise family members to act as mentors and advisors.

I had a grandfather who rose to pretty high levels in the Army and executive level in a major national railroad, he could provide some advice about management. A G-Grandfather who was a good enough CPA to never end up unemployed in the great depression, he presumably could teach me a thing or two about accounting. A grandpa-in-law who was a successful combat medic, after treating combat injuries normal lifestyle trauma would make him handy to have around (edited to add, patching up blown off limbs made him a peace activist type in his later years, another good reason to keep him around). One of my grandma was one of those flapper / womens suffrage / womens lib radical types and she'd be a good influence on my daughter. If we extend life over 200 years, I have a Harvard lit prof in my ancestry who would be a handy tutor for my kids, and a civil war era land surveyor who could probably teach even me a thing or two about wilderness hiking and survival, etc.

If you do enough genealogy, everyone's got enough "cool" in their ancestry, that if those ancestors were still alive, kids lifestyle would be radically improved compared to folks with dead ancestors.

Of course human nature being what it is, the 10% of cool would come with 90% of hatred, bigotry, ignorance, blah blah, so you'd have to take it all with a grain of salt. (edited to add, and learning the critical thinking skills to take it all with a grain of salt, would overall be one of the most valuable skills...)

"To take one example, the smallpox vaccine was initially considered unnatural, and an affront to God[1]."

In hell, conservatives will have the ability to turn off the flames.

If something can be done, it can't be "unnatural". Unnatural things or processes DO NOT exists by definition.

Ageing is a genetic disease. It has to be cured. We evolved to adapt to specific environment. Now that we are changing this environment we must change ourselves as well. Everyone should be given an option to die but it should be just one of a few options.

Indeed! Options like Death by My Little Pony:

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-...

Not as long as religious fanatics, anti gay (shame on you, Uganda), anti abortion and other zealots, dumbasses who have 10 kids and nothing to feed them with and other kinds of people still exist.

Then again, I'm all for it if we can colonize space sooner...

One "philosophical question" which we already know the answer to, is at least in the short term and as a rare tool its not going to change much of anything. For example according to key metrics blah blah my grandmother's bypass surgery restored her circulation to that of a young woman blah blah but it hardly turned her into a sorority girl or whatever sociological blather. Ditto my grandfathers gallbladder removal.

To some extent an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about is just going to be an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about. You'll get to hear more Fox News talking points instead of medical symptoms.

Anti-aging has nothing more to do with immortality than does, say, curing a particular disease.

Aging is only one of many causes of death; if we solve that one, there's still heart disease, stroke, getting hit by a bus...

I can't recall the source (probably a special on the Science channel or somesuch), but I heard that if we "cured" aging and no one died from getting old, that the average lifespan would be between 1.5k and 2.5k years where one would die of an accident or disease. I'd take my chances with that :)

Curing cellular aging would not, as far as I know, have any effect on cancer. Whether it would have any effect on other problems like decreasing bone density, I'm not sure. So even if you sweep one cause of death completely off the table, it stands to reason that whatever you would have died from next will still be around to do the job until it, too, is cured.

Much like when you add more of the limiting reagent to a chemical reaction, it just means that some other reagent will now be the limiting reagent.

I'd read it was bout 600 years with current safety standards, and car accident was right above die in the shower.

There were 2.5M deaths in US in 2010: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

If you take other leading causes out (accidents 120k, diabetes 70k, influenza 50k, suicide 40k), it still leaves about 2M deaths related to ageing: heart, cancer, chronic respiratory, stroke, alzheimers.

Cancer is a big treatment problem. Well here I am a tired old 95 year old cancer cell, too tired and sore to start reproducing madly and my hosts blood chemistry is too F'ed up anyway for me to grow, so I'll just sit here in my lung cell sized recliner and watch Fox News with my host... Ah I see now after some treatment I feel I'm in the body of a healthy 25 year old and I'm absolutely bursting with energy... lets get fissioning boys, there's a new sheriff in town and we're takin' this here place over.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this were an accurate metaphor, wouldn't cancer incidence decrease with age, rather than increase?

No. This research addresses just one cause of ageing; there are many others.

It's all of them together that causes increased cancer rates.

Cancer does decrease with age. I read it somewhere that it is some professor's pet theory but they do have some evidence.

And this particular anti-aging therapy, if it works, will only treat a subset of those age-related diseases. There are many different mechanisms of aging, and each therapy we develop will only incrementally improve things.

In that light, philosophical discussions about anti-aging therapies are somewhat doomed to only have a specific context such as "what's wrong with curing alzheimer's?"

A lot of diabetes and influenza related diseases could also be related to ageing.

Aubrey de Grey has said (as far as I know) that heart disease is a symptom of aging.

You may have a strong attachment to mortality, but I personally don't. I strongly believe I would be able to cope with immortality, and I think it would very much be worth it for a chance to see more of the universe and the future of humanity. Please keep that in mind when you consider the morality of these issues. Although you personally would rather face death, I personally would not - and I don't think anyone else has the right to determine whether someone else should die.

On a side note, I think it's quite sad that you think every day life is mentally deteriorating, especially because of "sin". Personally I'm pretty much at peace, and doing my best to live a good life and change to be a better person.

> it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)

This study goes way over my head, but if the goal is to boost ATP isn't creatine monohydrate supplementation a cheap and effective way to do so currently?

Inhibiting or preventing dementia isn't a "lifestyle drug". It would solve a very serious issue we have with aging populations, or indeed any population, where we have a huge number of people who are very much alive but incapable of managing basic life functions.

Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions

Charles C. Mann (of 1491 and 1493 fame) wrote extensively about this in The Atlantic Magazine (which is distinct from their website) in 2005: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/05/the-comi... .

Why do you believe that improving the quality of the decades that are now the last won't prolong peoples lives? Personally, I'd expect the result to be pretty drastic.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/o6n3ad

Not sure why you are being downvoted -- this is actually the paper in question, minus paywall. Thanks for the link.

TY ^^

> "with scientists set to look at how the theory of age reversal can be used to treat diseases such as cancer, dementia and diabetes."

Alzheimer's medications can generally improve cognition. Age-reversal medications might work even better if used at an early age.

I always see articles, media, and papers focusing on how something new can be used to treat some existing disease. But what I'm always thinking is "can I use this if I don't have a disease?"

It's a strange disconnect. I know everyone is thinking what I'm thinking, but you never see this in the articles. Is it some kind of taboo?

I don't think it's a taboo subject, it's just not really good journalistic form to employ relatively baseless speculation for more than a few sentences.

Basically, as a matter of principal they report on what the researchers are doing, and the researchers are (quite reasonably) going to try to beat Alzheimer's in patients who actually have it before they try to apply it to everyone. No sense in worrying about, Can this be globally administered, like a vaccine? before they even know for sure how to beat it.

The same is true of artificial intelligence. For example, articles always mention that brain simulation would help us understand brain diseases (alzheimer, schizophrenia, etc.) better and barely mention the much bigger implications of strong AI (like that it might be the last thing humans ever need to invent).

>like that it might be the last thing humans ever need to invent

Damn. Putting it like that is powerful.

Maybe most people are not capable of understanding the possibilities of a strong AI? It's not like we will just have a nice sounding personal assistant.

What can't one understand about "infinite 'free' labour"?

The labor won't be infinite... they'll work us to death at some point.

Beat me to the punch ;-)

But they'll pump us full of anti-aging meds that restore us to youth, so they can work us to the brink of death again. It's more efficient than growing new humans through that whole irritating "childhood" phase.

They would have to repair us so heavily and so frequently that they would basically just be growing new humans, one piece at a time. I'd put my money on maturation tanks. Humans are finite and fragile, and will always lose to thermodynamics, eventually :-P

Certainly not infinite. There is and always will be a finite amount of computational power; considering thermodynamics alone, we can't continue to increase power usage exponentially or the surface of the earth will be uninhabitable in 200 years.

"infinite 'free' labour”

We used to call that „slavery”. There’s ethical considerations to AI, and treating it as a potential source „free labour” is one of the reasons I believe humanity shouldn’t be allowed to play with matches.

Slavery is a word that applies to humans. Why would one create an AI that does not want to work, and then force it to work?

Well, something like a "technical singularity"?

The medical estabilishment is hung up on 'above all, do no harm'. This means that if you don't have a disease, you generally don't 'deserve' a cure, since any cure or procedure tends to have some risk element in it, and if you don't have a disease then the risk is considered unacceptable.

There are a bunch of substances that likely do improve things for healthy adults, but they won't get allowed to be marketed as such before they are proven safe&effective; and they won't get proven safe&effective because you can't do proper clinical trials to measure the effects on healthy people because of the possible downsides, etc. You can make and market 'dietary supplements' to the extent that they provably don't do anything significantly different and more effective than dietary choices; if it works really well, then it's a drug with a whole different regulation.

You can make, test, verify and sell a medicine to improve cognitive function in people with a specific mental deficiency. You aren't really allowed (legally and ethically) to do proper medical tests on how some drug does/doesn't improve the same cognitive function in healthy adults and market & distribute it to them.

You can make, test, verify and sell a medicine to fix erectile dysfunction. You aren't really allowed (legally and ethically) to do proper medical tests if some powerful drug changes sex to be more enjoyable for healthy adults, although it's quite likely that such drugs do exist.

Anecdotally, yes. A a friend of mine works under a neuroscience researcher. They are studying the effectiveness of a substance at restoring ideal brain function to those who suffer from a disorder. When they asked the researcher why they don't study the substance as a way to improve cognition in already healthy people, they were told that doing so would violate medical ethics.

I have no idea if that's representative of the beliefs of other researchers.

Yes. http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

Actually, before we started to "poop in the hole", the rates of infectious diseases were way lower.

Wait, what? Pooping in a (deep) hole, as opposed to, say, against a tree, is extremely good for people. Especially people who don't wear shoes.

Ref: http://endtheneglect.org/2012/01/how-the-outhouse-helped-sav...

Not a bad point, especially given that the current consensus seems to be that the agricultural revolution[1] was a net negative for most individuals in society (evidence of significant wear on the body from bending all day, evidence of worse nutrition), but it was a winning adaptation at the group level. Underscores the point that progress can make us less happy.

That said, I strongly believe that we can do anti-aging right and improve the lot of humanity.

[1] We only started needing a designated place to poop because we stayed around in one place and became numerous.

Technically correct, but the pooping in the hole wasn't the cause of the disease - it was a necessary countermeasure against the effects of living in the same place for years on end.

What are you talking about? (serious question)

The era between the end of nomadic lifestyle but before civil engineering of water and sewer systems aka the centuries where the average woman had 14 kids and watched 12 of them die before adulthood. It kinda sucked.

Yes, but what the GP said was the opposite.

That's was what I meant, sorry if I didn't express it clearly. Ditching hunting and gathering for permanent settlements and agriculture was hygienically a terrible idea.

> It's a strange disconnect. I know everyone is thinking what I'm thinking, but you never see this in the articles. Is it some kind of taboo?

Sure. It's ridiculously selfish.

As you age, you realize your success in all things eventually boils down to experience and ability to execute. Ability to execute wanes with age, as experience is accumulated, so it balances out. Now imagine a spry 20 year old with 60 years of experience? Not exactly fair to those actually 20 years old.

EDIT: To the old farts responding below me, regardless of how well you take care of yourself, you wither with age. By removing that, you are messing with the balance that has existed for millions of years. It has nothing to do with fair competition, it has everything to do with using technology to get ahead of the competition, in the same way that some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, and we as a society frown on that too.

This is a good opportunity to apply the "reversal test": you say the status quo is better than an envisaged alternative, so let's see how it looks if that alternative is the status quo and someone proposes to switch to what we have now.

So: Imagine a world in which people (let's say) stay at 25-year-old health until the age of about 90, and then die quickly. And suppose, in this world, that someone comes along and says: "Hey, I've had this great idea. You know how sometimes it can be difficult for young people to be successful because older people are more effective? Well, I know what we can do about it. I've got this stuff we can put in the water, and what it'll do is make everyone degenerate with age, so that they lose energy and brain function and strength and so on. Most people will have stopped paid work entirely by the time they're 70. A lot of people will find themselves practically unemployable before they're even 60. What's not to like?"

I can't imagine that the response would be very positive.

This is silly. You have absolutely no clue what a future with a "25-year-old health until the age of about 90" would look like. Not even close. There are literally millions of things, from the economy to social structure, that would be impacted. It's not possible to even remotely predict.

Neither do you! So stop trying to predict that it's necessarily a bad or "selfish" thing.

Boom. This was a great rebuttal, I just needed to say that.

> It's not possible to even remotely predict.

What? He's responding to your prediction.

We already have that substance its called HFCS. That and ethanol.

I'm 54, so I suppose I'm one of the people you have never met but still choose to label as an "old fart." Whatever.

For what it's worth, I don't care about any "balance that has existed for millions of years." I care about my life and the many people in it, whom I choose to love and respect.

As I write this, I'm recovering from a sleeve gastrectomy, where about 75% of my stomach was removed. This was voluntary on my part, to help me lose weight. I paid for it myself, out of my own pocket. My BMI last week was 36, and I've lost 12.5 pounds in the last two weeks. This morning, I walked four miles in the Seattle rain.

I did this because I love my life. It's my property, not yours. My only agreement is to respect individual rights as best I can. Don't expect me to die any sooner than I must out of some self-less concern for others.

I'm 54 and am an old fart.

> This morning, I walked four miles in the Seattle rain.

Ya got me beat. I was waiting for things to dry up a bit before going running.

Hi Walter. We've never met, but I recognize your name from things you've done in the Seattle area over the last 20 - 30 years. Good to hear from you.

thanks for the kind words

Hazel thinks George looks exhausted and urges him to lie down and rest his "handicap bag", 47 pounds (21 kg) of weight placed in a bag and locked around George's neck. He says he hardly notices the weight any more. Hazel suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but he says if everyone broke the law, society would return to its old competitive ways. Hazel says she would hate that. A noise interrupts the conversation, and George cannot remember what they were talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Harrison Bergeron was a parody of what social darwinists think socialists think.

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/may/05/vonnegut_lawyers_co...

Thanks for the high school reading list flashback :D

> Now imagine a spry 20 year old with 60 years of experience? Not exactly fair to those actually 20 years old.

How is that "unfair"? You might as well criticize an old person who looks and acts young for taking good care of themselves.

Your thought process is linear. Try to model the consequences. 20 yeas old people will be considered kids and that's it. Otherwise you should opt for euthanasia because 10 year olds have a hard time competing with you today.

This is a valid point, but if 20 year olds are now treated like children and the fertility window doesn't change, procreating becomes somewhat difficult.

In fact, isn't that what's happening in all the countries where longevity has shot up and the fertility rate plummeted?

Sounds like a good deal to me. I'll take longer life over more children any day of the year.

So you're ok with living in a society where most of the children are made by religious fanatics of the "Quiverfull" style? Because this is what tends to be the consequence when educated, wealthier, secular people can't found families in their 20s.

No, I'd want to live in a world where said religious fanatics are not allowed to do that, otherwise you get evolution.

I don't like evolution.

I do tend to agree that we're pretty much screwed, though.

Employment, the economy, and success are not zero-sum. Someone getting a job doesn't mean someone loses a job. Someone succeeding doesn't mean someone else is failing.

It's perfectly fair for the 20 year old, because they won't compete. It's not fair to the 50 or 60 year old, who has to compete with someone who has equal experience but is younger.

As a man in my 20s, I welcome the challenge. What's fair or not fair about it? I'd be thrilled to work in a world with more competent people around.

Isn't the 60 year old more likely to have a senior (note the word) position, more pay and more assets than the 20 year old? It's not like things are totally "balanced" today.

There has been a fair amount of research into the effects of manipulating hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) in lower animals, mostly nematode worms I believe. Interestingly this is one of the few manipulations in which either reducing or increasing levels of the protein in question can increase longevity. This is a sign that there is probably significant complexity involved in this outcome, such as in relationships with other mechanisms or that the effects of changes are tied to specific tissues in the body or locations within cells.

So this is, I think, an overhyping of otherwise interesting new research into a way to manipulate HIF-1 via NAD levels that is apparently an offshoot of past and ongoing research into sirtuins and aging. When considering the source of the wor - the Sinclair lab - the overhyping is perhaps less of a surprise than it might otherwise be: this is a group with a very large sunk cost behind them and little to show for it. Deep pockets nonetheless still back continued efforts, and they have a lot of experience with the press. This is a formula that leads to breathless press materials touting rejuvenation. The people who are really, actually working on rejuvenation are more restrained these days.

So I disagree with the tone of the publicity for this work; it's a great example of the mindless attention machine being manipulating into seizing on something that has little relevance compared to other far more deserving work.

I think that (a) these researchers have found an interesting set of interactions to help explain why manipulation of HIF-1 can affect longevity, and (b) the changing levels of that and various related proteins with advancing age are responses to accumulated cellular damage. Perhaps the most relevant damage is mitochondrial, given that cycling of NAD is involved in the chain of unpleasant results that unfold when mitochondrial DNA becomes damaged, or perhaps it is something else.

So to my eyes what they focus on isn't a cause, it's a consequence. The fastest way to see what causes what at this point is to work on repairing the known forms of damage rather than tracing back all of the myriad complexity of relationships and feedback loops in the cell - a task that would take substantially longer than just building means of biological repair for our cells and other small-scale structures.

You can get NADH (which is interchangeable with NAD) pills pretty easily on amazon for like $30. My question is what is the difference between those pills and the $50K substance/solution they came up with?

How is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) synthesized, such that their estimates for cost are "about $50,000 a day for a human."?

I would expect that any such estimates on cost would be based on the predicted cost at scale and not the cost to produce it one off for lab experiments. Is this a PR ploy to start staking a high price, so that people view it as a bargain when it is released at some absurd price like $1000/day.

They must have some special version of it. NAD can be gotten online for considerably less http://www.herbspro.com/co-e1-nadh-tab-76057.html

Anyone care to explain why this is too good to be true? Because it's always too good to be true.

The discovery concerns decline in mitochondrial function with age in muscle tissue.

Another article about this, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25445748, explains that this could never be a cure-all for ageing. Other aspects such as shortening of telomeres or damage to DNA would not be reversed.

It sounds like an expensive drug habit to have. To start with, imagine the withdrawal symptoms.

death

Until it's not.

has to happen some day, i guess

The article reports, "Turner said a 'magic pill' that reverses ageing is several years away, partially due to the cost of the compound, which would be about $50,000 a day for a human."

That suggests several things. The clinical trials will be small in the beginning, and thus the small-n studies will not have much statistical power. There will be some kind of patent scramble related to any patentable technology that can reduce the cost of producing the chemical in a dosage form appropriate for human medicine. And (if and only if this preliminary finding in mice translates into a safe and effective human medicine) there will be immense political pressure for a public subsidy to make treatment like this available to more patients.

The HN participant who kindly submitted this interesting story found a news source with a nuanced headline, "Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice." That doesn't overpromise, and tells what stage the research is in. The news report mentions that the researchers have a peer-reviewed journal publication in Cell

http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213?cc=y

on their findings, and I suppose many scientists will be looking at that publication and thinking about their study findings. That too is better than the usual submission to HN. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.

The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[3] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

[1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

[2] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...

[3] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

If nothing else, I think this is emblematic of where we are in both the news cycle and the scientific cycle with regards to anti-aging research. After decades of small progress in anti-aging research, we're at this neat convergence of increasing public interest in anti-aging research combined with promising early results and vastly increased funding in the area.

No one should be holding their breath in anticipation. Billions of dollars in research funds worldwide are wasted on "splashy findings" based on fraud and bad science[1]. In fact, most published research findings are likely false[2] :

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/27/business/la-fi-hiltz...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

The actual paper is here, free abstract but the full PDF is paywalled: http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213?cc=y

This seems to be a pretty big deal, but the article gives off the impression that mithocondrial aging is the only reason that we age. In fact there are many other aging factors that have not been linked to mithocondrial aging (and have, agruably, no relationship).

Some other factors I recall studying are

- gradual DNA damage, which is quite inevitable

- collagen degradation, which affects the eyes and all cartilaginous tissues.

Yes, it is confusing, since there is no wider context given in the article at all. The conventional story I hear about ageing is that telomeres in replicating cells become shorter until the DNA no longer replicates and the cell either dies or seriously malfunctions. As a significant proportion of the cells in your body move into this state you "age".

So I'm struggling to relate this phenomena to the mitochondrial story described in the article - it's not clear to me whether these are independent aspects of ageing or somehow related?

Independent. There are, oh, I think I once saw a lost of about fifteen major known causes of ageing.

Some are worse than others; this is one of the really serious ones, but not #1. Others of note are... - Intracellular debris - Intercellular debris - Gradual macroscopic degeneration from incomplete healing/scarring - Progressive DNA damage, with any number of consequences (e.g. cancer) - Asymptotic loss of some brain functions (e.g. learning)

I could go on. For evolutionary reasons all of these hit at roughly the same time, which means uploading remains the most promising approach for completely eliminating ageing.

Well, almost completely. Upload someone, and you eliminate degeneration below the firmware/software layer, but you still need to cope with a brain that didn't evolve to last for centuries.

uploading remains the most promising approach for completely eliminating ageing

If so, in the future the equivalent of CryptoLocker will be a terrorist weapon that takes hostages.

I also see a strong future for bitcoin in this scenario. Virtual minds are going to have a hard time paying for things with cash. They'll probably want some form of currency to pay for their Amazon EC2 instances to offload various components of their sentience, essentially slowing down their perception of the passage of time so they can get more accomplished faster.

Right.

Because there's no way, today, to pay for an EC2 instance without involving physical cash.

I always wonder about this quote,

“Whether that means we’ll all live to 150, I don’t know, but the important part is that we don’t spend the last 20 to 30 years of our lives in bad health.”

Imagine a process that makes you feel like you are 25 right up until you body gives up at a physical age of 100 or something. Do you end up doing riskier things because you don't "feel" old? And if you did would you die sooner? Its an interesting question for me. I'm not sure how that would work.

(and of course if they are successful (which I hope they are) then we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?)

if they are successful (which I hope they are) then we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?

Which I would be totally OK with. Imagine how much more scientific progress we could make if we had 70-year veterans of their field with the sharp mind of a 27-year-old!

That's an interesting question, but I think it could be less helpful for scientific progress than you might imagine. It could even be a hindrance. As Max Planck put it, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Extending scientific careers could effectively slow the rate of Kuhnian revolution.

Alright, maybe I'm more excited specifically for engineering then. I'm an engineer, really, not a scientist, and I'm always blown away by some of the old stalwarts in my field.

Who says their minds will be sharp? This discovery is about muscle aging.

Good point indeed, that said, even physical health can be a toll on your mind. Freed from that you can spend more time thinking instead of aching.

We're just speculating here :)

Is that the goal of life? Incessant scientific progress?

For me? Yeah, pretty much.

Yup. There may be thousands of earth like planets in our galaxy alone. Shouldn't we explore them some time in future ?

With 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, we're talking millions (or more), not thousands.

Making eradicating aging even more important.

Wouldn't it make more sense to live well wherever we are? I'm not saying we have to settle for Earth, but the focus should be on how people are living and not how many planets get checked off.

Living longer means signification rise in population on earth and given the unsustainable state of our planet, it makes more sense to look for other similar planets for habitation. And if we invent faster than light travel in future it will be natural for people to leave earth in the spirit of exploration just like Europeans did to find the New World.

Why should we explore?

What confuses me is that they seem to be making the assumption that if they are able to give good health in the later years, that the person will die at the same age they would have. Which seems unlikely.

Seems to me if they are in good health, they won't die (healthy people don't tend to). Eventually, though, they will be in bad health enough to die. In which case, it IS about longer life spans, since we'll still have the same problems, just at a later age.

I'm all for longer life (and I imagine they are too), but it seems to me that they are just trying to be politically correct by saying things like the above.

Well... in this particular case it really won't extend life, though. Not by much, quite possibly not at all; it could easily be somewhat of a carcinogen.

It'll make you feel better, and give you more energy, and that's about it. Think of it like a kind of amphetamine, only not (hopefully not) that bad for you.

I'd rather have the choice. I have no choice with ageing. The same is true of "immortality". What immortality really means is that you kind of have a choice of not disappearing forever (well unless a car runs you down or something, but in the future that can probably be fixed, too, by "backing ourselves up").

Rather selfish? We'll have enough problems in the coming decades with geriatric baby boomers, you now want to give people the option to live forever?

No. Survival is our strongest instinct. Besides, human population will plateau around 10 billion or so, and we're already seeing trends, from very early ones to pretty advanced ones (Japan), where people decide not to have kids anymore in modern societies, or even have sex with other humans.

You're thinking immortality would be a problem given the current conditions. But the conditions will be different in the future. The same will be true for food production, which should be vastly more efficient in the future, and enough to feed everyone.

We can already feed everyone. The problem is distribution, not production.

First of all, generations are pipelined. If we live twice as long, the world needs to support twice as many people, not infinitely many.

Secondly of all, one of the problems with the baby boomer generation was just the "boom". The growth was not continued/sustained.

Thirdly of all, I figure with people spending proportionally more of their lives in a field instead of in school, plus population pressures, we'll figure out how to colonize other planets pretty quick :)

This comment must fall under some FAQ. Someone always brings it up in the "What if humans could live a lot longer."

I'm sure that it's trivial to answer and has been answered a million times.

If they have fewer kids then where's the harm?

This is very true. It's proven itself over and over in history. The more stable, healthy, and developed a country is the less children it has. Europe and East Asian countries are having this problem right now as both have negative population growth. In fact this might be the solution to over population. If I knew I'd live to 150 I'd probably wait till I'm 75 to reproduce and replace myself with children.

Well, you've outed "Chris" as the male form of the name "Chris" as there are certain female reproductive system issues where once you're outta eggs thats all folks. Dudes are fertile to a ripe old age. So at 75 you need a wife 1/3 your age.

The cultural issues could be pretty huge if women are only fertile for a small fraction of their life and dudes are fertile for X times as long as women. Or maybe it becomes a cultural "job" of young people to churn out kids as fast as possible for old people to raise them, which we seem to already be implementing in certain socioeconomic classes.

Good point. But I'm sure that's a problem that will be solved by that time.

Not sure if this is 100% true but "It had been widely accepted that a woman was born with a limited number of eggs [...] But, in 2012 this dogma was challenged in a paper that found proliferative germ cells that sustain oocyte and follicle production in the postnatal mammalian ovary. This means that women do not have a limited number of eggs."

OK interesting, but the larger scale problem exists now where most 75 year old women are infertile. That could be "fixed" by yet another medical breakthru.

that's an ongoing debate but does not change the fact that women hit menopause in their mid 40's right now.

disclaimer: my wife and I have spent about $100K over the past 6 years trying to get pregnant, including several IVFs and a failed donor cycle (that's where you write a check for $30000 and flush it down the toilet).

I have a hunch this is a technology that will take very long to 'trickle down' the forbes list.

I don't. An effective anti-aging treatment would likely pay for itself in Medicare savings alone.

Obamacare won't cover it, then?

You want to let everyone die to maintain solvency?

> we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?

This is the first thing I thought about when reading the article. It sounds like the dream of countries like Japan where retirement is costing a lot of money.

I'd love to read the comment of an economist (or a sociologist) on this.

Personally, I probably do riskier things when I do feel old.

Tick... tick... tick....

It's not the feeling old, it's the realization that you have, in fact, spent the first half of your life not doing the things you wanted to do. And then the realization that you better get a move on if you want to get them done.

Motorcycles, Porsches, divorce + remarriage to a much younger woman, angel investing. You know, the mid-life crisis.

I always picture some poor guy who spends decades dreaming of the day he can buy a fancy sports car. Finally he can afford it, he buys the car he's wanted since he was 15, and people say "hey look, he's having a midlife crisis."

There is a NoSQL joke floating around in here somewhere.

>researchers confident that side-effects will be minimal due to the fact the compound is naturally occurring.

There are a lot of naturally occurring poisons too. I'm curious, how does the substance being naturally occurring have anything to do with the side-effects?

They mean it's naturally occurring in the human body. And I'm not sure but I think they're not boosting it much beyond natural youthful levels.

That's great. So my mom doesn't have to put it on her list of things to avoid because they "contain chemicals".

I wonder why the study has nothing to say about the longevity of the treated mice compared to controls. Maybe it costs too much for experimenting with extended effects and maybe they want something for their next paper.

The biggest problem of course is sociological with only the top tiny% able to afford it. The psychological divide between have and have not will grow in ways completely unacceptable to the (100-tiny)% and could stimulate revolutionary tendencies among the masses to even things out. The top tiny% really should be considering pouring lots of their money into making the treatment cheap enough to not create a divide so intolerable that it will perish under its own weight.

Some seriously interesting comments here, on a very interesting piece of research!

If any of you wanted your comments to be a part of the post-publication review record for the paper (either as reviews or as discussion points), you can head over to the Publons website at https://publons.com/p/3318/ to leave them!

Disclaimer - yep, I currently help out at Publons :)

I wonder if these researchers could win the mprize [1] for this?

[1] http://www.mprize.org/

Can anyone explain how this compound differs from the NAD you can buy as a supplement, if at all?

Well I do see this quote:

"Turner said a “magic pill” that reverses ageing is several years away, partially due to the cost of the compound, which would be about $50,000 a day for a human."

So in guessing there's some special processing of the compound or a special way to get it into each cell somehow.

Currently, you can buy NADH, which seem different, or NAD+ precursors (Niacin, Niacinamide) or Niagen (https://chromadex.com/Ingredients/NIAGEN.html), which is proprietary and suppoedly increasing NAD+ levels. It's pretty expensive as of now compared to Niacin, but, still, $50/month isn't that much. Combining Niagen with Resveratrol should do the trick.

I've been taking Niacinamide + Resveratrol for over 2 years. Honestly, I don't see any positive effect, but neither I see any negative effects either. Given I'm 40 now, I'm not 100% sure if this is a negative or a positive outcome. For example, without any supplementation, maybe I should've aged more... but how can I know for sure. My point it, as long as the supplement is orthomolecular, the negative side of spending a few dollars per month is well-justified.

Any expected or potential side effects?

Hmm... As I'm new here I'm a little confused. I posted the same article yesterday but this one posted by Mizza got picked up quite heavily. Does the poster's "karma" have something to do with it? Or is it just a coincidence?

Sundays typically are more accepting of this kind of content. I also posted a link to the article in Cell as a comment with the submission.

shrug

It's really just timing though.

;) Thanks for the response.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_and_Tomor...

It's interesting, even if we halted aging so that people could theoretically live forever, we would as a culture have to embrace a sort of 'death by probability.'

Not for long, I bet. We'd find ways to make backups.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-20/scientists-develop-ant...

I found this article on the subject more informative, it contains 2 media clips, 1 video, 1 audio, with the scientists involved with the study.

NAD is an interesting chemical anyway for its electrical properties. I had an idle thought once upon a time that you might be able to make some kind of liquid binary computer with it, given how readily you can “toggle” it between NAD+ and NADH. I don’t know nearly enough about it, though.

Question is, would it make one, 'young at heart' too. Possibly No. And this is all what matters.

As for $50K/Day price tag, it makes it loud and clear, this drug is for the filthy riches at least for couple of years, my average joe and jenny will remain old and ugly. :/

Great for the mice.

I don't understand this phrase "Turner said a “magic pill” that reverses ageing is several years away, partially due to the cost of the compound, which would be about $50,000 a day for a human." ?

$50,000 a day for a human ? What is the effect of a day of treatment ?

50k at first, 5 bucks eventually, hopefully.

That number is almost certainly bullshit. It would be nice from a drug manufacturer's perspective to artificially limit supply so that they could get away with charging 50k a day for the stuff, but it seems insanely implausible that anything that comes out of a set of bioreactors could ever actually cost that.

I wonder whether the researchers were tempted to try this on themselves. Or the lab costs of producing it[1] would effectively prevent it?

[1] quoted at $50k per day, not sure how many days a person needs...

They should put it on kickstarter, asking for donations and early adopters. I'm pretty sure they would've fulfilled their goals in a week or less.

Pledge $X or more

Y backers

ONE EXTRA DAY OF LIFE.

Someone once asked me why I'm so interested in life-elongation technology. I said, "I'm BETTING MY LIFE on it!"

IF this is true and IF this really works in humans, you know that the only people that will ever be able to afford it will be the "1%".

How might this compound compare to HGH, etc. by getting in top physical shape by working out (a lot), healthy diet and sleep?

Peter Thiel, you know where you should invest now. This is a product every human being will pay for.

Okaaayyy... Can I buy NAD+? Or is the magic in using sIRNA[1] to inject NAD+ into the pathway?

I have read on Wikipedia that our body can generate it.

Moneyquote: "In organisms, NAD+ can be synthesized from simple building-blocks (de novo) from the amino acids tryptophan or aspartic acid. In an alternative fashion, more complex components of the coenzymes are taken up from food as the vitamin called niacin. Similar compounds are released by reactions that break down the structure of NAD+. These preformed components then pass through a salvage pathway that recycles them back into the active form. Some NAD+ is also converted into nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP+); the chemistry of this related coenzyme is similar to that of NAD+, but it has different roles in metabolism." [2]

And: "This NAD+ is carried into the mitochondrion by a specific membrane transport protein, since the coenzyme cannot diffuse across membranes." Link: http://www.jbc.org/content/281/3/1524 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16291748

I can buy Tryptophan [3] and D-Aspartic Acid (DAA) [4] pretty easily and legaly. Would an overdose in Tryptophan have the same effect? UPDATE: http://aminoacidstudies.org/l-tryptophan/ Yes, Tryptophan overdose is bad!

I'm sorry, I'm pretty good at absorbing all kinds of scientific materials, but I am really not familiar with all the "body science". That's why I'm asking you, if you know what would happen with regular Tryptophan overdose. I know that DAA can destroy Neurons when overdosed and should only be used according to the RDA.

I don't buy that it's sooo expensive. That's either because researcher's monthly wage is astronomers, or the lab equipment they think is needed is too expensive. I am sure it can be done much much cheaper without the advantages of mass production. You and I currently synthesize the NAD+ thing for free!! The problem they solved, should be repeatable with cheaper equipment or even at home. I would like to have a cat, dog, hamsters or fish that live longer. (Parrot's already live pretty long, but I guess they'd be funnier with more NAD too) --

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleoti...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryptophan

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-aspartic_acid

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