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Comment by rtfeldman | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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 :)

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

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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