So to achieve longevity escape velocity [0]
1. Don't have unprotected sex if you're less than 44 years old.
2. Don't kill yourself, or do drugs, if you're less than 54 years old.
3. Invest heavily in heart disease, cancer, and alzheimer's research.
1. Don't have unprotected sex if you're less than 44 years old.
2. Don't kill yourself, or do drugs, if you're less than 54 years old.
3. Invest heavily in heart disease, cancer, and alzheimer's research.
Incidentally, there is also some evidence of Alzheimer's disease being linked to risk factors typically associated with type 2 diabetes. [1]
Of course my post is a bit tongue in cheek. Healthy nutrition and exercise are probably the biggest factors in living longer setting aside physical trauma. It even improves your mood, so I'm sure it lowers the suicide rate too.
I considered listing it, but this is a list of things that will kill you, not a list of things that will make you live longer, healthier, and happier... I would love to have that list please.
(Less significant here means a ten year swing in life expectancy. Exercise, not smoking, calorie restriction - these are things that can make 5-10 year expected differences. Everything else is pretty marginal if you exclude the obvious exogenous line items like risk of accident. But an improving implementation of SENS provides indefinite extension of healthy life out to the expected limits due to accident rates, which is somewhere in the 1000-5000 year range for present data).
The mainstream medical research community is largely focused on patching late stage manifestations of aging. Most work and funding goes towards either manipulating proximate causes rather than root causes, or trying to find ways to alter the operation of metabolism to make the disease process less terrible - but again without addressing causes. Until such time as the research community is overtaken by the "address root causes" disruption currently taking place, of which SENS is an exemplar, but by no means the only movement, then progress towards extended life and defeat of age-related disease will continue to be painfully expensive, slow, and marginal.
The trends in life extension achieved through medicine to date are all largely incidental, unintentional. Where aging itself as a collection of processes [1] has been slowed it wasn't because that was the deliberate intent. Again, because until very recently no-one has been trying to address aging itself rather than focusing on the nature of its outcomes. It is the same difference as that between working to reverse or prevent rust in metal structures versus working on repairing structural failures that occur due to that rust.
It's a great place to be because many aging researchers, while smart and capable at their own techniques, are basically in the informatics stone age. So there is a lot of collaboration potential.
As for GP's comments, I'd agree that there needs to be more focus on "root causes" and fundamental mechanisms in aging research. But SENS itself is broadly considered hokum.
I would love to see more of the people who dismiss SENS criticize it on the published details of ongoing or proposed research rather than just hand-waving. Sadly all too few seem to be willing to do so. Clearly it isn't nonsense, since there are SENS labs and allied research programs in a number of universities now, including Cambridge, Wake Forest, etc, and a range of important figures in aging research and other life science fields relevant to regenerative medicine support SENS.
SENS, as I understand it, can mean (at least) 3 different things:
a) The idea that we should focus on root causes rather than late-stage manifestations. I agree with this.
b) The idea that we should attempt to repair aging-related damage without needing to know what caused the damage. I find this debatable. We have stumbled on to some big treatments (aspirin, penicillin), without knowing how or why they worked. But in general, if you take a broken, complex system (e.g., a car, some source code) and attempt to repair it without understanding how it works, you will fail. With aging, many changes occur. How can you determine which changes are "damage" and which are compensatory regulatory changes without understanding the chain of causation?
c) A specific list of 7 aging-associated markers of damage and proposals to clear that damage, with the implication that if we do so, we will drastically reduce or eliminate age-associated morbidity and mortality. This is the part that is seen as hokum. At best, it is a hypothesis. Let de Grey get a grant and prove it, like everyone else does, rather than publicity-hunting and implying that it is only the stodgy old aging research establishment keeping us from eternal youth. But if you want semi-technical criticisms:
- On what basis are these 7 types of damage chosen and not others?
- One of the proposed treatments for the natural shortening of telomeres over time is the periodic, whole-body addition of telomerase or the equivalent. Considering that telomerase is overexpressed in cancer and is an important ingredient to uncontrolled cell division, do you think this is a good idea?
- On a related note, SENS presupposes that a cure for cancer must be found before the entire program can be made practical. A minor problem.
- The technology for several other of his other proposed interventions does not currently exist; for example, expressing mitochondrial genes only in the nucleus.
Anyway, I actually share SENS' goals but not its unwarranted confidence in its specific proposals to achieve them.
One thing I'm also fascinated by are the bio "hacker" labs/spaces, and I was wondering if you think something in that direction would be more suited for people to build on and if you think that such labs are even close to being in a position to pursue such endeavors that have mostly been relegated to universities (and the funding environment for such research) and corporations (and the closed source environment typically better suited to monetization)?
Hackerspaces are promising in that they are finding ways to do certain techniques inexpensively. But to do the kind of wet-lab research that results in a published paper requires a wide array of equipment that I don't see available to the layman anytime soon (unless they're independently wealthy).
On the other hand, there is nothing specifically preventing interested amateurs from doing bioinformatics or aging informatics themselves. Only a few things (e.g., sequence analysis) require big clusters; you can do quite a lot on your home PC. If you need data, tons of it is freely available: http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ is a good place to start. http://rosalind.info/ provides good tutorials.
I wish we would see more open-source developers creating well-designed bioinformatics platforms under the auspices of e.g., Apache or GNU. In general the programming experience of bioinformaticians is quite low, and we are under tremendous pressure to publish often, so there is little incentive to maintain projects over the long-term.
http://omrf.org/research-faculty/scientists/wren-jonathan-d/
The brief research blurb doesn't specifically mention aging, but we in fact have heavy collaborations with:
https://www.oumedicine.com/ROCA
and the position is funded by them.
In general however, if you are really interested in aging research you should just bite the bullet and get a PhD. It's necessary to have independence.