Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Research Facility
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
"The AbbVie partnership seemingly makes it clear that Calico will be a drug discovery and development company, which is what many observers expected based on Mr. Levinson’s background in drug development."
In the best scenario, five years of this will raise the water level enough for more meaningful approaches than calorie restriction mimetics, autophagy inducers, and other attempts at slow-aging drugs that have consumed billions to date with nothing to show for it, to raise significant funds themselves. In the worst scenario, it burns investors for a decade on the whole topic.
It is a real time of choice and opportunity at the present. The lumbering monolith of mainstream research can continue to pursue things like Human Longevity Inc and rapamycin derivatives that are probably going to be profitable yet achieve next to no useful gain of human life span (because again they are doing hard things that can only achieve small benefits at best) or, hopefully, some form of disruption for a better path will overtake enough of the community to make a difference.
It is clear that far from everyone in the research community thinks that old school drug discovery, farming the natural world to take potshots at restructuring metabolism so as to work slightly better when damaged by age (without in any way fixing the underlying damage!) is the smart way forward. There is SENS, there are the European researchers behind the Hallmarks of Aging manifesto, there are some of the Russian contingent with novel ideas. The near future doesn't have to be an enormous waste of time and money that will go nowhere but to generate voluminous databases, entirely bypassing any realistic opportunity for achieving actual rejuvenation and repair of the causes of aging. But I fear that it will, based on what we're seeing the big money do.
You may well be better off trying some of the top Google results -- the recording quality isn't brilliant for this one, and its focus is perhaps a little different to what you want.
Preventing it from turning into dystopia is another matter though, well worth of discussing.
It's sad that throughout history, most humans are just willing to let fellow humans lie down and die at the hands of a powerful few.
Maybe not forever, but for awhile.
We might need to settle for a middle ground. Like for many other advances we had, we need rich to bankroll the R&D that will later lead to technology being available for rest. How to prevent it from turning into dystopia is another discussion.
> But on the other hand, I'm sure that death serves a goal as well. It is not a "problem", but very likely a solution to evolve the species.
It might serve a goal, but this is not our goal. Evolution may "value" inclusive fitness and death is its engine, but humans do not care about passing genes, they care about love, fun, intellectual growth, a good life. The process of evolution is not something we value.
The Anti-Deathist FAQ: http://carcinisation.com/2014/07/13/an-anti-deathist-f-a-q/
Also, the focus on age-related diseases is an interesting one. Originally Calico was sold as a "fighting old age" company. That's vastly different than "fighting diseases associated with old age". At the same time, targeting age-related diseases is much easier than fighting aging itself.
I guess my comment is referring to not staying out of the press, but more keeping the details under wrap.
The difference isn't really clear to me. Could you elaborate?
"fighting old age" - attempting to stop the aging process itself (i.e. longevity)
"fighting old age diseases" - looking to cure diseases associated with old age (i.e. treating a specific condition)
In the second example you could be treating a disease, but not having any impact on the aging process itself.
The ability to stop aging process might still end up somewhat limited by cancer, so both goals seem to be tightly connected.
I read once that if we didn't get old, death due to accidents would make the mean lifetime 800 years. I wonder what cancer does to that figure.
A much more modern approach is to figure out what kills people (heart disease, atherosclerosis, muscular & neural degeneration, loss of immune system) and fix that. Build a new immune system, figure out how to 'plumb' one's blood vessels, or '3d-print' new ones. Stem-cell & regenerative medicine can make new, and sometimes even improved, organs.
The technologies of the second kind were only fanciful pipe-dreams 30 years ago when the old-school pharma companies came about. And a few still are today. But many are not. We can actually do meaningful research into designing these complex tissues today that would entirely obviate the old way pharma does business.
As someone who does tissue engineering & synthetic biology it's a bit telling to see big money come in from a different field and latch onto old-school 'names' rather than new-school 'ideas'. Calico really could be something truly spectacular - but it has to be careful who it sets at its helm...
Perhaps the most significant problem associated with aging is centered around our body's replication system. The way that cells duplicate and grow is not perfect. Hosts of environmental, biological, and "pure luck" factors all combine against us in a slow, but inevitable warping of our genetics.
In addition to genetic decay, our biological parts get "worn out" over time. Valves close with less force and vessels become inelastic. Our stretchy bits - tendons, ligaments - become scarred with micro-tears over time causing decreased flexibility. Our squishier bits - our inner organs and muscle - tend to become less efficient over time and decay sets in (a rule of thumb is past the age of 30, the average human loses 1% of muscle mass per year). Our squishy-stretchy bits - fascia - tend to lose the fight to gravity as the cells become less and less "sticky" and the skin on our faces droop.
As one ages, the mistakes in replication, the decay of our organic bodies begin to add up. As they pile on year after year, the likelihood of getting "sick" increases. Alzheimer's - thought to be brought about by tissue decay and subsequent scarring in the brain. Infarctions (a loss of blood supply, thus a loss of nutrients and oxygen) to a certain part of the body (heart attacks are a common result of cardiac-related infarctions) - can be caused by a stiffening of the walls of blood vessels which lets plaque build up and eventually, when some plaque is dislodged, that plaque might get trapped in a smaller vessel and cause a lethal blockage. Edema (excess fluid building up in tissue) - generally as a result of the weakening of the heart (the heart is a muscle which gets weaker over time) and the decay of the vessels and the muscles surrounding the vessels. And so on and so forth.
Fighting old age tends to be thought of as fighting the underlying physical and genetic decay the geriatric (or just aging in general) undergo. Reversing old age, in a similar manner, tends to focus around the prevention or the reversal of that decay. Fighting diseases associated with old age thus is far more limited in scope. While the end result of "fighting old age" might eliminate certain diseases, "fighting diseases associated with old age" will never prevent people from getting old.
anyway. nice work google
True but I feel for the wrong reasons. To my mind, the single greatest challenge our species has faced in our brief history on this planet is how we minimize our impact on the finite resources available to us.
Researchers recently reexamined the predictions made in the 1970's book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth and found the models are holding true.
The elephant in the room is how do we curb population growth in a meaningful and humane way. What's the point of extending life if there's a diminishing return experientially?
Even Bill Gates has written about this, more recently in his 2014 Gates letter, but also in the following essay, criticizing the doom and gloom predicted by books like The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth.
In terms of population control, it's all about lifespan combined with more efficient discovery as fewer ideas would die with those moving them forward. Space travel will solve for moving the human race to further inhabitable planets, but not without a solution for the more important lifespan issue which is a requirement for extended space travel. We've got 4 billion years before our sun runs out and before the Andromeda galaxy will cause us a bit of trouble.
4 billion years from now, lets at least be known as the generation that began to make an impact in this area.
We will eventually have to spread to other worlds, but for now, there is still a lot of space to use on ours, so we don't have be afraid of overpopulation in terms of land. We just need to figure out how to feed us all in a sustainable way.
We need to learn more about are species, we need to buy both time and food with something other than money.
We need to crack sustainability anyway, and it's best to focus on it ASAP.
In the long run, having a technologically spacefaring species is the only way for anything other than microscopic life to survive.
Or, how to switch to sustainable means of energy production to secure comfortable level of life for increasing population.
It's a bit of an hammer and anvil situation - on one hand, achieving sustainability will most likely require getting rid of capitalistic economy and basically tearing the whole system apart and reassembling it into something different. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to be the one denied the right to live and/or reproduce, and allowing for this will open a huge another can of worms.
As for resources, we don't need to relocate to get to them, we can bring them down here. There are companies already working on it.
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
http://www.planetaryresources.com/asteroids/composition/
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
Survival is an argument for getting a lot of people living off planet, not an argument for not doing so. We can try and create utopias as much as we like, but that is not going to help very much when we get hit by a big rock.
Also, personally I suspect that the real advance is not going to be in settling other planets, but building habitats out of asteroids.
I think this "filling out" sort of non-exponential growth is actually a large part of what is predicted over the next 50-100 years (from adults in middle wealth countries getting near Western levels of life expectancy), Hans Rosling talks about it in his "Don't Panic" lecture from a year or two back.
The models for upcoming bearpocalypse also hold true. Better stock up on bear traps.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/03/the-guardian-vs-inducti...
Despite that this doesn't look the greatest challenge to my mind, conquering aging and death might actually help rather then hinder meeting it.
I think it's safe to say that 'think of your children' has proved to be less effective a slogan and we might as well try 'think of yourself 100 years down the road'.