How Silicon Valley is trying to cure ageing
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
I don't want mankind achievements to be limited by our limited lifespan. The first 20 to 30 years are wasted on learning - almost like 1/3 of a average life. But with linespans in the 200 to 300 years, that would be 10% - and these added productive years could bring so many more good things. Imagine if Feynman and Einstein were still alive today, having new ideas, discovering new things. Imagine if we still learn during 1/3 of the lifespan - the amount of knowledge that would be acquired, and the marvels we could achieve with it.
For those who will lament on how this would be bad/capitalism/not respecting nature or (insert your favorite deity), nobody will force you do to anything. Die of old age at 90 if you want.
Personally, I want extended life or immortality to do crazy thing when I'm still young in my early 200 (or young again thanks to cures we can't even imagine at the moment)
But you don't have to get very old before it's obvious that a lot of ageing is an accumulation of small infirmities that build up over time. There may well be a switch that can turn on or off the dramatic downturn that occurs in old age (perhaps to do with telomeres, or lossy DNA replication, or whatever), but it seems unlikely the same switch will also reverse that accumulation of infirmities. Returning a 60 year old body to the same maintenance processes as a 20 year old body won't fix torn cartilage, sciatica, or cardiovascular damage. So obviously we should be investigating the former processes, but the techniques for the latter small problems must be substantially fixed beforehand, or else we'll end up in this nightmarish middle zone of people getting more and more unwell, but not dying.
The body does not replace all of its cells; different tissues have different turnover rates. Many of the cells in your central nervous system will be with you for your entire life. There is research to suggest that even some of the individual proteins in those cells are never replaced either.
And soon after that we will be able to replace the brain too. Whether uploading to a computer, or adding so many artificial neurons, only a small part of you is still biological.
'Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging'[0].
'A common objection against starting a large-scale biomedical war on aging is the fear of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation). This fear is only exacerbated by the fact that no detailed demographic projections for radical life extension scenario have been conducted so far. This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging. A general conclusion of this study is that population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations.'
Here is what the paper says:
Let us start with the worst-case scenario (for overpopulation)—physical immortality... Consider a situation, when parents produce less than 2 children on average, so that each next generation is smaller than the previous one... This conclusion does not require any complex calculations and questionable assumptions, but follows directly from the calculus, and the property of infinite geometric series to converge
Well, I beg to differ with the "questionable assumption" part. Why would anyone think that in infinite time, parents will have, on average, less than two children?
And here's the lack of imagination: the whole (cultural) concept of "parents" and family dissolves when there's no death. If you marry at 1000, and stay married to your wife for 5000 years (producing one child), chances are that by the time you're 50000 you've likely forgotten your wife's name, and your only child's too. In fact, you won't even remember that happened (well, maybe you'll remember your first time around, but by your 200th marriage, you won't remember how many children you had with your 37th wife).
Of course, I may be suffering from lack of imagination, and the structure of society will be completely different. The point is that making any assumption on human behavior after such a revolution of much of what makes us human, is preposterous. Immortal humans will behave in ways that we cannot predict, and we therefore cannot predict how the population will grow.
That stat is for Sweden—in case anyone wonders where the numbers are from.
Anyway, that's for the next 100 years. In 5000 years one would hope the human race will be multi-planetary. Looking at the time-scale, concern is still misplaced.
In 5000 years the human race might be multi-planetary, or extinct. We have absolutely no information to make such predictions or even estimate their likelihood.
When someone expresses concern for overpopulation due to life extension, what time span are they referring to? 50000 years? Probably not. Looking at population growth for 100 years as per the model, the conclusion of the paper holds:
> Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to the success of a biomedical war on aging, such as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations.
Some people live to be well over 100, so if we could closely identify why they live longer, we might learn a lot there too.
We know so little about the human body that one day we say eggs are bad for you then the next, they're ok to eat again.
SENS: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
Hallmarks of Aging: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.039
Seven Pillars: http://buckinstitute.org/CellCommentary
We're just another species of primate, we age and we die, and we rot, and then we're nothing. Worms and pinochle and whatnot.
The only thing we should try to cure is our self-delusion and our fear. It only wastes what little time we have. If some of us start living to 120, we'll still moan that it isn't enough. It's never enough.
In fact, I'll argue that any serious life extension will have to come with a similarly extended lease on quality. Senesence will need to be stemmed upstream, so more of your 120 years will be good years.
Imagine those at age 100 preparing for the second half of their lives rather than expecting to die in the very near future. That may spawn a new phase of maturation that doesn't exist today. What if, generations from now, people recall how young and dumb they were before they turned 100?
To give an example:
The fact that it might be impossible to "fix" aging is no reason to not fight against it. Just like the conservation of energy law and the 2nd law of thermodynamics are no reason for us not to try to inch closer and closer to the theoretical limits of efficiency in clean energy production.
A rose by any other name, is just as sweet. I mean to say, all of the STUFF associated with malady is there. So how / why does death/aging ... with all its symptoms ... differ?
It doesn't.
Life can be extended, perhaps. Made more productive, certainly. But a cure for death? Show me one organism in nature anywhere near as complex as a human being with the capacity for unlimited aging and I'll believe it's possible. Technologically extending life for a few decades on average with a battery of complex and expensive medical treatments is not a cure.
Otherwise, looking at death or aging as a disease, while it might provide the catalyst for any number of worthwhile medical advances, also provides false hope. It's like waiting for the Singularity to happen so we can all upload our minds into the Eschaton. It's just another form of hoping for an afterlife.
Yes, absolutely act as if it can be cured, but don't believe it can.
This common of a fallacy is the top rated comment ... on HN. Please let that sink in.
Nothing more needs to be said. This forum is supposed to represent the top echelons of silicon valley thought. Not some echo chamber of common ( "well always want more" ... really?) memes.
I'm not appealing to nature anyway, i'm appealing to physics.
Here is the forum for those choosing to fight such beasts. Please come back when you've reworked your psychological underpinnings.
The heart rate variability thing is an interesting take on a biomarker for aging. I'm not sure I agree with its utility, but the prize should at the very least inspire enough attention to figure out whether you can artificially tinker with heart rate variability without having much of an impact on anything else. I'd expect that to be possible given (a) the existence of various heart function targeted drugs, and (b) the fact that aging results from the downstream consequences of cellular and molecular damage that is in and of itself many steps removed from large-scale systems level functions like heart beat regulation.
Some thoughts on prizes in aging-related medical research and why it is that we don't have more of them even though we should:
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Establishing a research prize is a form of investment in progress only available in the philanthropic world. At the very high level it is easy to say that philanthropists pay people to work on specific tasks. This is simple enough for smaller amounts: transfer a few thousand dollars to a research group and you have bought a very small slice of the time and equipment needed to achieve any particular goal. When we start talking about much larger amounts of money, millions or tens of millions, then there are important secondary effects that occur when making such investments. In these amounts money has gravity, money makes people talk, and money changes behavior and expectations in a far larger demographic than just the recipients. This is well known, and thus investment activities, philanthropic and otherwise, become structured to best take advantage of this halo of effects. Most of the experience in doing this comes from the for-profit world: it doesn't take too long spent following the venture capital industry to see that investment is a lot more complicated than choosing a target and writing a check, and this is exactly because there are many secondary effects of a large investment that can be structured and harvested if investors go about it in the right way.
I theorize that the reason why research prizes remain comparatively rare is that firstly they are an investment strategy restricted to philanthropy, and thus people with the money to burn have little direct experience, and secondly the whole point of the exercise is not in fact paying people to do things directly, but rather creating a situation in which near all of the benefit is realized through the secondary effects generated by the highly publicized existence of a large sum of money. A research prize works by being a sort of extended publicity drive and networking event conducted over a span of years, a beacon to draw attention to teams laboring in obscurity, attract new teams, and raise their odds of obtaining funding. Connections are made and newly invigorated initiatives run beneath the light of a large sum of prize money, but at the end of the day that money becomes more or less irrelevant. It wasn't the important thing, it was merely the ignition point for a much greater blaze of investment and publicity. By the time a team wins, they are typically in a position to raise far more funding than the prize amount provides.
The ideal end result is that a field of science and technology is rejuvenated, taken from obscurity and thrust into the public eye, made attractive to investors, and numerous groups are given the attention and funding they need to carry on independently. This is how it worked for the Ansari X Prize for suborbital flight, and more quietly, for the Mprize for longevity science: in both cases the entire field changed as a result of the existence of the prize and the efforts of the prize organization to draw attention, change minds, and build new networks. But the award of money wasn't the transformative act, and in fact that award didn't really occur at all for the Mprize, but rather change was created through the sum of all of the surrounding effects.
So consider this: people who arrive at the state of being wealthy and wanting to change the world through philanthropy, often after decades of for-profit investment participation, don't have much in the way of comparable experience to guide them in the establishment and operation of research prizes. Thus creation of a research prize falls low in the list of strategies under consideration by high net worth philanthropists. Few people do it, and so there are few examples from which others can learn. It is the standard vicious circle of development, in which steady, grinding bootstrapping is the only way to create change.
Why care? Because research prizes work well. They work exceedingly well. Depending on how you care to plug numbers into equations, a well-run prize of $10 million will generate $150 to $500 million in investment in an industry, and that is just the easily measured result. Just as important is the following change and growth enabled by that initial burst of attention and funding. The Ansari X Prize spawned a number of other prizes in various industries, but I think it remains the case that medicine and biotechnology is poorly served in this respect. Outside of the efforts of the X Prize Foundation, the New Organ prizes, and other independent efforts such as the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, there is little going on. Given the proven utility of prizes there should be many more of them, and yet there are not.
Economically speaking, if the utility of a prize is greater than its cost, that is an arbitrage opportunity. Once enough people take advantage of that opportunity to create prizes, there will be far more prizes to choose from and the utility of the effort spent towards each prize will drop to equal its cost.
A prize is somewhat like a dollar auction, but the result of any effort you bid is more random.
And population will be an issue - but I think that's largely self correcting. If everyone lives 1000 years, it may well take 500 of those to be financially stable enough to have kids, because you're competing against other people who can also plan on 1000 year spans.
My aunt just died in her early 40s of cancer. Maybe one can argue that there's already enough money flowing into cancer research, ok, how about parasites, tuberculosis, malaria, the more general problem of drug resistance in infectious diseases? While we're being bold how about research into the causes of and solutions to violent behavior?
There's really some truth in advertising in calling this the "Palo Alto prize" as its impetus is clearly not really to make the world a better place or to solve serious problems affecting many millions (billions?) of people but to assuage the minds of the privileged class of soft-livers sitting in their suburban pleasure dome agonizing about the slow encroachment of inevitability.
Are you suggesting millions (billions?) of people don't have a problem with death/cancer/dementia? Because that's obviously incorrect!
What do you think would happen if top research scientists lived longer and maintained their intellectual capabilities?
What would happen if people stopped thinking so much in the short term, because they expected to face the consequences of the more distant future?
What would happen to the resources that are currently being spent on diseases of ageing? Heart disease, cancer, dementia.
How much wealth would be created by an increased number of experienced people working?
Resource allocation to lifespan/healthspan doesn't seem zero-sum. Despite the temptation to create a dichotomy, there is none!
If our problem moves from "how do we live longer than ~120 years or so" to "how do we outlive the heat death of the universe", that's a rather impressive improvement, and it gives us a lot more time to solve the admittedly harder problem.
If we can fix the mind first then I'm all for immortality but not before.
Although the outcome where the poor have more time to accumulate wealth is possible, I think that the more likely scenario is a significant increase in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Estate taxes will have a much smaller (or no effect), while low income families won't be able to bequeath their houses to their children.
Of course, it's hard for us to imagine the how things might play out after such a complete revolution of human life, but it would be interesting to at least explore and investigate the possible ramifications.
Happy Sunday-