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Engineering An End to Aging
Reason writes "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a biological engineering plan to end human aging and co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize in recent years. Now he is finally getting some of the public recognition he deserves in an excellent David Stipp article at Fortune Magazine. If you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year - and how to bring about a sea change in the scientific establishment - then this is the place to start. As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"
As to the question of life becoming so long that it loses its meaning, De Grey has a response that's truly guaranteed to silence critics: If you don't want to try it, you can simply reject rejuvenation therapy and fade away.
Bingo. It seems like there are always people who whine every time the subject of immortality comes up -- overpopulation, interfering with the divine plan, or just, "I wouldn't want to live forever. I'd get bored." To which the proper answer is: you can always die. If you feel that you're selfishly using up too much of the planet's resources, or that God doesn't want you to live past a certain age, or the ennui of your endless existence is too much to bear (oh, the angst!), fine -- please kill yourself now.
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live. People who think a 200- or 1000- or 50000-year lifespan is nightmarish will still struggle, at the end of their lives, to hold on to whatever years or months or even days of life they have left. We rage against the dying of the light because the urge to live is part of our every cell.
So, for those of you who think this kind of research is a terrible thing, an affront to God and man -- please go off somewhere to die quietly. And those of us who choose to live will drink a toast on your graves.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
that means we could send people on super-long space exploration voyages, provided we can also engineer an end to 0-gravity boneloss
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I recently saw Ray Kurzweil give a talk. His new book, coming out in October, will be titled How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever. He touched on several topics that will advance longevity. Much was about nanotech and how it will become part of our bodies. He says in the past few years, he's gotten about 10 years younger in 'absolute age.' Neat Stuff.
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Low Caloric diets have long been fabled to extend life (with mixed results). This so far has been the most promising way of extending life, although depending on how you look at it, it's not really extending human life but allowing us to reach our potential. Think of a wild animal with the eating/lifestyle habbits we humans have. Don't think turtles would live so long smoking and eating McDonald's. (Me not good at html linky stuff) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A255 64-2004Apr19.html
http://webapp.abclocal.go.com/kabc/health/032304_h s_low_cal_diet.html
http://www.youngagain2000.com/lowcalorie.html
I boycott signatures
Just being old doesn't kill relatively that many people -- accidents, cancer, suicide, abuse of your body (smoking, drinking, etc) and other mortality factors knock off most people before they manage to linger into their triple digits in some retirement home.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time. Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations. If you bypass this slowdown, then mutations will build up faster. Entropy will then win in the end anyhow and one will die of cancer.
The only total solution I see is some kind of nanoprobes that cleans up DNA/RNA errors in potentially each and every cell. Only then we can turn up the metabolism to 20-year-old levels. But, that is a long way off.
Table-ized A.I.
My mom is 81 and she's busier than she's ever been although physical constraints are starting to slow her down. My grandmother died very alert, aware and reasonable active at age 100 and said she was ready to go, but it had mostly to do with the fact that her friends had all been dead for a long time by then.
Some people would look forward to a longer life because they find some meaning in their lives and others, I am sure, don't and probably would not partake of these treatments. I suggest that you folks who are not familiar with Robert A. Heinlein's novels several of which concern, among other things, longevity issues. Take a look at "Time Enough for Love"(1973).
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
We get more willing to look past materialistic pursuits as we age because by the time we're older, we realize what is really important in life is the people and the relationships in it.
By the time we realize it, life is over, and we need to hunker down to prepare for uncertain health in old age.
I wonder what the world would be like if my grandparents were still around and healthy and vibrant as say.. 40 year olds? I wonder what the world would be like if the wisdom and compassion that accumulates with age was allowed to be expressed by vibrant and energetic elderly instead of being locked up in the shadows we become?
Really what we are talking about here a child understands and we fatalistically complicate things with our hopelessness that anything can be done about aging..
Life is good.
Death is bad
and anyone who suggests that the suffering and death of millions is desirable and that the "negative" changes to our world that would come about by extending life couldn't be dealt with should take a real hard look at what they are saying...From what I've been able to see so far.. our world could do with a few changes.
br
Sociological consequences aside, there's no reason to think that we won't find a cure for aging eventually. A thirty-five year old couple can conceive a perfectly healthy, perfectly youthful baby... how is that? The genes they used to create this new life were copied from 35 year old cells--cells that have been damaged by oxidation, cells that have probably lost a significant amount of their protective end-sections (IANAG--I forget what the ends of the DNA molecules are called, but they basically act as a buffer to prevent harmful mutation. Over time, though, they get shorter and disappear.)
Reproduction itself flies in the face of aging. Consider, too, that some species (such as turtles, I believe?) are basically immune aging. How can you be so pessimistic in the face of such things? No, give us enough time and I'm sure we could find the cure, though it might be availible only to our genetically-engineered children. If we still haven't found a cure in a century or two, it will be because we don't want to find a cure, because we're afraid of the consequences such a thing might bring... NOT because it's a hopeless fantasy.
With diseases like Alzheimers we at least have an idea of what causes it, and we know what changes happen to the brain as it progresses.... I think it's only a matter of time before it can be prevented. However, I daresay that theories about where and how exactly memories are formed and stored in the brain are mostly wild speculation. We know the roles that certain regions of the brain play in memory, and there are some good abstract models (such as the Phonological loop and the Visuospatial sketchpad) but we are a very long way away from knowing how these are done at the hardware level of the brain.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Actually strangely enough .. statistically the only way to reduce population growth is to lower the death rate.
.. the only country to achieve a negative population growth with a high death rate is China. In every other case a high death rate results in an even higher birth rate.
Check it in the poulation stats
Low birth rates, on the other hand, make for low to negative population growth almost every time.
It's counterintuitive and supprised the heck out of me the first time I noticed that.
If I had points right now, I'd mod you insightful. The prospect of great minds being able to study not only sciences but arts as well harkens back to the Da Vinci "renaissance man", who could draw from all his knowledge and inspiration to create a synergy of new and groundbreaking ideas. If and when people are able to invest such time in many disciplines, we may just see another intellectual spark, such as in ancient Greece, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment. During such a time, perhaps people will begin to realize that all disciplines are interconnected, or as a Zen proverb says, "All ways are One in the end".
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
You fail to take into account how memory may work (or not) once the normal life span has been surpassed. Part of learning is knowing when you've made mistakes before and not making them again. If you can't remember what you did wrong, you're doomed to do it again and again. How ironic would it be if longer life spans were counteracted by longer periods of sleeping/dreaming in order to keep our memories straight?
As with anything else, solving one issue (aging) raises even more (health care?!?!, memory, boredom, etc.)
The current record holder for the Mouse prize won by placing his mouse on a very strict diet. This isn't the South Beach Diet. The mouse was fed the minimum amount of calories to sustain it's life, and other systems that would normally fail were artifically supplemented in a way least likely to cause celluar damage.
The mouse winner played the Free Radical game. This is _NOT_ Healthy living. If you did this, you wouldn't be strong enough to walk, and barely enough to bring air into your lungs.
There are people out there that count their calories so closely they can perdict a 5yr added life bonus by decreasing the amount of waste products metabolism produces. Many are now suffering from delbitating illness like Osteoporosis.
So yes, Science does hold the answers to everything. It's not a miracle, it's _science_. We're a machine, we can be maintained like one.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
I'd almost go as far as to posit that this article is an elaborate joke.
Why, exactly, is death a problem? Just pause a moment and really think about why death is a problem, for you.
Life doesn't work without death. In the end, that fact should be very life-affirming and comforting to you. Look around outside and realize that even horrible deaths contribute inifnitely to the natural world.
People weren't meant to live in fear of death.
"Why, exactly, is death a problem? Just pause a moment and really think about why death is a problem, for you. Life doesn't work without death. In the end, that fact should be very life-affirming and comforting to you."
Maybe to you. Death is a problem for me because I enjoy life so very much. Death will put a very definite and wholly unwelcomed end to the fun. So far, my life is working just great without death, and I'd like to keep it that way. Do I fear death? NO. I resent it.
I know full well that immortality is impossible, given entropy. That pisses me off. But if longevity is the best the universe has to offer, give me the maximum. I take first rate care of the equipment (at 51, I can still run a mile under 6 minutes, bench my body weight for reps, and cycle all day at 18 mph avg in rolling country), so I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to hold biomedical scientists responsible for doing their part to keep me alive and healthy at least long enough to get tired of it. "Accepting death" is a defeatist attitude that I just cannot abide.
(uh-oh...I seem to have gotten a little worked up)
My other machine is a lever.
This phenomena is well studied in the form of non-charismatic dictatorships. When power is inherited, it gets diffused via several mechanisms. For instance:
1. The kid doesn't know how to weild the power and loses respect.
2. The kid disagrees with the parent about how power should be weilded.
3. Power is divided among several siblings (this is especially true about money), and some of it is lost due to lack of appreciation for it.
Of course, none of that stopped the Plantagenets from ruling England for over two hundred and fifty years, but I suspect that immortality would have extended this reign, probably to the current day.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.