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The Fight To End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding
oddwick11 writes "Aubrey de Grey and other leading scientists and thinkers in stem cell research and regenerative medicine will gather in Los Angeles at UCLA for Aging 2008 to explain how their work can combat human aging, and the sociological implications of developing rejuvenation therapies. From an article today in WIRED Magazine 'Now, though, some scientists are beginning to view his approach — looking at aging as a disease and bringing in more disciplines into gerontology — as worthwhile, even if they still look askance at his claims of permanent reversible aging within a lifespan. The Methuselah Foundation now has an annual research funding budget of several million dollars, de Grey says, and it's beginning to show lab results that he thinks will turn scientists' heads.'" The conference is free, though registration is required; L.A. area readers who can attend are encouraged to post their thoughts. Update: 06/27 05:18 GMT by T : Dr. de Grey notes that you can also simply show up and register on-site. Look forward to a Slashdot interview with de Grey in the near future.
So there is hope for John McCain after all!
500 years from now, just think how out of touch the elderly will be! I can't wait to shake a cane and tell the youth that in my day we had Atari 2600s, not AI-merged universal consciousness!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Aging is not a disease. Imagine contesting with our own offspring if everybody decides to live forever.
Please, please, no.
The hope that my mother-in-law will someday die is one of the few things that allows me to be around her. PLEASE, don't take that away from me.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The life-extension movement has been asking for this approach for at LEAST a half-century.
By the way: Watch for the government to try to restrict this research, or use of its results, to "save social security".
Which shouldn't really be an issue: A good set of treatments for aging would lead to people of larger calendar age not just hanging in there in a sickly state consuming large amounts of medical treatment - but retaining (or being restored to) good health and able to return to work and create the resources needed to support them (and in style).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've been in attendance at the last 134 annual conferences and found it to be very rewarding.
Heinlein wrote extensively in his novels on the subject of aging, treating it as a syndrome that was inherently cureable, including the anhedonia (loss of the joy of life) that came from that multitude of minor pains that take up so much of your attention as you get older. Pain is terribly distracting, from minor itching all the way up to opiate-resistant terminal conditions. It's a lot of nerve noise. Anything that can solve the complex of symptoms that lead to age-related death will also have to deal with pain and anhedonia as well.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Saying you can stop aging soon could be an easy line on old rich men beginning to fear death.
No difficult questions on progress or specifics; investors that came to you. There's your millions.
(No, not saying anything at all about whether or not this whole thing is a good or bad idea)
Imagine a world where all deaths are either by tragic accident or homicide...
... won't be an issue as long as anyone who opts in for clinical immortality is also stripped of their fertility. In fact, i'd imagine underpopulation would be a significant risk if enough people take it.
I for one would love to live to see the day where we roam freely amongst the stars. With all the advancements in almost every area of existence that we are experiencing today, I don't forsee myself getting bored any time soon.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
'living forever' really seems like it should be possible. Our bodies have a process, and that process can get altered by diseases and malnourishment and improving how we keep clean and what we eat has given us much more time to live.
Why should aging be any different? Nobody really dies of 'natural causes', it's always something specific that breaks homeostasis in the end (sometimes starting from the beginning), natural causes is another name for 'there's no worth in investigating exactly why this person died because they're too damned old, but it's probably heart failure, even though that's a symptom of a mode of death'.
Our bodies aren't designed on a basis of 'right' and 'wrong', it's designed on what worked best to getting the next generation across. Unfortunately, renewing certain kinds of cell tissue was never vital to that goal.
We already know electronics and stuff are prone to getting old and eventually failing themselves, but there's no reason to use our artifice as an analogy, we have yet to create something that is constantly replacing itself on the cellular level, essentially becoming a whole new thing over and over.
I hope this research makes some serious progress, even if it will be only our descendants that enjoy the results.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
If human lifespans are ever extended to a significant degree, there will be significant repercussions as governments attempt to deal with what would inevitably become a very serious overpopulation crisis. Death and suicide are currently viewed as horrible things by the majority of western cultures. Would a practical illustration (catastrophic overpopulation) of why death is a natural and necessary component in the "lifespans" of living things, including human populations, change popular and governmental dispositions towards death and dying?
What kind of effects might this have on policies towards euthanasia? More provocatively, might governments starting offering tax credits or other kinds of awards to families whose eldest members opted to end their lives? Might governments impose penalties on individuals who were older than a certain age?
Beats dying early due to disease. I'd much rather be given the choice of when to end my own life. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea then kindly stand aside for those who long for this.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
If you'll remember back to your high school biology class, most of the items Glug listed are what are widely accepted in the scientific community as density dependent limiting factors. Meaning that as a population increases, so do wars, plague, famine, etc. Global warming is debatable as a density dependent limiting factor, but you could make a strong case for it.
People don't give a shit about the planet because they know they will be dead long before it is.
Give them eternal life and watch how quickly they become militant greenies.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Assume they stop or reverse aging and take it to the next step: never dying. Also assuming that we don't kill ourselves by overpopulation, what does that mean for the humans as an evolving species? We would stay the same while the rest of earth's species continue to develop? Death may be disastrous for the individual, but it allows the species to continue to adapt to changing conditions, no?
Funny how we're "overpopulated" but need constant immigration to keep our economies going. I don't believe "overpopulation" is the right word, but it's time for some new, well planned cities, no?
While de Grey and colleagues are very excited about their findings, they warn that repeated exposure to the Lazarus Pits may drive some people quite mad.
What exactly do you mean by other?
Malthus published his famous two centuries ago. If he had been even close to being right, Western civilization would not currently exist. The fact that you and are here, having this discussion, shows that he wrong in nearly all his assumptions.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Kurt Vonnegut is a good story to read about the effects of immortality on life on this planet. I guess if we have some form of anti-gerasone, combined with the admonition of the Georgia Guidestones, we should wipe out a little over 6 billion people and let 500 million people live forever, thus halting human evolution completely so all of us can be wiped out eventually.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Not only that, but there are some other things that just might be more pragmatic. If you live for 1000 years, traveling to Earth 2.0 might sound like a good trip to take, provided that we find a good source of energy for said traveling.
I can think of a lot of things that would be enhanced by longer life spans, many of them mentioned here already. People are pretty much enslaved to that biological clock. If the alarm didn't go off so soon, it has been shown that in affluent societies, people will choose to not reproduce if the alarm clock is not about to start ringing.
If I could live for 1000 years, and there were enough to do on the journey, I'd take that 200 year trip to Earth 2.0. In that time, I could easily become a quintuple PhD, concert guitarist, and some other things; perhaps redesign the propulsion system while on the journey. When you have more time, you don't have to make so many limiting choices, and that frees the spirit to be more useful to society at large. Yes, that is a bit philosophical, but I think it's right on this topic.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I really don't want to live forever. If it were possible, I think eventually everything would become mundane. ...
I think it's quite entirely possible that if we find a cure for aging, we'll eventually discover people don't really want to live forever. But it would still be better to let people live as long as they want to, and choose the time and manner of their own passing, rather than forcing it upon them against their will.
If you're right, we'll just eventually see legalized, rational suicide. Probably simple drugs you can get from your doctor when you decide it's time to move on. People being executors of their own wills before they throw a farewell party and take that fatal drink at the end, surrounded by their still living friends to see them off.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Then don't think of it as extending life expectancy. Think of it as making people healthy right up until they die at age 90, or whatever.
Aging is more than just a way to die. It's a way to suffer. I'd fight to end aging if only to help remove that suffering from the world.
Also, most overpopulation problems are the result of having 3+ kids per couple. A number of studies have shown a direct correlation between quality of life, expected lifespan, and (fewer) number of children per mother.
and you can take my fertility with it; no interest in children, thank you. On the other hand, I'll take 20 years (or more!) of my life back, thank you very much! It's grossly unfair that you spend half of your life learning to live it properly, then you start to (potentially) decline so that you can't enjoy it as much. I want to train for the Tour de France!
Consider for a moment that we do somehow manage to eliminate (or significantly limit) the aging process in humans. Based on trends in our current culture, it's very likely this would lead to sharp declines in child birth for a huge number of personal, social and legal reasons. This poses a serious problem when you start looking at things occurring on the microbiological level.
First off, this leaves us wide open for a plague-like epidemic the further into the future we go. As child birth declines, our genetic diversity will begin to stagnate. This means the human race could face extinction at the hands of a super-virus or antibiotic-resistant infection. (Not unlike what we're already seeing in certain types of food crops, such as bananas.)
Next, it's possible that our collective intelligence could also become stagnant. Humans seem to have a strange knack for ignoring and overlooking new concepts that contradict stuff they've been conditioned into believing is true for significant portions of their lives. (Anyone who's ever gotten themselves wrapped up into an "intelligent design vs evolution" debate, or has tried to convince a senior citizen that they're "too old to drive" knows this all too well.)
Finally, we face the possibility of society and government entering a static state. As the rich and powerful cease to age, the more likely they will retain their positions of power. This means anything about these people that impedes social progress (grudges, stereotypes, general stupidity, etc...) will never go away until something really major forces such a change to occur. (Imagine a world where the current president and his administration would never be replaced until it literally ended up killing everyone...)
8==8 Bones 8==8
Given a free market economy, having a society that doesn't age will have some interesting effects. One of the more nasty is dealing with the rapidly diverging economic classes.
See, some people manage their money and assets well, others just don't. In today's world, those that do manage well (the Warren Buffetts of the world, large and small) have only so long to accumulate wealth before they die, leaving their assets to kin who rarely do as well. Within a few generations, that wealth will be gone, and new powerheads raise up.
It's a system of creation and destruction that has no end, and is largely self-stabilizing. But if people can live forever, those who can't manage their wealth will forever live just above their poverty line while those who can manage their wealth become wealthier and wealthier... forever. People of the likes of Trump, Gates, and Ellison will always be rich, and usually will be getting richer.
Further, consider that those most able to AFFORD life extension technology will be the savers and asset managers, and you see very quickly that this is a problem that makes the problems of today's middle-class erosion look like a walk in the park.
Me, I bridge these two categories. I'm pretty good at making substantial amounts of money, but I'm also pretty good at spending it. I'm working on saving a significant amount of my income. It's not easy for me, as I naturally view money as something to spend, not something to save, so I use lots of charts and monthly meetings with my wife to discuss our financial situation and I'm pretty damned insistent that we improve our financial picture significantly every month and every quarter.
But if life extension technology becomes available, I want to be where I need to be to get it!
Of course, there are other problems to be solved. What about overpopulation? Today's death rate in the United States is just shy of 0.9%. But if people "lived forever" the death rate would drop through the floor, so the birth rate would have to similarly drop to avoid a severe population bomb. We can't just tell people to wait until they are 200 years old to reproduce, since a woman ovulates every month, and there are a finite amount of eggs available in a female to give. Therefore, we have to allow for child birth by lottery, by tying births to existing deaths, or some other mechanism to equalize the birth/death rates to fit the resources available.
Otherwise, we'll just crash Mother Earth, something we're on the verge of doing anyway!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It sounds funny, but imagine the implications.
Politics in a democracy is hanging on the sentiments of the majority. Now realize that this majority would be well over 100 years old when you can reach 500 years. Now imagine how slowly any political change can happen when the average voter is so fully entrenched in his stance that you need a major earthquake to move him.
Think back 200 years and ponder what people deemed "good values" and beneficial. Do you think we'd have female suffrage? End of slavery?
If you think politics move slowly today, just imagine what it would be like if not only politicians are old, but also the majority of their voters.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
God is the only one who holds the promise for an eternity better than anyone can conceive. God also loves us so he wants to see us happy.
I think that the 'offtopic' mod is unwarranted, the thread is about science eliminating ageing and you are offering an alternative —albeit unpopular POV. One problem I have with your proposition, though, is that science is something that any random human that cares enough can verify for themselves. Not so with the God 'promise'.
To begin with, it's not God whom holds the promise. It's random humans that do. They claim that God speaks to them, and maybe he does but it's not falsifiable.
If I'm not a geneticist, or a scientist, science is still open to me and I can go out and study and learn what we humans know so far about how things work. The possibility is open for me, personally, to work in this or any other scientific research and continue it and add to it. Not so with this promises that supposedly come from God. There is no verifiable, replicable mean for Virtual Raider to acquire the knowledge that the people that spoke to God claim to have.
I can go to some university and verify the scientific theories; but I can't go to the mosque or the synagogue, read The Word, try to reproduce those claims and ask to please talk with God to ask Him about some inconsistencies on His word on chapter whatever. Granted, I can't ask to talk to Einstein either, but if I so choose I can replicate all of his work and verify or disprove it (LHC anyone?). There is simply no way to verify any claims made by any religion.
That doesn't mean that they are false, mind you. But for all we know God does exist and doesn't give a hoot about us. Or really, really hates us and enjoys making us suffer and it was Him who purposefully introduced pain and evil in the world for us to have a hard time. Maybe He exists but is so Vast, Magnificent, Unhumanlike and Incomprehensible that we have no hope of ever extracting any meaning from His actions. Or maybe He does love us and wants to see us happy. The point is, we have no way to know so that offers little comfort for certain type of order-and-answers-craving kind of minds.
Why, even if He's waiting for me with arms wide open, isn't He Eternal and Everlasting and can wait a few more hundred or thousand years for me to go to Him? If He does exist, wouldn't you like to show up before Him with some achievements under your arm like a kid that comes home from kindergarten to show daddy his drawings? "Hey, look, I made people live 20 times longer than before!" or even "Look how many people I made happy by building bridges, cooking pizza, teaching to use Ubuntu during my 754 years alive!" ;)
In sum, while IMHO you're not off-topic it's kinda pointless to say "yeah this is cool but I have something completely unverifiable that is way better, you just have to believe it is better without any proof whatsoever". Makes the case hard to argue.
+Raider of the lost BBS
Put the "Happy" thoughts aside and realize the DYING AND AGING ARE AN ESSENTIAL PART OF LIFE.
Not to rain on your parade but, how many immortal people do you know of to be able to claim that it is an essential part of life? What were the side effects of not ever dying? How did not dying affect their environment?
It is a part of life because we don't know of anything that has *never* died, so we concluded that everything does. No evidence on why it must be so.
Boy, today I woke up on the ranting side of the bed :)
+Raider of the lost BBS
Births, mutation, and death are all critical to a species survival. If people don't die & get replaced by offspring, the human-species will be endangering its ability to adapt.
A species which has become static and forgoes any new genetic variation is somehow not going to get wiped out by a pandemic at some point? Yeah right.
Even with good genetic variation, viruses have managed to kill significant portions of human populations. You're not going to exterminate these viruses, ever. Even if you did, nature would cook up more at some point.
And I've seen concerns over the idea of overpopulation poo-poo'd by people saying "we'll take-away/limit their ability to reproduce". What happens if for some reason the whole immortality thing stops working? Maybe an oversight, but maybe some anti-immortality jerks genetically engineer a retrovirus that makes everyone mortal again (contagious disease that kills over a period of about 70 years). Without the baby-making option, guess who gets to determine what traits make the species?
And all the talk here about how the body is just machine, and we can repair it to perfection seem to have forgotten that there are plenty of toxins out there, natural & anthropogenic, which don't leave the body once they get in. This is the entire basis behind biomagnification/bioaccumulation. How would "immortal" people avoid the accumulation of heavy-metals over long periods of time? How many years of trace-amounts of mercury do you think it takes to damage your brain?
It's also worth noting that the human societies have evolved in a sense as well, and would likely be much slower without replacing people with those able to offer fresh ideas & let go of the old without resistance. I can tell you that ethnic/national/political grudges would probably endure for much longer in the event that everyone can recall the reasons for their conflicts in a very personal way. If you think the middle east is a mess now, just wait until they're all immortal.
From my humble point of view, the desire for immortality comes off as an amazingly selfish quest which would certainly enhance the risks for the survival of the species. It can be argued that by the act of dying, humans behave as team players and increase the speed of progress (biological & intellectual).
Somehow I find this sort of research will lead to the founding of the biological weapons wing of the Umbrella Corporation.
Live forever... as a zombie!
Quote: "I live in LA. I was a little surprised when I moved here five years ago to discover that the normals outnumber the weirdos by a dramatic margin."
It's just that the weirdos and shysters get more publicity than normal people.
After about 18 months in L.A., you begin to understand the more serious problems. The L.A. culture is even more disfunctional than the culture where you lived before. It gets seriously lonely, living in Los Angeles, even though there are people all around you.
Fraud Alert! In my opinion, this Slashdot story is about an almost purely fraudulent subject, with insignificant truth. Many people want to believe, and my guess is that the leaders of "anti-aging" efforts want to take the money of the believers. Here's where they ask for money: At present, a $100 donation (enough for a free signed copy of "Ending Aging") is leveraged to $150!.
The real science in this is in the VERY early stages. It's a wild guess, but a somewhat educated wild guess, that perhaps one one-thousandth is known about body chemistry that would need to be known to "cure" aging.
There have been some successes, if you can call them that. This paper talks about extending the life span of fruit flies by 7%: Extension of Drosophila Lifespan by Rhodiola rosea Through an Anti-oxidant Independent Mechanism. This sentence is interesting: "We evaluated a new formulation of R. rosea (SHR-5) which contains elevated levels of the putative active compounds (rosin, rosarin, and rosavin), and found that it could extend mean life span by 43%." The interesting word, in that sentence, in my opinion, is "could". Not "extended the life span by 43%", but "could". And the active compounds are "putative"; that means "commonly regarded as such; reputed; supposed". How "commonly regarded" can it be when it is a "new formulation"?
If you follow experiments like this, you already know that "extending the life span of fruit flies" is rather common. If I were to try to extend the life of fruit flies myself, I would start by taking them out of their tiny cages in the laboratory and letting them fly more freely. Maybe now they just get depressed and commit suicide. (I find it difficult to be serious about that "research" paper.)
Right now, 2008-06-27, 01:13 AM PDT, Slashdot is second on the list of Blog Coverage (bottom of the left-hand column):
* Digg
* Slashdot
* Center for Society and Genetics
* Depressed Metabolism
I wonder if they will eliminate the link to this Slashdot story when they discover that not all Slashdot readers are ignorant about science?
Remember all the publicity about sequencing the human genome? A lot of taxpayers paid a lot of money for that. Then, it was revealed, that, so sorry, the epigenome is a lot more complex, very influential, and almost completely unknown.
I would like Slashdot editors to provide an assurance at the end of every story they run that no one they know got money or any other benefit because of running the story.
Every time you play a video game, you are spending time learning about a fantasy world, when you could be learning about the real world. If you study the real world, you can discover that "anti-aging" is a HUGE business, funded largely by people who have more money than scientific knowledge, and hope not to die.
Yes, I know how to spell disfunctional. I just don't like that spelling, and I made my own.
I'm all for this, as long as you drive down fertility at the same time. All of the really serious problems we face right now (peak oil, peak copper, peak phosphorous, unstable food supply, global warming, international terrorism, imperial foreign wars) are either directly caused or directly exacerbated by having ~6 billion people on this planet.
If, right now, the human population fell to 1 billion many of the aforementioned problems would be eliminated and those that remain would become much more manageable. Even if the "window" of fertility remains the same (the age of menopause), a dramatic increase in lifespan still means a dramatic increase in population.
Let's get the whole world on board with birth control before we go after longer life. I'd love to live in a world with a stable human population of about 1 billion people who live for 500 years.
Except you're kind of over looking the fact that one of the main ways of extending life will be actual modification of DNA. Theoretically, once we know everything about our genetic code, those who can afford it will just pick out genetic variations they like and say "I'll have 2 of those, oh and that one seems popular with that one country, let me have that one too." The beginning should be fun at least to watch those rich who have no idea how it all works and just insist on getting genetic variations that won't work properly for them. I look forward to famous people with toes growing out of foreheads and such.
Some disturbing issues with this:
1 - the current generation which is in power will never pass on. they will continue to subsist, cling to their power, impede progress, and, freed from the inevitable struggle against disease, will be able to dedicate more energy toward bringing about a police state.. (MAFIAA, ACTA, "we dont need no stinking new business model, we have a RIGHT to profit how we always have")
2 - the propensity for "turds to float" will mean legions of GW's maintaining the capacity to have yet more stupid children, contributing to the DEvolution of our species by bombing our genetic pool with yet more "stupid".
3 - the continued reproduction of all subsequent generations exceeding the already artificially elevated carrying capacity of our planet, causing all manner of maladies associated with extreme overpopulation... Bacteria in a dish will reproduce.. and reproduce.. until they use up all resources, then they ALL die.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
For those of us with severe chronic illnesses who do not wish to but feel obligated to stay alive for our loved ones since the current societal view is that quantity of life is more important than quality of life, this is very disheartening to read.
Doubly so for those of us concerned with overpopulation.