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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?
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.
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
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!
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.
Thanks to the magic of calculus, as long as you have less than two children (on average) per couple, the population will stabilize eventually. Many first-world nations have already reached that point (and are experiencing negative population growth as a result).
A one-child policy seems a reasonable price to pay for immortality - hell, even if sterilization was mandatory a lot of people would still jump at the chance. And why shouldn't they? There's plenty of interesting people in the world to get to know. If we didn't spend our entire lives concerned only with our immediate relatives we might become a better species.
Besides, even without old age plenty of people will still die from yet-uncured diseases, accidents, wars, murders, suicides, etc. Death isn't going away any time soon.
The big question is how it would affect us psychologically: If death was no longer inevitable, would we give life more value? Would men still march to war? Would terrorism become a far more compelling tool? Would we spend eternity cowering inside private fortresses, fearing the slightest risks to our fragile immortality?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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?
What exactly do you mean by other?
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. " - Susan Ertz
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The solution: make old people grow asparagus on mars.
The big question is how it would affect us psychologically: If death was no longer inevitable, would we give life more value? Would men still march to war? Would terrorism become a far more compelling tool? Would we spend eternity cowering inside private fortresses, fearing the slightest risks to our fragile immortality?
We already do —and don't do— this, in industrialized countries life expectancy is already twice as much as 200 years ago and 20+ years more than 30 years ago [No citation, Google is your friend] and because of this we are already cowering in our living rooms afraid of the dark, of the darks, of the unknown, of the different...
Terrorism is already a very effective tool. It's used by those on power to scare those outside the elites into submission. We're already sue and lock up parents because they fail to protect their children from stuff that we did when we were kids. There are already booming industries that feed on our fear of getting sick to sell us everything from pills, to methods to simple comforters (such as food, toys, drugs).
So, while we're not immortal, life is much more valuable now so on the one hand we value it more and are more afraid of losing it to the point of being afraid of living; and on the other humanity continues to kill, maim and destroy as it always has. I would like the opportunity to live longer while in use of my mental capacity and physical might (?) but I don't think it's a great idea just now. I'd personally rather die "young" if that meant that more people on the current undeveloped countries got a better shot at enjoying some of the stuff that I do.
Redistributing/spreading wealth and health is not as sexy or popular because is harder to care about Petey J. Random dying of malnutrition or dysentery in Africa/Asia/the Sprawl than it is to care about ourselves. Not criticizing, just my opinion.
+Raider of the lost BBS
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!
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.
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.