Aging Is a Disease; Treat It Like One

theodp writes "In a letter to Sergey Brin, Maria Konovalenko urges the Google founder to pursue his interest in the topics of aging and longevity. 'Defeating or simply slowing down aging,' writes Konovalenko, 'is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet.' Calling for research into longevity gene therapy, extending lifespan pharmacologically, and studying close species that differ significantly in lifespan, Konovalenko says 'it is crucial to make numerous medical organizations recognize aging as a disease. If medical organizations were to recognize aging as a disease, it could significantly accelerate progress in studying its underlying mechanisms and the development of interventions to slow its progress and to reduce age-related pathologies. The prevailing regard for aging as a "natural process" rather than a disease or disease-predisposing condition is a major obstacle to development and testing of legitimate anti-aging treatments. This is the largest market in the world, since 100% of the population in every country suffers from aging.'"

Comments

Tithonus

[jonyen]

Make sure you ask for eternal youth.

"when Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus indeed lived forever 'but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.'" (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus

Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs

[Em Adespoton]

Actually, if people continue to have the same number of children they do now, and our lifespan doubled (or tripled), we'd have a brief period of doubling or tripling the population, and then the rate of growth would fall back to original levels as people started dying again.

For most longer-living and/or higher educated cultures, the birth rate is already closely tracking the death rate. For those with a shorter lifespan, women are already limited to the number of children they can have in their lifetime, and the number wouldn't change.

Short story: the sooner we expand our lives, the better, as we can sustain doubling the population _now_, but that might not be the case after we travel further along the growth curve.

I'm willing to handle the experiment.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The brain as miraculous as it is can only handle a single lifetime of information.

And you have how many multi-lifetime old samples in your research to support this claim.

Come up with a way to give me multiple lifetimes, healthy as I was in my late teens, to see if my brain crashes due to "filling up", and I'm willing to be an experimental subject.

I'm already in my late '60s. I'm also studying for a college degree and getting 4.0 (much better than when I was trying to work my way through college and avoid the draft during the Vietnam era.)

Psych research has shown that intelligence, as measured by I.Q. tests, increases with age. ("Senile dementia" is a handfull of specific diseases, which only a fraction of people get, and eliminating THOSE would obviously be part of "curing" aging.) Meanwhile, the brain's capacity for both memory and processing is very large (as shown by the amount of info people with eidetic memory accumulate, and are able to index and retrieve without apparent problems, over normal life spans.)

So you think there's a limit to how much the brain can handle, a wall we might hit if we cured aging? Let's find out. Bring it on!