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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.'"
How fabulous! If we cure aging, then we'll get to have WAR all of the fucking time because of the population pressure.
Or we can reserve anti-aging treatments for the rich and privileged.
That's actually exactly what the world needs the more our society becomes knowledge-oriented. If you could double the active lifespan of a (sane, healthy) individual, you'd get twice the amount of wotk for the same amount of high-school and college man-years. It's simple economy of scale.
Ezekiel 23:20
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
As much as I like the idea of a longer life, there is simply no way our planet will support it. Which means it would be a perk for the wealthy and influential, rather than the unwashed masses. Nothing good could come from that.
You're going to have to "cure" starvation due to crushing population growth first.
The statement "Defeating or simply slowing down aging is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet." is nonsense, if we do not first deal with the issues of , oh, for example, sex slavery (wouldn't it be GREAT to be forced to live 150 years as a sex slave?). How 'bout getting more people to a healthy 70, free of autoimmune diseases and cancer, well nourished, with a decent roof over their heads, and decent care for injury and illness? Could we, somehow, free the millions (if not billions) of women trapped in archaic, abusive societies?
We don't have enough decent-paying employment on the planet to support the population we have now, and you're going to double the number of years someone has to support themselves? Where do we find those jobs?
Maria Konovalenko has a serious case of aerobic encephalitis.
So much for the theory. And now look around you.
Essentially, it would give 90% of the population more time to waste, nothing else.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And far more people exploiting our natural resources. We're way beyond capacity as it is.
No, we're not.
The doomsayers have been doomsaying for thousands of years, and we've always figured out ways to avoid the doom they're saying. But, hey, if fantasizing about doom makes you feel good, keep on doing it.
Why is this comment modded up? Suffering from disease, disability and decrepitude on both physical and mental levels is a gift?? Then even being in disease and disability at any age is a gift. Why bother treating them at any age?
Parent comment is so bad it's not even wrong (to word it like Wolfgang Pauli)
That sounds like a good reason to limit reproduction, not a good reason to make me die. I don't recall ever having made you die. What's your beef?
Fortunately, the people who believe death is a gift will rapidly die out, and only us aspiring immortals will be left.
Any couple that has four children is already doing more harm to the population than one person living forever. Should we force-sterilize people at two or three kids per couple?
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 say sterilize after one. And heavy tax burdens for families with more than one child. Irresponsible breading will be the death of us all.
You would not want to fry the population with mass-produced tasteless breading. To bread the right way, I suggest the following:
1 dozen eggs (per human)
1 lb flour
3 boxes of bread crumbs
herbs and seasonings to taste
1) Mix seasonings in bread crumbs.
2) Coat a damp human in flour.
3) Dunk human in eggs and then roll it around in the bread crumb mixture
Then you can fry and bake the human, but make sure that it's fully-cooked. You can get diseases from undercooked human.
BOOP!
Aging isn't a disease; it's a gift.
I pity the people who can't see this.
While I'm sure there's a lot to mental maturity, what is happening to the body I can't call anything but decay. Loss of sight, loss of hearing, loss of smell, loss of motor function, all sorts of aches and pains, wrinkles, sagging and hair loss there's absolutely nothing there I'd consider physically or aesthetically positive. Some age gracefully but that's just saying they look less shitty than the rest, if I could keep/regain the body of a 20yo I'd take that in a heartbeat. And judging by all the people who desperately try to cling to their youth, I'd wager 99%+ of the population would gladly avoid this "gift".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is an enormously strong anticorrelation between lifespan and reproduction. Where are birthrates highest? Places like Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, and other such places. Where are they lowest? Places like Japan and Germany, where women both have access to roles in society other than babymakers and where they can expect to live long, healthy lives.
I bet if the average Somali woman could look forward to a century of fulfilling life she'd have fewer kids.
Except people might care a little more if they planned to live that long. We're going to run out of oil in 100 years? In 100 years we'll fry from global warming? Almost everybody alive today will be dead and buried by then, so nobody cares much. Sure a few nice speeches about what we leave our children and grandchildren but if people realistically could live 200 years they'd care a lot more.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, not quite. If we could bring all the nations on the planet down to zero population growth *today*, we'd still be looking at somewhere around a 9 billion person peak mid-century just because of generational lag. If we managed to cut that in half to one child/woman we'd still keep growing for a fair bit - we keep adding new people, and the elders keep living longer.
Current Birth rate: 19 /1000/year = 1.9%
Current Death Rate 8.4/1000/year = 0.84%
Current Net population growth rate = 1.06%
Even if we sterilized everyone tomorrow the death rate is still only .84% - that is a survival rate of 99.16%/year so in fifty years (2+ generations?) the cumulative survival rate would be 0.9916^50 = 0.5, or 3.5 billion people.
If we instead aimed for half of steady-state - a birth rate of 0.84%/2 = 0.42% then the "net survival rate" = 99.58%, for a cumulative 50-year rate of 0.9958^50 = 81%, or 5.7 billion
And just for sanity-checking sake, if we do nothing we get 1.0106^50 = 1.69%, or 11.9 billion people, which is about in line with the worst-case forecasts.
Of course that's just a very rough "back of the napkin" calculation, but I think it illustrates the challenges we face on this front.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
largest market
Those two words tell you everything you need to know about the motivations of Maria Konovalenko and why she would make such an appeal to a guy with very deep pockets.
Also, I can "recognize", say, unwanted body hair as a disease, but all that means is that I'm delusional; my recognition doesn't make it so.
There *is* that axiom:
But the person I'm quoting here is almost a counterexample. Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate and former director of Fermilab, wrote this in his book on particle physics, The God Particle. In his younger years, Lederman discovered some crucial elements of the Standard Model. What's he doing now? Writing books and teaching (even into his nineties), something that to my way of thinking is even more invaluable than his work in the lab. Feynman continued to do good work very late in his career (like figuring out why Challenger blew up). Looking beyond physics, Mozart's best work (the Requiem and the C Minor Mass) was done late in his career, as was (according to one musicologist I know) Brahms'. Rachmaninov was known as a brilliant teacher of piano later in life: I've heard one of his students play, and she is incredible.
There seems to be a pattern of people revolutionizing something or another early in their lives, and teaching and consolidating that revolution later on. I think our world would be more improved if we put more emphasis on the latter, as the dissemination of knowledge is as important for human wellbeing than "having a nonzero count of people who understand concept XYZ". Science needs more Carl Sagans and fewer Isaac Newtons these days, I think (and I say that as someone paid to do fundamental physics research).
According to some commentators here. If you consider aging a gift and not a disease, then you must consider a gift the suffering imposed on the elderly and the trillions of dollars that are spent in treating all these "natural" diseases. People who want to grow senile and dependent on help of strangers to eat their soup, can go f*ck themselves! I rather be strong and productive when I'm in my nineties.
This argument (^) is a strawman created by an idiot.
I have many genetically heritable issues, and I strongly advicate normal, natural death. I am not a 20 something, and I do have health issues.
Death is required. Making death clean and without suffering would be humane and beneficial, but killing death itself is foolish in its most extreme.
Creating strawmen to shove in other people's mouths because you don't like what they are actually saying is delusional and stupid.
(For the record, since I am sure you will ask, despite having no business asking, I have a congenital heart defect, genetically linked soft tissue tumors, blood sugar regulation trouble associated with early type 1 diabetes risk factors, and several other noteworthy things. I consider death essential, and I am glad it exists. Take your strawman and shove it up your ass.)
I think neural network algorithms give some insight here - they start off very flexible and prone to "leaping to conclusions", but gradually grow more stable, then become so fixed in their ways that they almost completely ignore inputs. If people didn't grow old and die, we'd turn into a society of stodgy, inflexible people lacking dreams and unwilling to compromise over anything. We'd probably end up killing each other over stupid things like Coke vs Pepsi. Aging and dying is the way the species keeps its innovative edge - by systematically eliminating individuals whose neural nets have become too inflexible, so make way for younger people who are willing to try and risk new things.
I viewed the initial comment as relatively insightful. No, I don't think anyone's calling disease or disability a gift. But since the human body is a biochemical machine, it seems to generally cease functioning via those processes. (Not everyone is going to die cleanly and painlessly in their sleep.)
The "gift" refers to the beauty inherently designed into the process as a whole. IMO, medicine should be focused on giving the best quality of life possible, within the parameters nature has set up -- NOT trying to "cheat" the natural course of things.
I recall reading a piece of sci-fi a while ago where the characters had supposedly achieved very long life-spans (thousands of years, typically). Eventually, many just opted to "check out" after a while, voluntarily putting themselves into a coma. The idea was, after you've been around that long, you reach a point where you feel like you've "seen everything, done everything". The things you still haven't learned yet are pretty much the things you already concluded you simply have no interest in, or get no enjoyment from -- and you're bored with the rest.
It's just a fiction story, but I think it would be pretty accurate.... Most of the people who fear death or even aging just fear the unknown. If you can't say that you lived a "full, rewarding" life in the window of time most of us naturally get, you were doing something wrong. Plus, there's just something that motivates us, knowing that our time is limited on this planet. If you had essentially unlimited time to accomplish things, would you really get more done -- or would you just keep putting things off?
I'm not old enough to say for certain yet, but I sure hope there are some great, valuable and rewarding experiences to be had when I'm in those older, retirement years. When society (and your own health situation) deem you incapable of working a job each day for a paycheck and you've reached "old age", it's a little bit like a second shot at childhood, except with all the wisdom you gathered along the way as an adult. Surveys have been taken, asking people how happy they were in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's ... and overall, people were increasingly happy with each decade. So "youth" clearly isn't everything.
Death is required. Making death clean and without suffering would be humane and beneficial, but killing death itself is foolish in its most extreme.
Personally, I believe that anyone who does not want to live forever is either insane or a liar. The solution is to have something to live for. I don't remember who said it, but to paraphrase, I plan to live forever, and I believe I'm off to a good start.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
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!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way