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Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120'
HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on the current quest sweeping Silicon Valley to disrupt death, and the $1 million prize challenging scientists to push human lifespan past its apparent maximum of about 120 years. Hedge Fund Manager Joon Yun's Palo Alto Longevity Prize, which 15 scientific teams have so far entered, will be awarded in the first instance for restoring vitality and extending lifespan in mice by 50%.
"Billionaires and companies are bullish about what they can achieve. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." ... In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people.
Why might tech zillionaires choose to fund life extension research? Three reasons reckons Patrick McCray, a historian of modern technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First, if you had that much money wouldn't you want to live longer to enjoy it? Then there is money to be made in them there hills. But last, and what he thinks is the heart of the matter, is ideology. If your business and social world is oriented around the premise of "disruptive technologies", what could be more disruptive than slowing down or "defeating" aging?
"Billionaires and companies are bullish about what they can achieve. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." ... In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people.
Why might tech zillionaires choose to fund life extension research? Three reasons reckons Patrick McCray, a historian of modern technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First, if you had that much money wouldn't you want to live longer to enjoy it? Then there is money to be made in them there hills. But last, and what he thinks is the heart of the matter, is ideology. If your business and social world is oriented around the premise of "disruptive technologies", what could be more disruptive than slowing down or "defeating" aging?
How? Why? Who?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
So many billionaires in Silly Valley, and none of them is willing to invest more than $1 million in extending their lifetime to forever?
Clearly they don't expect much to come out of this research.
I've posted this in another post, and yet again.
A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances: mutations can never be absolutely avoided, because they are an inescapable consequence of fundamental limitations on the accuracy of DNA replication, as discussed in Chapter 5. If a human could live long enough, it is inevitable that at least one of his or her cells would eventually accumulate a set of mutations sufficient for cancer to develop. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bo...
Telemeres - for now they look like imposing a pretty hard upper limit.
May they find greatly-lengthened and considerable technologically-amplified pleasure in their lives while the remaining 99% of us scratch and grub for the barest minimum to achieve survival in this brave new world of post-scarcity possibilities.
I wish nothing but the best possible outcome for our obvious betters, those for whom life's problems amount to the tyrannical difficulty of deciding between thirteen hundred cases of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay or Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Ermitage Cuvee Cathelin when catering for their this week's offensively-ostentatious wedding or birthday party.
Yes, Kim Kardashian, you vile cunt, I'm looking at you (amongst others).
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Its true that cancer is an almost inevitable consequence of simply living, and the longer you live the more likely you'll have it -- but many cancers are treatable, depending on the particulars of the strain. You think these people aren't prepared to pay top dollar for the best treatments when/if the time comes that their longevity has a consequence?
Alternatively this will only be accessible to the Rupert Murdoch's of this world...
No alternative necessary. You are entirely correct; this is exactly how it will turn out.
Yay for us!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Where do I claim my million dollars?
I find that many people claiming aging is absolutely inevitable are suffering from a case of sour grapes. SENS is a very real, very realizable goal. The human body is of limited complexity and we're putting the pieces of the puzzle together fast. Skepticism is understandable, after all people have been promising cures for aging ever since the emperor of China ate mercury. But recent advances show real promise and are based on real research.
It's popular to say one wishes for death at an arbitrary age... until one is that age and it's time to try to live or try to die. The upshot of recent newsis there's a very real chance that the first person to reach escape velocity is already alive. Here's to hope for a prosperous and very long life for each of us.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
A collection of obscenely wealthy guys are upset that life won't let them get their way. Maybe if they at least admit they're scared shitless about it they can get their way.
Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120
followed by the government's quest to extend the pension age well beyond 115
And why do you feel that defeating cancer isn't already part of the research into helping us live longer?
You can make the same argument about all of it, the longer you live the more likely you are to catch any deadly disease. The longer you live the more likely your heart is to give in. The longer you live the more likely you are to suffer a stroke. The longer you live the more likely you are to go deaf and lose your vision.
Cancer is no different, increasing age increases the chance of suffering all these things. Part of living older is defeating or delaying each and every one of these possible threats. What makes you think that cancer is somehow a distinctly different problem on the way to the same goal as the rest of it that means that it should be singled out and held up as a possible problem of increasing age more than anything else?
Yes, take a look at that page and consider what Blackburn got a Nobel for then get back to me. It's not a reset button.
They just want to get the money from the zillionaires. My aunt was at one point the oldest person alive in the world.
When I asked her how that felt, she told me that somebody had to be the oldest and by pure luck, this time it was her.
She gave her body to science and several things have been found thanks to that. It also encouraged a search for more people above 100 to donate their body to do more research.
She not only gave her body. She also insited that the outcome was for others to learn. She opensourced her body.
If people are able to get older, you talk about the species, not only about a happy few (just ask Steve Jobs). And no, I do not think I will be getting that old. She was just a statistical anomaly.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Some (most?) billionaires deserve 120 years of continuous radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Luckily this could never happen again today, because they need all those children for the Foxconn plant.
Suggestion: Develop an inexpensive and effective cure for cancer first.
Imagine if Genghis Khan's life had been extended, or Stalin's.
So we have to kill a few tens of billions of people in order to kill off the Khans and Stalins? To damn the entirety of humanity for however long it exists to short, painful, ignorant lives? To create suffering on a scale orders of magnitude greater than anything these guys ever did or were capable of? If you were to actually do that, you would be even worse than those old terrors were.
I have to agree with the original AC. Don't worry about the motivation, worry about what is actually done. There's been too much hand wringing over the psychology of rich people. My view is that those rich people are just like you, psychologically, for good or ill. They just have money.
I don't know about the 3000 children part, but I do know that he was feeding the Emperor a lot of heavy metals in his potions, which is probably what killed him.
Cancer may not have to be the cause of death, but rather the cause of immortality.
Perhaps they can harness the same thing that keeps HeLa cells immortal - sort of a body-wide 'cancer' that makes you immortal?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Seem to be panicking upon realizing that aging and mortality are the great equalizers.
I see such things as the greatest form of selfishness, it wasn't enough they hoarded resources from people in their own generation. They want to continue to do so to their children.
So cancerous mutations represent a measurable delta-S that normal cellular processes do not? Do please, tell me more!
It's funny all of the things people try to credit to the second law of thermodynamics that aren't even talking about thermodynamics, as if you can user-define "disorder" any way you wish ("cancer sounds disordrous... so let's say that the second law of thermodynamics means cancer will occur!"). No, the only thing in that regard that's an inescapable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that at least some day all humans will be dead, as the universe will have died of heat death.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Imagine if Genghis Khan's life had been extended, or Stalin's.
... or Leonardo Da Vinci's, or Rembrandt's, or Einsteins, or Planck's, or Feynman's, or Mark Twain's. Any powerful tool can be used for good or ill.
I'd be fascinated to see a (reasonably large scale) 'neural network' simulation in the biological sense of 'neural network', rather than the computer science analogy. Life extension aside, it would certainly be a very neat piece of gear.
It would also catapult the old philosophical chestnut of whether a perfect copy of you is you, or a distinct person very similar to you who will go on and live their own immortal life while you shrivel and die from the dusty pages of PHIL101 to practical application. That would be interesting to watch.
For that reason, I assume the more concerned brand of would-be immortal will attempt to 'Ship of Theseus' his brain into an immortal simulation, one neuron at a time, in the hopes of avoiding the creation of an immortal replica. Should be good fun.
Khan's empire still would have collapsed, as would Stalin's. And likely faster. Not only that, but the lessons of history would have stayed learned, rather than us having to repeat them over and over. Khan would be able to tell us today that just printing money feels great for a few decades, but it inevitably leads to destruction, while Stalin could tell us that Communism simply doesn't work. Not only that, but the people who lived under them would have learned how much power they had after going through some number of revolutions, and would never again allow people to have arbitrary authority over them.
Stop trying to justify things just because you think they are inevitable.
I kinda doubt that telomeres are the key to aging. Rather, I think they are strictly a method for preventing cancer. Instead, I think that something is happening to cause a decline in the number of stem cells in the body as you get older, likely something to do with NAD.
As unscientifically as possible and no cite to really get your questions going (but I'd search /.):
There is (call it a rod) in each cell, each time the cell divides this rod loses a bit of length.
Say this rod is half the size it started at, then you are at half of your life (age).
If this rod shorting can be stopped a longer life should be a result.
You haven't seen it all. Many people live 80 or 90 years and will tell you that they haven't come close to seeing or experiencing everything there is to life.
Your "can't build up much of an excitement for anything" is a textbook symptom of clinical depression, which is a treatable medical condition.
And even among non-depressed people, middle age very often corresponds to a dip in happiness which passes on its own as people get older.
Nicain as nicotinic acid produces severe side effects (flushing, vomiting) at the effective dose. Nicotinamide riboside doesn't. The one that I found, nicotinamide (sold as niacinamide) doesn't either, so long as you stay under 3 grams a day.
The current state of the research shows that it effects cellular health/aging markers, effectively turning the cells of old mice into the cells of young mice. Last I heard, the same group that showed that was going to start a new study that looked at their actual lifespan.
Current thinking is that NAD facilitates communication between the nucleus and mitochondria.
This is a real stunner, not because it is so new and amazing, but because this is about as low hanging of a fruit as you can get. I learned NAD and its role in cellular metabolism in biochemistry class. It had been observed to decline with age. But no-one ever thought to try increasing the concentration to counter the aging process or at least some of its side effects!
All these nerds turning 40+ and thinking about their mortality.
Sorry, but thermodynamics is not about how many states there are in any arbitrary system. There's countless states in which you can win money in a casino and only a few (such as paying for chips or inserting money into a slot machine) that they take yours - does this mean that the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that you're going to beat the house? Is winning at the casino an increase in entropy?
Please stop taking scientific terms and making up your own definitions for them. The second law of thermodynamics cannot simply be taken out of context and shoved into whatever other context you want and then claimed to be proof that something is going to happen.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Wow, she was also an aunt of my father! Small world! :-) I think we might have commented on slashdot on that coincidence a few years back? But you'd have to be pretty old if she was your aunt, as opposed to, like me, a great aunt? I met her once with my father when she was still in her own home, and maybe incidentally another time or two perhaps (decades ago).
Glad that "open sourcing" runs in the family. :-) Although I might feel differently about open sourcing my body or DNA than open sourcing some software I've written. :-) Still, it is kind of a mental calculation of the risk that personal DNA sequences could be used against one or one's family somehow versus the benefits of medical breakthroughs for your own family and also everyone, and also that DNA is not that hard to get via copies of medical samples or from trash or whatever...
I've put some links in other replies to ideas about health sensemaking to help everyone live longer and healthier lives.
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
And while I was born and raised in the USA, maybe it shows some Dutch roots that I believe we can make more "land" for a growing population by reclaiming it from "space" in addition to the sea. Of course, with falling birth rated in industrialized countries, long term population growth does not seem to be one of our problems/blessings, even if many people start living a lot longer.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Health may be also be partially a function of what you do relative to your genes and environment, so her preferences, say, for orange juice and herring might have worked better for herself than for others in different situations. For health commonalities, one can read about "Blue Zones" and also I like Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work overall emphasizing eating more vegetables (but quibble about some parts).
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Attitude and "morale" is also a surprisingly big part, for many reasons including because it affects your connectedness to your community from which other good things flow. Probably easier to have higher morale in the Netherlands than in a much crazier place like the USA though. :-)
Contrast:
http://www.findingdutchland.co...
"According to Unicef's most recent Child Well Being in Rich Countries survey, Dutch kids ranked as the happiest kids in the world. Dutch kids led the way in three out of the five categories, namely- material well being, educational well being, and behavior and risks."
With:
https://www.adbusters.org/maga...
""The reason our children's lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
Anyway, we're all not going to live that long unless we sort out some of the wealth inequality and distribution issues given the spread of AI, robotics, and other automation that makes most human labor less and less valuable economically. The following may sound silly in the Netherlands or other parts of Western Europe, but it sound all too plausible in the USA given current politics:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or t
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I am talking about entropy. Actual entropy, not "let's take an actual scientific concept and pretend it means something that it doesn't" entropy. I'm not making any comments about whether people are going to change DNA any time soon. I'm simply talking about the abuse of scientific terms - entropy being one of the most widely abused. To everyone who's doing it: stop.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.