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Harvard Prof. Says Cure For Aging Could Emerge Within 5 Years (washingtonpost.com)
trbdavies writes: Reporting from the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene-editing summit in D.C., the Washington Post quotes Harvard genetics professor George Church as expressing "confidence that in just five or six years he will be able to reverse the aging process in human beings." He says: "A scenario is, everyone takes gene therapy — not just curing rare diseases like cystic fibrosis, but diseases that everyone has, like aging," CRISPR is a powerful technology, but many at the summit have expressed caution about both the ethics and the feasibility of using it to cure disease. The story quotes Klaus Rajewsky, of the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine saying "We have become masters in the art of manipulating genes, but our understanding of their function and interaction is far more limited."
Oh great, now Trump is going to live forever.Thank you, Science.
use it for space travel!
In 1563, Ponce de Leon said we would have a cure for aging within 5 years. 2 years later he claimed to have found the Fountain of Youth.
I would expect the scientific method and a lot of elbow grease to be more successful at this task than yet another real estate scam in Florida.
A cure for aging is a few years away, and always will be.
You're probably right for now, but scientific progress sooner or later is going to real that goal.
With the difference being that unlike nuclear fusion and HURD, a lot of old, rich people have a vested interest in a cure for aging.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most types of cells are programmed to divide only a certain number of times, and then die. There are ways to defeat this programming, but when those occur, the usual result is not immortality, but death via cancer. Wikipedia has an excellent article on telomeres which are one of the mechanisms by which this process occurs.
Nonaggression works!
So far, medical science has done essentially nothing whatsoever to stop ageing from killing us. Instead, current medicine stops us dying prematurely of other causes.
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts. Medicine has done quite a bit to address many problems with aging. People are able to live much longer lives despite the aging of the cardio-vascular system. As medicine has improved in these areas, the bits that they are good at have their own names and are removed from the 'aging' bucket. Now, with those items removed, 'aging' is only left with things that medicine hasn't yet figured out.
I see no reason at all to think we're just going 'solve' ageing overnight, as the professor seems to think.
Admittedly, the claim being made here is rather optimistic, but it isn't entirely without merit. There is an open question about how difficult the aging problem really is. Aging *could* be surprisingly simple, with just a few genes needing to be tweaked to stop chemical timers that kill cells and inhibit healing. We have many examples of creatures which effectively don't age or even reverse aging during certain events, so we may just need to find analogues in humans, turn them on, and bam, we stop aging. It could be that the only reason we haven't done this previously is we didn't have the right tools for analyzing and altering genes until the last decade or so.
Of course, we probably don't have enough information to know how difficult a problem aging is going to be. Even if this claim is accurate, it is likely that anything it creates will just uncover new problems which will, in turn, need addressing. On the other hand, we thought that gastric ulcers were a hard problem and when a researcher suggested that treatment for most could be as simple as taking a course of antibiotics, he was laughed out of the room.
Except that the rich would find a way around it, legally or otherwise.
Identity farms would do a booming business.
Good for them. I certainly would never want the fear of a few people gaming the system to stop everyone else enjoying their lives far more.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
How cute. You believe that you can get rich. By "hard work", I assume?
That's really adorable!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are you sure? I've always found it ironic that people who can't find anything to do on a Sunday afternoon, still want to live forever.
I am not the kind of person who can't find anything to do on a Sunday afternoon. I have an extremely full and happy life and would love to add 10, 20, 100, 500 years to that.
Sundays afternoons are actually when I frequently nap because I'm so exhausted from the rest of the week!
And we still don't really know if we will be able to live forever, or whether we will just be able to live healthily for longer
As a practical matter it's always about getting past the next obstacle rather than living forever. Defeat one cause of death and you are on to the next, which may not even be discovered yet.
And even if we could, would it be desirable to live forever? Would anybody want to go on after 200 years? How about 500? 1000? 10000? 1 million? 1 billion?
Those who don't desire it certainly wouldn't have to do it. And those who want to keep going are certainly welcome to, assuming of course that they aren't doing it at the expense of others.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Well, then, sign me up for YOUR spot on the list.
I do want to live forever....hell, if the vampire thing was real, I'd do it in a heartbeat!!
Seriously....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Screw the rich. It is also my ultimate dream. I intend to live forever, or die trying.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts.
No it isn't moving the goal posts.
It depends on what you think the "goal posts" are. I would argue that the opposite of "aging" isn't "living forever." It's, well, NOT AGING.
What is "aging"? Most of it associate it with the kind of stuff you and GP both bring up, i.e., gradual degradation in various parts of the body and mind. One can cure "aging" partially by reducing that sort of degradation.
Unless you are literal believer in the story of Methuselah, we have never observed any human living longer than 125 years or so. Plenty of people have lived into their 100s before most of what we consider modern medicine was available. They just had to be incredibly lucky to live that long without something else coming along to kill them first.
Again, stopping aging is a separate issue from life extension. Suppose you had a car whose engine was just going to die around 200,000 miles no matter what -- it was just part of the design. But the other parts would gradually degrade, meaning that the best part of the lifespan of the car was the first 50,000 miles, followed by random repairs and problems for the next 50,000, and at that point you'd be better off just selling the car because after 100,000 miles the thing just required repair after repair to just keep it going. The engine was still good, but it had "aged" and become useless.
But what if you could "cure" that aging for all the other car parts and have a car that ran great for all 200,000 miles of the engine's lifespan? I think almost everyone would agree that that would be fantastic and would be a significant advance in "reducing the aging" of the vehicle. Even though it completely "died" at the same time, curing "aging" is still a significant improvement and benefit.
And in that sense, we ARE moving the goalposts, because many of those traditional elements of aging can be delayed or halted for a while -- which allows more and more people to make use of those "extra miles" getting up toward 100 years.
So here is the question: if you can give me some gene therapy that will prevent me from just sorta shutting down in my middle 90s, as so many of my relatives have great, but how does that mean I die ultimately. Does it mean I am going stroke out or something. Does it mean I am going to live for years with conditions that are debilitating? Is that even what I want.
Again, you're confusing aging with life extension. The very definition of "curing aging" has to do with keeping you in a state where you aren't debilitated by the problems of "old age." If you just extend life, you haven't actually cured aging.
For my own anecdote, the sister of one of my great-grandparents lived to 106. I remember going to visit her when she was 102 and finding her in the garden vigorously digging and turning over the soil. Even when she was 100 years old, she probably looked (and apparently felt) like somebody who was typically 70 or 75, maybe younger.
Figuring out how to do THAT sort of thing would actually be working toward a cure for aging. Personally, I don't know whether I'd want to live much more than 100 years (if that). But if you told me I could live those full 100 years in great health, I'd commend you for curing aging and raise a toast to you.
The people seeking immortality are the crazier ones. The ones who just want to stop aging are pursuing a more useful goal.
I was here to say exactly this.
I am late to the sport of running (started 6 years ago, at age 36), but I recognized that many runners I had talked to in the past complained of injuries as a result of running.
Come back in 30 yers with 36 year old legs, and I'll belive all of that.
As much great fun as it is to blame people's physical ailments on what they did "wrong", just like aging, I suspct there is more in genetics than anything else.
I played and exercised hard compared to most people. It wore my lower body out. Some from repetitive stress injuries, some from general injuries, a lot from genetics. This is not really all that unusual. Old jocks often have a lot of leg problems, and the natural runners from long ago usually didn't make it to their 60's, so how do we know they were doing it right?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.