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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."
use it for space travel!
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.