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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."
That should coincide with the perfection of nuclear fusion reactors and the release of Hurd 1.0.
That would certainly be wonderful, and I'm sure it's theoretically possible at one point, but I wonder if it's a bit overoptimistic. I mean a lot overoptimistic.
If they are going to solve this problem in five years I don't need to worry at all about diet and exercise, right? What an excuse for not taking good care of myself....
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Jesus, this would be the end of the human race. Can you imagine what would happen to the population if people no longer aged and only died from accidents, murder, or war? Can you imagine how long the food supply would be adequate if the population were to increase unbounded? Do you think that this would be given out to everyone, or would someone (or some government) use it to become ridiculously wealthy and powerful by controlling it? Do you honestly think you could convince people to stop procreating? The only way this would work would be if the anti aging treatment was combined with sterilization treatment. Even then, the number of young 'breeders' would rapidly increase. Famine, wars, poverty, suffering ... I am not the religious sort, but I think if this guy pulls it off he would be the equivalent of the AntiChrist.
Oh great, now Trump is going to live forever.Thank you, Science.
Toot late! I will be already old in five years.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
Aging is one of the main drivers for many incurable diseases like Alzheimer, Parkinson but anyway I find it difficult to "cure" aging before solving riddles like cancer.
Thirty years from now we'll read about Bill Gates dying of old age. Then, days later, all his money will be given to a mysterious heir who looks just like he did when he was twenty years old.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
use it for space travel!
Longer living people in retirement will doom the economics that the whole country requires to operate. The existing Social Security system is already insolvent actuarially. A "Cure for Aging" would just make it collapse sooner.
To maintain the economics of US society, it would become mandatory to work until you are 85 or 90 years old.
Conveniently in time to enable the professor to live forever, right?
Bullshit. There's even a name for this idiocy: the Maes–Garreau law.
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. I see no reason at all to think we're just going 'solve' ageing overnight, as the professor seems to think.
The entire argument seems to be something something gene editing. Not good enough.
These things tend to improve incrementally, and if we're lucky, medical science may soon take the first step in combating ageing.
Then it will happen eventually. Humans are just that persistent. If this is flat out not possible, then it just won't happen. Either way we will rightfully scoff at any such radical claim until it is demonstrated to work and is proven safe. If it is possible, I would not mind if this really is it.
As it stands my own continued existence is a product of gene therapy, and it's not even entirely human DNA. This being such a radical treatment, it was the sort of thing we all scoffed at before it was demonstrated to work, albeit not entirely safely. This is only increasingly become the norm. The science we are dealing with is advancing faster than we can keep up with. At some point very soon, we may just have to hit the brakes on genetic manipulation so that we can catch up with what we have created.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Just in time so I can go on forever in my flying car.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Not in five years, maybe not in fifty; this is so absurdly over-optimistic, it's not even funny.
http://xkcd.com/1605/
We know SO LITTLE about how genes actually function to produce, well, you, the idea that we can, within five years, figure out which genes are "responsible" for aging and turn them off/around is ridiculous. The amount of feedback looping going on, even if we knew which genes produced which raw proteins, is so twisted that even figuring out the protein synthesis process itself requires super-computers, much less figuring out how all those proteins interact with your body.
We heard all this very same talk when the first Human Genome Project results were released. Please tell me what grand advances that has brought us, other than a few diagnostic tests, and some treatments for a couple rare diseases.
Is "in just 5 or 6 years" the universal code for "I have an idea, it doesn't work, but I need to get some PR in the meantime"?
Because when I see it I mostly think "sure, whatever, tell me about it in 5 years when it actually happens".
So many things come along and say "in 5 years", and then 5 years later we hear nothing more about it.
I've taken to assuming that all such claims are pretty much bullshit. Stopping aging in 5 years? Yeah, I'll stick with my assumption this is bullshit too.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I was thinking that, in the future, people are going to look back on us, much like we look back at old black and white films and realize that everyone pictured is now dead, and feel sorry for us because we lived before some major breakthrough was made that prolongs life extensively. We will have existed on one side of that technological divide along with billions that have lived and died before us, who were relegated to natural lifespans. They will look back on us and wonder how things may have been if our Einsteins, etc, had lived three for four lifetimes and were still contributing to humanity.
Better known as 318230.
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.
People like Church and Lander are excellent scientists in their specific areas. But they sound incredibly naive when talking about issues outside their area. My recommendation: don't believe the promises that these people are making (like "curing aging" in five years). On the other hand, don't give in to their fears either ("'we' need to go slowly").
I hope people will work aggressively on gene therapy for aging, human cloning, genetic manipulation of human and animal embryos, and xenotransplantation. I also hope people will do so responsibly and not create disabled human beings or cause animal suffering. And the best way of doing that is for people to talk about ideas freely and take individual responsibility for their actions, and to spread funding widely. The worst thing we can do is to create blanket bans on certain techniques out of irrational fears, or to invest billions of dollars into a few showcase projects over empty promises.
Why do people keep deferring their journey to pearly gates to meet their maker ?
On a serious note, we have a population crisis!
That's the root cause for every socio-political problems in our time.
I'd rather be excited if academics, medical practitioners, politicians and alike embark on an project to legalize "ethical euthanasia".
It's not like the clinical trials can be run in much less time.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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!
I'm tempted to real your English for you
Why? Is there some rich guy interested in that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From Wikipedia
Cells in the germ line (sperm and ova) have an enzyme called telomerase.
(emphasis added)
When cells run out of telomere, they stop dividing. When the body can't make new cells, it ages and dies. If you want to not age, you have to get your somatic cells to produce telomerase. But then, cancer...
Bacteria avoid this whole problem by having circular chromosomes. No ends, no telomeres, no telomerase. And bacteria are...you know...kind of immortal. They just grow and divide, grow and divide, worlds without end.
Side effects may include:
- Profuse rectal bleeding
- Projectile vomiting
- Sterility
- Excessive Gas
- Delusions of Grandeur
- Suicidal Thoughts
- Death
If I were going to stop aging, I'd like to stop aging at 35.
"You sure you wouldn't prefer to be, like, 20 again?"
"No, thanks, 35 for me. I like my bald spot, graying temples, hairy back, incipient presbyopia, and pot belly just fine."
"Uh... look, sir, I'll level with you. This treatment can only take you back to early adulthood. You don't get to pick a particular age or anything."
"Oh, in that case, never mind, I don't want it."
So he's a Harvard Professor must be true, right? Wasn't Ted Kaczynski also a Harvard professor?
My worst nightmare is coming true, that some morning when I'm 75 (in five years), I'll stumble out of bed, make coffee, turn on my computer and discover there's a cure for aging. So I'll get to spend the next 450 years going to the gym with my 75 year-old body and having to deal with a bunch of forever-40s saying to themselves: "Look at him; I'd rather be dead than 75".
Please Lord, don't make it happen when I'm 85... And I want my erection back! My only consolation is knowing that 20 year-olds will be terrified of being mugged by packs of rich, old bodyswappers. How would you like to be 20 and wake up after a hard night of drinking and flirting with a 75 year-old body? And at least for me this puts a whole new slant on the issue of transgendered rights; after all, I might wind up as a cute, blonde 21 year-old coed... until I get mugged.
Young people in the gig economy are just getting used to the idea that there is no such thing as lifetime employment. Now they may have to get used to the idea that there is no such thing as a lifetime body.
And a cure for world overpopulation
And climate change? Are the visionaries working on those, too?
I actually want to start this argument.
What is the problem with "overpopulation" How do you define it?
Is a planet overpopulated because we can't produce enough food for everyone? About this, here's a conceptual 21th centory farming tower : http://www.popsci.com/cliff-ku...
With this, you can produce food for 50k people with a 30 story tower. So, unless I make a huge mistake somewhere, it's untrue that the earth can only produce food for 10 or so billion people.
Or is it the pollution and the destruction of the nature? I am going to say something really sad here, but will humanity really need nature to survive in the 22th century? A good image is the planet Coruscant from the Star Wars franchise, the planet is one big city, nothing else. Yeah it's sad and I love nature too, but there's tech to remove our dependency of mother nature.
Or is it the pollution and the global warming? Well, there is something to be worried. But I'm a optimist one. The reason why we are slow to fight global warming is mostly an economical one. But guess what, one of the first city to drown will be New York with a estimated GMP over a trillion dollars. So I think that, soon enough, there'll suddenly a lot more money available to fight global warming (Well, "soon" is a long shot since the sea is rising a few millimetres each years). And I also have faith in new green tech on the way to help us out.
Elok
"We have become masters in the art of manipulating genes, but our understanding of their function and interaction is far more limited."
No we haven't. Human genetic science is still in the very early stages, and we've only begun to understand complex DNAs in a very, very general fashion. In another couple decades, we'll probably still be working away at it. It does rise to an interesting question though; If we learn to alter our DNA, and somehow do make ourselves immortal (which I heavily doubt), would it really be in our best interest? We have problems with population as it is, and at the rate we go, we'd exhaust the remainder of Earth's resources very quickly. Better work on that space technology...
Also, I wonder if humans were meant to get this far? We evolved from basic primates to this level through millions of years. If you take an intelligent lifeform, is it possible that given enough time, it will always find a way to self-modify itself? Questions we might want to start asking ourselves, because we'll certainly want the protocol figured out before we actually get to immortality...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
It's funny. They are talking about curing aging as if aging was a disease.
Finally, a cure for inheritance tax, now dynasties can last forever without any of those pesky government taxed transfers of wealth.
1) Effective life span now is only about 40% longer. Yes, only 40% longer. People don't die of old age, they die of diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, etc.
2) Social Security on the other hands GOES AWAY. If we no longer die of old age, then we don't have to pay people for being too old to work. Same goes for Medicare.
3) Those currently on Social Security get moved to Disability - with their disability being their aging was stopped at a weakened state. They continue to get paid until they die.
4) Birth Rate sky ROCKETS. Much more than 40%, because while you might live to 120 on average, at the age of 100 you will still be just as interested in sex, as your body is still young AND you will not be worrying about being unable to put children through college at 120.
5) Divorce rate goes up. When you hit 60, it won't be "eh, I can't do better", but instead "Yeah, I can do better".
6) But as men take to take more risks and less care for their health, their will be more older women than older men. Similarly, the older population will likely be more white, more wealthy, and more risk adverse.
7) Politics will become more conservative Not because older people become conservative, but because liberal ideas advance. So a person that was a huge liberal 100 years ago has the same ideas, but those ideas are considered conservative. Example: Consider a man like Abraham Lincoln. The Great Emancipator who freed the slaves. One of the shining lights of liberalism of his time. Who on at least one occasion said that whites were superior to blacks, didn't think blacks should serve on juries, nor allowed to marry whites. Would his views have evolved if he were still alive today? Perhaps. But not all of his contemporaries would have evolved at the same rate.
Frankly, I don't think we are ready to stop aging, even if we could (which we can't).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
and always will be.
Explain Keanu Reeves, then.
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I read something about 10-15 years ago about this and the author said, despite this type of medical technology, anti-aging doesn't mean immortality. He proposed even if you stopped or reversed aging, you could only live to be about 300 years old. At that point, something would get you: murder, plane crash, illness, etc.
While I'm not an expert on the topic of society and the rise in violence, poverty, etc. I do believe overpopulation does not help the issues. The details, I speculate, could be desperation in the face of poverty, shortages of food/water/fuel, and yet we just keep breeding while we live longer. This would bring the death rate so low compared to today's standards I'm sure we would surely test the viability of our natural resources. We would either be living on top of each other as the population booms and be at a higher risk of disease outbreaks or we would invade the farm land and decrease the production of food which would only be in higher demand. Maybe the issues at hand are not as bad as I think they are since information of them spread so quickly in the information age. I'm not making changes however because I'm human and a clinician that promotes health and I have a son and another due any day.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
A natural process that is a result of being made of biological components is not a disease.
One thing that I will always find intriguing/amusing are self-proclaimed 'men of science' who purport to be staunch atheists, yet seem so bound and determined to stop what they should know to be a natural evolutionary process. People like this professor, and also those that claim that through some sort of special diet/routine they can achieve immortality (example: Ray Kurzweil). What is interesting is that the majority of the people who fall for this nonsense are not your typical image of "nutjob", but instead are often very intelligent people. I see two possibilities:
1. Deep down, they are not really atheists and are afraid that when they die whatever God that judges them will send them to a terrible afterlife.
2. (More likely) They do not believe in any sort of afterlife, and because it is so difficult for the human mind to even imagine a complete lack of existence, they are scared shitless by their own mortality.
Do you really want to live forever? There's only so much life has to offer.
It's called a pine box.
I'm well aware that the "overpopulation" myth is BS and that the limits to earth's carrying capacity, if there even are such limits, have yet to be seriously explored. I'd quibble with a couple things though.
Yes, IMO, we do need "nature," because (a) that is most of what generates much of our oxygen, and (b) it is the most sensible use for much of the land in even a very densely populated world. That some of the most densely populated cities in the world (New York, Paris, Hong Kong, probably others) also find space for beautiful park systems seems to me a strong argument that we need not eliminate "nature" in order to achieve a vastly higher population or population density than we have today.
The problem of pollution will need to be addressed in a sustainable fashion. A large part of that solution will be technology. The U.S. manufactures almost as much as China today, by some measures more, yet it does so far more cleanly, because today, we can afford cleaner methods of production, while China can't. That is not a function of the number of people there, but simply their as-yet lower level of development. When they are as wealthy as we are, they'll be able to afford to produce more cleanly, and they will.
I do not believe that humans have much understanding of climate, frankly, much less that they have much influence over it on a global level. Sufficiently large cities, however, do become heat islands. We will have to use technology, and probably energy (hopefully cleanly and sustainably produced) to deal with this, especially in the parts of the world which are already hot and/or humid. Again, increasing development and hence wealth should help. If the global climate does become significantly warmer, some adjustments will be necessary, of course, but it should actually be an overall help to humanity, not a hindrance, because it will open up vast regions in the world to agriculture that cannot be done in those regions today. (It will of course reduce production in some places as well, but the net effect will be not a loss of total land suitable for agriculture but a huge, huge gain.)
One challenge we will have to tackle: the near-universal human obsession with big governments, nation-states, collectivism, and war. All of those things in their current form are incompatible with life, even life as we know it today, much less the life that could exist on a wealthier, more densely populated, more civilized planet. In fact, IMO, those things constitute the chief impediment to becoming such a world.
Nonaggression works!
I really get upset when I read people writing about how germline editing is unethical. My wife suffers from terrible symptoms that are at least partially genetic. It had not flared up, we did not know how bad it would get before we had our daughter. It is unlikely we will have a second child. We don't know what she inheritted. It could get bad for her in her teens, her 20s or even her 30s. We will not know until if/when it happens. It is scary.
So many people seem to be saying that even if it is possible to eliminate such suffering we shouldn't do so. We should just keep passing it down to our children because that is 'natural'.
I wish they could all suffer a single day of all the terrible things they would like to condemn our descendants to, just long enough to realize how horribly wrong they are.
Germline editing I think is the BEST way to handle genetic disease. Eliminate it once and for all. Even if the same disease can be treated so as to eliminate the symptom.. what if one day a descendant of the patient is unable to obtain the treatment?
That is truly the question. As someone who believes in life before death but not after, I accept the likelihood of oblivion, but would just assume avoid it all the same.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The morality wizards want to put on their pointy hats and insert themselves everywhere they can. Curing diseases or eliminating pain and suffering is what medicine is all about. Otherwise, why call an ambulance when someone has an emergency? Saving the life of an elder is the same morally as saving the life of an infant. Yet we will have so-called morality oriented people who will raise all kinds of hell if we have even the slightest negative attached to genetic therapy. So you have a bunch of 80-year-old people who are partially functional and you reverse their aging process but 1% die from the treatment. Why would that be an issue at all? Frankly we know that every now and then people perish from having a tooth pulled. That does not mean we should have everyone walking about with a toothache.
"I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I’d settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice." -- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, MorganLink 3DVision Interview
Geneticists like Church know a lot about gene blueprints, less about their expression, a lot less about development, and they know absolutely nothing about ageing or disease. Their work doesn't touch on 95% of disease in any way, including ageing (a phenomenon that is unrelated to genetics).
Church should be ashamed for spouting such clueless hyperbolic fantasy. My respect for him just dropped through the floor. He's just another snake oiler.
“One of our biggest economic disasters right now is our aging population. If we eliminate retirement, then it buys us a couple of decades to straighten out the economies of the world,” he said.
But if this could be done and is done without a plan in place to keep immortals from having babies, we'll have a much bigger economic, social, political, enviornmental or whatever disaster you can name on our hands.
It is unwise to ascribe motive
I don't think I'll be holding my breath for either of these to actually happen however.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
We all have a chance of living forever. Our sample size is just too small.
I'm gonna leave these here:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi...
He effected a bored affect.
Aging has been cured. You'll be 95 years old forever!
Not many people know that Liz Parrish is patient zero for her company BioViva. They used gene therapy to try and reverse ageing in her to see if it works. They used two genes, I forget what they're called but the idea was extend the telomeres. Every few months they'll be testing to see how she's doing and if any ageing was indeed reversed.
Keep in mind that BioViva used viruses and not CRISPR to do this. Even if this doesn't work, it's just a matter of time before they find the right genes needed to reverse ageing. That's what the Google backed Calico is all about. It's very feasible that within 5 years we'll find the right combination of genes to reverse ageing. Doesn't mean that within 5-6 years you'll visit your doctor and get CRISPR injections just yet. Clinical trials will take 10 years before all this is approved, at least.
A man sits in the waiting room.
The doctor enters, gives him the shot and then says:"I have good news and bad news, which one do you want first?"
"The good one always first." replies the man.
The doctor says: "After this shot, you'll live about another thousand years!"
"Great" says the man, "and the bad news?"
"Well", the doctor says, "you'll have to keep working that crappy job for another 985 years."
I think this concept was explored in the movie "In Time". It's an OK movie, a bit over the top at the end. Still it had some interesting ideas. I would expect that given how increases in productivity had been with held from most of humanity the movies depiction of the poor always being on death's doorstep is likely. It's an interesting thought - how would you decide who gets to live forever? One would hope that some thresh old would be used but who sets that and what criteria are used? Those who can afford it? Those who are pleasant, good looking, athletic, intelligent, etc? Those who have provably contributed something to society? Interesting question.
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Aging is a highly complex thing, with many factors. Just thinking of PSEN-1 PSEN-2 APOE and all the other ones, this is a dream.
Unlike fusion energy. We actually have a working fusion reactor on the UW Seattle campus. That does exist.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So on Tuesday, I asked him if he was still on track to reversing the aging process in the next five years or so. He said yes — and that it’s already happening in mice in the laboratory. The best way to predict the future, he said, is to predict things that have already happened.
Details. Is he talking about unpublished work? Does he expect these mice to live forever, or have only some aspects of their aging been reversed? If not all of them, then the ones that aren't will kill them eventually, so it's not true age reversal.
I love the conceit that we could do something analogous to changing a line of code in our genes to just STOP ageing. It's like saying cancer is genetic. Preventing deterioration of our bodies in every way shape and form will take more than genetic manipulation.
You can check him out here.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
In fact if I developed such an advance tomorrow I'd be burning my notes! We haven't got a handle on problems of overpopulation and environmental degradation as it is -- a significant boost in the human lifespan would likely be a total disaster.
I think this is patently false. After all, why do people engage in short-sighted behavior in the first place? In large part, it's because long term consequences aren't their problem. They won't be alive to be concerned about consequences.
That life extension method of drinking red wine that they told us about last decade. Urp.
Well, the thing is, even if we HAD a "DNA Beautifier", which we do not, even neat, organized, DNA is about as useful as handing that Google.com code over to my 96-year-old Grandmother and asking her to interpret exactly, with perfect precision, what even part of it does. We simply do not know enough about protein synthesis for the source code to be of much use at all, and there aren't any obvious efforts on the horizon for great leaps forward in that respect.
As pipe dreams go, this isn't such a bad one, assuming that some other set of geniuses (not geneticists) has figured out where we find the resources to support everyone's living forever.
And then only people who receive this therapy will be the rich.
According to the story it is bound to happen sometime!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
"the ethics and the feasibility of using it to cure disease" - WTF is unethical about curing disease? No no no, that's really bad, we must never cure people, people must be left to suffer....
On topic...the first round of anti-aging experiments will probably go badly. But that won't stop people from volunteering. Better to be a mutant super-monster than dead.
How far would you take that?
No matter what it is, say, whatever you personally find most offensive, you either become... or perish forever.
NO matter the measure, would there always be a miserable life that was better than the greatest death?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I wouldn't mind more days from my teens or even 30s. Getting old really really sucks!
Crispr sounds like that big drawer at the bottom of the fridge. Everything I put in there rots away to a disgusting mess quite quickly: much like old people really. Perhaps they should call their age-reversing conference ROTTER . Really Old Tiny Tots Evading Reality.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
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.
i MAY stop ageing, but MY PROSTRATE will have to be advised to stop growing. IHe could arrest one bodily action, but others will continue, like prostrate, teeth fall-out, memory... and more.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada