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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.
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.
use it for space travel!
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.
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.
It has been said that if all causes of death other than trauma were eliminated, our lifespan would average about 650 years. What would probably happen is that the population would be stabilized by reducing the birthrate accordingly. The resulting social changes would be major, but not the end of the world. The longer lifetimes we already enjoy have resulted in social changes that have been absorbed over the years.
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.
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!
Our problem isn't that people get older. That could be fixed by letting people work longer. Our problem is that people get older but do not age in a healthy way. Yes, people to their 80s routinely today. But more and more of them are by no means able to do any meaningful work anymore by the time they hit 60. You can't have people work 'til they're 80 because they are in no condition anymore to do any sensible work long before they even get close to 80.
THAT is the problem. If we can age AND stay healthy, all we have to solve is simply how we get more jobs, which would probably be easy to solve with more people being able to enjoy an active lifestyle.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
OR terminate everybody at the age of 100 but give them the body of a 30 year old for the last 70 years of their life. I'd want that.
Except that the rich would find a way around it, legally or otherwise.
Identity farms would do a booming business.
and always will be.
Explain Keanu Reeves, then.
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
Also when you die in the game, you die for real.
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.
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.
I developed an economic policy, including transitions and risk management, that eliminates all homelessness and hunger in the United States. This strategy would have bankrupt the entire population in 1950 immediately (costs 120%+ of the total income of everyone), would have been prohibitively expensive in 2000, showed indications of viability in 2009, and became less expensive than current public aid system in 2013.
Some of my models show the top tax bracket raising from 39.6% to as high as 41%. Taxes on businesses drop by 4.5%. Taxes on every other individual income class drop more substantially, although those rates above $200k of income are effectively unchanged.
Do you know what people do when faced with a working, well-designed plan like that?
They complain it doesn't tax the rich enough, so they don't pay their fair share, so we shouldn't do it.
People don't care about every single human being on the planet--including themselves--living better lives; they care about the 5 or 10 people who are cheating. They want to sacrifice the entire human population to bring swift retribution unto the rich, the illegal immigrant, the drug dealer, the welfare slob, anyone they don't perceive as being as much of a valid human being as themselves. It distresses them that someone who is clearly beneath them enjoys a benefit in life they clearly don't deserve.
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I haven't figured out all the economic factors, and only have the rough observation: populations do not expand into poverty. I don't know why. I know why poor people don't expand themselves into starvation, but I don't know why middle-class and rich people don't expand to 18-child families to fit their means at the expense of crushing the poor people.
The rough theory is easy enough: scarcity limits population growth. I don't use the classical economics definition of scarcity; I use a more complete model which produces the classical economics definition as a simplification.
Consider if you have limited fertile land, such that 10 hours of labor per week produces food for 1,000 people. Expand the population by 4,000 and you need 1 extra person working 40 hours per week to make food, and the other 3,999 go into other industries.
Now expand the population until you're out of fertile land.
Expand the population by 4,000 again, past the limit. You're now growing on less-fertile land. You need to irrigate. You need to fertilize. You get half as much yield, so you need to irrigate and fertilize and harvest twice as much land. Instead of 40 hours per week to produce food for these 4,000 people, you need to expend 120 hours per week (working twice the land with 1.5 times as much labor time invested per land unit). You have to assign 3 extra people working 40 hours per week each, leaving you 3,997 workers to enter other industries.
This means two things.
First, the specific cost of that additional lot of rice is three times as much as the prior lot. Instead of paying one guy for 40 hours, you pay three guys for 40 hours each, only to produce the same amount. That doesn't consider if the fertilizer producers or the water pumping infrastructure are run by workers with higher salaries than your agricultural workers.
Second, you're short 80 hours per week of work in other industries. Out of these 4,000 new people, someone is getting a slightly lower quality of life because we don't have the capacity to produce some trinket everyone takes for granted, because the 2 extra people we'd hire to expand capacity and produce goods for the expanded population are busy making food.
That means the ability to provide supply for some goods is reduced. The labor-hours to provide supply of some good increases as the demand increases, and so the cost of a good increases. The demand for some other good increases, but that good can't be produced--or maybe the people who would buy it are just struggling to afford food now, since food is expensive, so the demand for that other good decreases, and we're just a little less wealthy.
A gross simplification of one aspect of this is that demand exceeds supply, and prices go up. Demand exceeds supply *because* scaling up supply requires more labor (thus more cost) than the proportion by which we've scaled supply up, and so supplying is hard, and costs increase. It's not that we can't supply; it's that we can't supply cheaply at this scale of production.
Eventually, we will run out of capacity to produce cheap food. I don't care how much excess capacity we have right now; expand the population by twice that much and you will run out of capacity and have higher food prices and lower capacity to produce other goods due to reduced labor availability.
Expand population too much and your entire population becomes poor.
How that actually carries out in real life is, again, a mystery. I know the population will suffer if it expands; I don't know what stresses appear to tell population to stop growing.
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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.