Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
I'm tempted to real your English for you
Side effects may include:
- Profuse rectal bleeding
- Projectile vomiting
- Sterility
- Excessive Gas
- Delusions of Grandeur
- Suicidal Thoughts
- Death
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
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.