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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.
use it for space travel!
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
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....
Now that is a very interesting comment. I think it speaks to the odd puritanical streak in some folks, that somehow being healthy without sacrifice is bad. Certainly I'd like a way to not have to got to extremes for physical fitness. At my physical height, I bicycled 30 miles per day, ran 3 miles per day, and did weights every other day. Top it off with three Ice Hockey games a week.
Now whether or not that would make me live longer - which I doubt - it did give me some wicked CV stamina. Ruined my legs though. But in the end, and in retrospect. It was just about all I did for many years outside of work. That Calvanistic streak coupled with the idea that all we have to do is "take care of ourselves" simply ain't all that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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
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.
My brain has room for approximately 500 years of unedited memories; I don't know how it handles overload, but I suspect it will remove the least-used. The problem is memories aren't discrete: they're built out of piles of association, and removing one part of the memory removes a *lot* of memories.
Geriatrics to make you about 30-40 years old until you're about 300 would be cool. 1000-year lives would probably suck.
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