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First Successful Gene Therapy Against Human Aging? (geekwire.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
For the first time data may show that a human being has been successfully rejuvenated by gene therapy, claims Bioviva USA. "In September 2015, then 44 year-old CEO of Bioviva USA Inc. Elizabeth Parrish received two of her own company's experimental gene therapies: one to protect against loss of muscle mass with age, another to battle stem cell depletion responsible for diverse age-related diseases and infirmities." Bypassing America's FDA, the controversial therapies were described by the MIT Technology Review as "do-it-yourself medicine," saying it "raises ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators."
"The treatment was originally intended to demonstrate the safety of the latest generation of the therapies," reports Bioviva's web site. "But if early data is accurate, it is already the world's first successful example of telomere lengthening via gene therapy in a human individual."
but i forgot what it was
If old people are going to stay around, they should consider going back to work too, otherwise it won't be affordable.
Medical advances like this is why some people don't understand that I'm not planning to retire at 65 and live another 75 years until I'm dead at 120. Outliving retirement funds will be a serious problem for most people in the future.
She looks 54 with pancaked on makeup. Is this the future?
A bit off topic, but can anyone recommend some good science fiction novels that deal with this subject (i.e. the consquences of living in a world where aging was suddenly easily cured, and people died only by violence (and maybe disease too))?
Maybe, but the money is in creating macro penis syndrome.
She only took the treatment 7 months ago. How much could we really know about it's efficacy in such a short period? Unless she reverted to looking like a 20 year old person (she doesn't), then I have a hard time believing that it's really working. Also, we don't know how it will effect her long term.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I read somewhere that, on average, you'd be killed in some accident by 150 anyway.
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/b...
For one thing, the findings haven't yet been submitted for peer-reviewed publication.
Regulations are seriously hindering a lot of science, and most of it is completely unneeded because it is broad as fuck regulations that never occur unless you are talking about some sci-fi / crime TV show.
I highly expected it from China, but then again, population problems, etc.
They have been doing things a lot of other countries think repulsively of, yet cause zero harm. (unless you think some cells are conscious, like some retards do)
Ageing is a by-product of evolution.
Creatures that were genetically immortal usually outlived their welcome because they lacked basic moderation of consumption. The only ones left were the ones that died off, which allowed offspring to survive longer to repeat the process. (said deaths also left behind useful nutrients to feed on)
Humans have intelligence to fall back on, but of course, I say that, look at the fucking state of society right now.
We COULD become genetically immortal, but the way society is now, it needs to completely change.
I personally wouldn't like immortality in the human race if we hadn't reached a post-scarcity society.
We are on the verge of becoming such a society as there are 7 (last I checked) different groups all working on space mining now. Including 2 governments.
It will take anywhere from 50-100 years for there to be any meaningful progress in that area, so best start eating healthy and living well if you want to be immortal, if not, continue playing chicken with genetic buses.
"..Judge orders gene therapy so convicted can serve full 200 year sentence..."
Well, sounds like at least it didn't kill her yet. What about other side-effects though? Super powers? Mutations? If it all goes badly wrong, I wonder if we'll ever hear about it?
We'll only know when and and, most importantly, if she manages to substantially outlive most people of her age.
What was done is reckless, but pushing progress is often non-linear process that requires reckless extermination. Good example is Charles Goodyear and rubber vulcanization.
Wow! That would be very similar results to what has been demonstrated with a Vegan diet.
I'll take a shot, a ribeye steak, and skip the vegetables. (and still look young)
The woman is the CEO of the company making this so-called anti-aging treatment. AND she located the company outside the US to escape FDA requirements that a therapy be proven to be safe and effective. Could it be true? Maybe, but it looks more like snake oil to me.
Double life expectancy and effectively double the population. I'm sure the Earth is up for that.
Some observations which may seem obvious but bear mentioning: (1) In today's out-of-control / Ponzi monetary system, this is almost enough to start a speculative bubble (2) At some point anti-aging breakthroughs at a fundamental level are inevitable (3) When real anti-aging therapies become available they are going to be priced out of this world...literally priced for billionaries. The LAST thing in the world your health-insurance is likely to underwrite is something which will extend your natural lifespan to something preternatural. Can you imagine ObamaCare doing that? Can you imagine the impact of such a move, were it to occur, on the broken pension/SS/medicare system and the negative interest rate economy in general? (4) We have a problem already with "elites" buying it all -- including complete control of the government. Can you imagine the situation when billionaires -- and only billionaires -- can afford to live forever? (5) That's right: totalitarianism by the 0.001% for the 0.001% ... forever.
I'd say if we are going to "fix" the government and monetary/tax system we might want to fix it sooner than later.
Pasteur himself was absolutely fearless. Anxious to secure a sample of saliva straight from the jaws of a rabid dog, I once saw him with the glass tube held between his lips draw a few drops of the deadly saliva from the mouth of a rabid bull-dog, held on the table by two assistants, their hands protected by leather gloves.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Not that I wish anyone dead, but if we have people living longer, it will strain the food supply, the job market, and the ecosystem in general. We need to start building moon bases and heading to Mars or we're really going to run out of resources.
"I once saw him with the glass tube held between his lips draw a few drops of the deadly saliva from the mouth of a rabid bull-dog"
Wow! It sounds like YOU have the secret to long life, since Pasteur died over 120 years ago.
Baby boomers have no time to waste. If they want to try let them retards death is death.
If it works great, population explosion to the tenth power combined with the rise of ubiquitous automation and competent AI might force us to move out into the solar system. Although I can think of a few political leaders and, ahem..., candidates who should not be allowed access to this. Oh yeah, some figures in business too. I shutter to think of a world where certain ass hats could potentially maintain their power status indefinitely.
"itâ(TM)s going to take 15-20 years to get a drug through, but 100,000 people are going to die today! Weâ(TM)re so detached, how do you say that without feeling emotional? Thatâ(TM)s it, their value to this earth is gone. And itâ(TM)s real to them, itâ(TM)s very real to them. To us it seems like fantasy, but to them theyâ(TM)re facing their last moment, and we shouldnâ(TM)t feel comfortable with that."
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If longevity becomes a trend, there will be a natural economic adjustment which will force some people back to work.
The inevitability of death has been deeply ingrained into our collective psyche since before recorded history. Many wisdom traditions explain why it is better to eventually die...and they are going to start looking a whole lot sillier than they already do once we can actually keep ourselves going in perpetuity.
As an aside, I feel similarly about many cultural truisms. Like the notion that rich people aren't happy. What rubbish! Obviously this is just sour grapes on the part of envious poor people. See also: real beauty is on the inside, vegans are protein-starved and unhealthy, and single people are depressed.
The last thing we need is for people to live longer. What we do need is far less babies to begin with.
Give this a decade or so and maybe there actually is something to it. Before, it may just result in a net loss of life-expectancy. It will surely result in a significant loss of money to anybody that wants to risk it. Hey, maybe we can have Ray Kurzweil try it?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Finally something evangelicals can get behind? I don't think I stated that right.
ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators
If it's getting tested exclusively on CEO's then I don't see an ethical problem. Why shouldn't they be expected to eat their own dog food? These regulations are just to protect people who don't understand how the drug works and have other things to worry about - not to protect someone who can already give informed consent for the risks.
After all, dying and going to heaven (or hell) is a pretty important part of most religions...
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Unless experimental therapy is done outside government regulation, it will not be done.
Human beings are not white mice. Because of the length of human lifespans, in order to satisfy FDA regulations, the therapies would have to be tested for decades, not years. Who wants to wait until they are dead to try something that might extend one's healthy years?
If this means that such research must be done in China or some other country, then so be it.
What about mitochondrial deterioration, and beta-amyloid plaque buildup?
"On the bright side, you'll look fantastic until the day you die, and you could live until you're 150. On the downside you'll likely develop mitochondrial disease and Alzheimer's, and will spend your last years good-looking and debilitated, as a vegetable."
These two treatments only address two symptoms and ignore several other major chronic, progressive problems that are part of the spectrum of age-related disorders. I wish her luck trying to sneak off and get any other treatments. Talk about jumping the gun. :(
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
There the life extension is through the ability to transfer minds into implanted mind-hard-drives.
Which should in any logical universe lead to permanent youth for everyone AND elimination of poverty cause everyone could basically live off of interests on their savings, while sleeping for centuries in between, right?
Or buggering off to new frontiers and living happily forever there, right?
OR... and check this out... NEVER HAVING AN ECONOMIC PROBLEM ON ACCOUNT OF FASTER THEN LIGHT INFORMATION TRANSFER.
TIME TRAVEL FOR FUCKS SAKE!
Naaah... Because Morgan really, REALLY, fails to understand the basics of economy (and much more) - he decides such a world has to be a dystopia, despite also being a world of wast frontiers thanks to quite literal alien space bats.
Then he also piles on that such a society is both full of religious fundamentalism AS WELL AS tolerance of religious fundamentalism.
And less is said about his idea of sex and/or gender in a world where people can switch bodies on a whim the better.
The universe he builds doesn't hold water. Just like his idea of spray-on replacement for condoms.
Then again, most people don't really know how those things work anyway.
What he DOES do well is creating villains you'd really want to see beaten to a pulp.
And then he puts them through a wood chipper. And then pours gasoline all over it and lights it all on fire.
And then he defecates on the steaming remnants of the villain and the wood chipper.
Mini revenge fantasies.
But no... he's simply not capable of imagining a world where people are given what is basically an infinite lifespan.
Let alone a prolonged one.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Telomeres do shorten with aging. But having unshortened telomeres causes fatal glioblastomas.
Humans have evolved with built in planned obsolescence so that our genes in our children and grandchildren will have a better chance. Humans are a highly complex system made up of hundreds of thousands of components in our and our bacteria's cells and there are unlikely to be any simple re-engineerings that don't produce unintended consequences.
Well that is a worst case scenario but, we cannot say "Oh it does not matter what an individual does to themselves." if any of the technologies used involve the use of live virus particles or could interact with an existing infection in the patient. Imagine this technology getting accidentally blended with the influenza virus so that every time you got the flu you receive an overdose of the treatment until normal cancer preventing mechanisms in your cells can no longer function properly.
I am not saying this is the case this time, but the risk I am describing is logical and real so there should be no room to move legally outside of a regulatory environment and anyone who does so should be condemned for being so selfish and reckless.
Incredible things will be done in medicine, but sadly, not in the US. We're too "ethical". Which means centuries of delays, and research locked up behind pay walls.
> the controversial therapies were described by the MIT Technology Review as "do-it-yourself medicine," saying it "raises ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators."
Let me translate that for you: There are career criminals who want to limit what you can do with your own body. They want to control you.
Reminds me of Marie Curie
Released by popular demand for all citizens to test on themselves, ten years down the road we learn that the principal side effect is to eat away your brain and turn you into a zombie. The streets are infested with millions of zombies. You are the only survivor in your neighbourhood because with your home in foreclosure you could not afford the pills. Grab your gun and run.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is more of a poetic look at the topic of youth, ageing and death. I vaguely remember a short story which touched on the specific topic of what eternal youth was possible by drinking a potion made out of something cheap and ubiquitous, like a dandelion. How would a person decide when to stop taking this elixir? I don't remember the name of that story but it might have been in the book Dandelion Wine.
You'll catch on to FTL bit rather quickly. Like in the first few pages.
About at the time when you realize that the book doesn't start on Earth.
That Kovacs gets killed on Harlan's World.
That Kovacs gets beamed 180 light years to solve a crime. Which took place in the last 48 HOURS.
180 light years. 48 hours.
Until then, as someone else probably also missed that bit... there's a citation JUST FOR THAT.
Kovacs is an ex Envoy, a military unit formed to cope with the challenge of interstellar warfare.
Faster-than-light travel is only possible by subspace transmission, called needlecasting, of a digitally stored consciousness to "download centers"[2] where resleeving into physical bodies can be carried out.
Problem with Richard Morgan's writing is that he thinks he's creating these complex worlds and making these insightful social commentaries - when it is all just a juvenile macho fantasy, so everything is subjugated to THAT idea.
The characters, the world, the physics...
There's no need for his book to start 180 light years away... but he wants a YUUUGE universe.
There's no need for his character to die 180 light years away and be resurrected on Earth... but he wants him to be a YUUUGE badass. Back from the grave and all that.
Why not start a book 180 years ago? Have him already being shipped back to Earth and picked for solving the crime cause he's the best available on such a short notice - NOT THE BEST MEGA YUUUGE NINJA MacKiller PRO DETECTIVE SPECIAL FORCES SUPERGUY IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.
Nope. One of the richest people IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE (and we're talking hundreds of light years in every direction, literally billions of billions humans out there somewhere probably) - picks our badass with an OMG! Japanese slash Somewhere East European name.
He wrote his alter ego into a Deadpool - minus the 4th wall awareness and any sense of satire.
The badassest maddafakka in the Verse. Boiiii!
But since Morgan thinks of himself as this smart and socially insightful and sensitive guy... he then piles a bunch of juvenile understanding of social issues on top of his juvenile macho fantasy.
Which starts to show particularly whenever his characters rant for a while about this or that social issue, asking easily answerable questions or making easily refutable arguments.
And just as they are about to reach the pinnacle of their carefully constructed rant... something explodes.
I.e. All his arguments are irrefutable because OMG! LOOK BEHIND YOU! A THREE HEADED MONKEY!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens