what you say rings true, especially as I'm not in a habit of going over memborabilia and photos, although I have plenty..
very insightful and helpful... thanks for the thoughtful reply.
the outcome of the debate is debated by one of the LOSERS of the debate.. and the question asked by the Challenge was not one which one needed expertise in biology to answer as it was pretty straightforward..
The Challenge was to determine whether the proposals of the SENS platform were worthy of scientific discussion.. and there were some who dislike Aubrey de Grey so much that they took the bait despite there hardly being an argument to that fundamental assertion as all of his proposals are actually based on science which is ongoing.. so they they lost, no matter how the losers want to try to spin it. One can debate the debate and have another debate and debate the outcome of that debate.. but the realization will eventually sink in that science will be applied to aging in much the way that Aubrey de Grey proposes.. because it makes sense.
How about a little compassion for the suffering of the elderly.. including the parents of many of your friends and perhaps yourself? Or maybe you don't like your mom and dad that much?
I can't remember any but the most vivid memories from my childhood now.. and my teens are becoming vague except for the high points.. I'm quite willing to forgo the ability to remember the finer details for the chance to make new memories indefinitely.
Just because the status quo is the suffering and death of 100,000 people per day doesn't mean we have to put up with it when a choice exists because of potential social consequences.
We are dealing with the social consequences of the suffering and deaths of our loved ones (and eventually ourselves) NOW!
What kind of sense of proportion is there in suggesting that this is a situation that should be allowed to continue even one infinitesimal portion of a second past the time when we are able to do something to alleviate the carnage of 100,000 *people* dying from age-related causes everyday?
These are people with jobs, loved ones, and ultimately they are human beings. What does it say about a society that looks upon the aged as 'disposable'?; and treats the resource of wisdom and experience within their minds as if it was worthless?
Perhaps the maturity that would come to a world with healthy and actively engaged individuals of a century or more would help us approach perennial problems of wealth distribution, pollution, violence and more that our short term perspectives born of shorter lifespans gives rise to.
If there is something after life.. why live at all?
Obviously it's because life is worth living and we are entirely designed for life which is why we struggle to live, even to our dying breath.
Every religion that has an afterlife mythology also requires their adherents to have compassion for the suffering of others and often have additional myths that talk about building a heaven on earth. Perhaps this all fits in with those myths and there is something for everyone to agree on. It is only those who fatalistically want to avoid hoping they may escape the suffering of aging and death who make a "Stockholm Syndrome" style peace and acceptance of their eventual demise.
The rest of us will fight for life.
and it is for the article in Technology Review that Jason published this comment in which led to him being soundly spanked by a huge number of readers and ultimately the "SENS Challenge" which he moderated was lost by Aubrey de Grey's detractors.
Have a look.. the fact that you bring this adhominem attack up really shows you don't know much about the argument or the outcome of Jason's lack of tact.. and illustrates perfect the ignorance of the science.
With the pace of science and accumulation of medical knowledge doubling every four years I wouldn't count ANYONE out.
Tony Atala, a well respected scientist at the cutting edge of stem cell research has been able to duplicate and rejuvenate almost every living tissue in the human body with their own stem cells. For the few tissues such as the liver and pancreas which were unable to do so, embryonic stem cells are being used but its only a matter of time before we unravel how our bodies rejuvenate. Look up information on the MRL mouse of Ellen Heber-Katz that DARPA is so interested in. It can regenerate any tissue all by itself. Look at the experiments of Irena Conboy at Stanford.. she was able to demonstrate that old mice have a very strong but repressed ability to regenerate their muscles that when the brakes were taken off, they became strong and healthy again.
We haven't even begun to sniff the smelling salts that were broken out when the human genome was first drafted three years ago. Coupled with increasingly powerful supercomputers which decode the language of our biology, we are entering in an era of health that has never before been an option. We've all just had to lay down and take the fact that our bodies break down....
Put a smile on your face and some hope in your heart.. there's plenty of chances for almost everyone alive to look forward to a much longer and healthier life than has ever been possible before in the history of humanity..
Well the foreseen consequences of not doing anything about aging are well known... getting frail, sick and dying.
The Sirtuin genes are well established as a regulator of genes expressed near the ends of telomeres and there are many researchers studying its effects in mammals in fact there are pharmaceutical companies (Sirtris for instance) betting the pharm that, resveratrol, a component of red wine and activator of mammalian sir2 pathway, can be tweaked into a more powerful drug and help everyone live healthier longer.
Whichever way you look at it... aging is going to be "oh so yesterday..." within the next few years. Baby boomers will soon get the message that we know enough to start really looking at the dysfunction that increases as we get older as "treatable" by attacking it at the root cellular processes which give rise to it. Now if only those people in the "pro-aging trance" could wake-up we'd there would really be an all out War on Aging and many of our parents and loved ones would be around longer not to mention the 250 billion dollars that would be saved not having to buy diapers for them. Seems the best solution to the rising costs of Medicare from an increasingly frail population that everyone is whining about is to maker sure they don't get frail in the first place.
In fact..
There's a research prize of THREE MILLION DOLLARS being offered to the scientist that beat the world record for the lifespan of a mouse using any technologies available.
Don't forget the clock is ticking for their children, and likely for more than a few parents of these individuals who see the possibility of extending their loved ones lives.
I would love to give the parents who gave me life the opportunity to have a few more healthy years of their own to enjoy their grandkids.
The people who benefit from this technology are REAL individuals who have value to someone.
It is highly unlikley that The MPrize will result in usable human therapies. Its purpose is to draw the attention of the general public to the fact that aging is not as 'inevitable' as one might think now that we have the technology to intervene and treat it like the universal disease it is.
Once people see that scientists are hot on the trail of making a mouse live longer they will start looking at their own lives, and those of their loved ones, and begin to ask for those same improvements.
A HUNDRED THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS SUFFER and die everyday due to age-related disease, costing over 218 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR to look after the dependent elderly in the United States alone, and this amount is set to increase by 600 percent over the next few decades. Is there anything better you think that might be accomplished with this vast amount of capital currently earmarked to give our elderly mothers and fathers some quality and dignity?
From any perspective, ethical, moral, or practical, applying the same technology and ingenuity which has allowed generations of children to survive to suffer in old age, to the problems of old-age, makes perfect sense.
And don't forget that the millions of starving Africans and all their future children ad infinitum are subject to the same fate.
The lack of control over our biology is one of the last challenges which human intellect has to surmount. I wonder what a world where the distraction of falling apart didn't exist and where the experience and wisdom of accumulated with years was preserved would be like?
Perhaps in a world of healthy supercentenarians we might move on to solving some of the more esoteric problems in life.. little things, like sharing and getting along with one another, both traits that seem to increase as we get older. Who knew?
Social Security was for people who couldn't work any more and 'retirement' was a euphemism for 'go home and prepare to die you used up husk of a human'. This is no longer the case and hasn't been for sometime as people are healthier than ever as they reach their final decades.
Certainly individuals who are capable of adding something to society by putting out more into the world than taking in, should. Perhaps in a world of lifetimes marked in centuries, one might just *posssibly* find something else interesting enough in this universe to attract their attention worth doing.
My mother has the same opinion... Loss can really kick the *** out of you..
Aging however, kicks the will to live out of anyone even more assuredly..
A nice long nap sometimes seems preferable to an unending future of being tired and increasing pain... I am hopeful that vitality can be restored to my gradually degenerating body so that my mind might face the 'ordeal' of existence with more optimism and perhaps the thought of a new day might bring opportunities for joy as well as rememberances of the beauty in the past.
Of course science could be doing a lot of things to increase the quality of life and this is part of my point... under the current situation of the short (and for most of the worlds population often brutal) lifespan... there is often a feeling of the need for haste with little time to stop and help one another. Science could be doing a lot more.. but it isn't... Some people claim that it is the "shortness" of our lives which give it meaning.. I propose exactly the opposite.. that it is the rushing through life that keeps us from making better connections with others leading to a focus on materialistic accumulation and ill-thought out decisions resulting in poor relationships with our fellows.. I propose that the wisdom and knowledge of a healthy older generation is key to actually breaking through this ceiling placed on our societal development by allowing us time to "stop and smell the coffee" and take a longer term view of who we are in the world and our effect on it rather than be faced with continual crib death we seem to be threatening ourselves with as a result of our emotional and societal immaturity.
Your point that aging interventions would be available only for the wealthy, at least initially, is the only argument I feel truly warrants any ethical consideration. However, this problem is a general distribution problem which faces us today in almost every aspect of society. It has always been the wealthy who paid for the benefits as well as took the initial risks of new technologies that are now widely available. The challenge is to learn from previous mistakes and to ensure that as discoveries are made that they become as widely accessible as possible as quickly as possilble.. not to prevent the technologies from being developed in the first place because they won't be widely available. With this type of reasoning.. not technologies which benefit everyone today would ever have been developed!
The fact that people in the world have historically had a hard time sharing, ties in with my previous point that our lives are too short for us to have a perspective that older people gain, that living in harmony and symobiosis with the others and the environment is healthier and better for all in the long term. s This is really what I'm talking about...gaining long term perspectives.
Additionally, we certainly need to work now to try to distribute wealth to help alleviate the current suffering of the "have-nots" you refer to, but much more would be done I believe for these people in an atmosphere of experience which would arise from extending healthy lifespan. It can't be forgotten that these have-nots will still get old and die from old age with its attendant amount of physical suffering. We can't say that we shouldn't work on the "end game" because we haven't got the "sharing" part of things worked out when one of the reasons I believe we don't share is because we don't live long.
I'm not looking for a "goal".. What I'm talking about is an 'evolution' into a different kind of society where we can worry less about suffering from breakdowns in our physiology and begin to pay more attention to other forms of suffering of the other aspects of our lives which get put by the wayside because of the more immediate concerns of avoiding physical pain. Physical suffering that can be avoided leaves more room for working on for instance, getting along with others, distributing wealth and a host of other issues that can only get our attention when we aren't falling apart!
I haven't even discussed the financial benefits to the world and the possibility of redirecting some of the money that would be saved with healthy life-extension. Not only would we not have an increasing economic burden of aging baby boomers, but they would still be enthusiastic productive individuals. The reason why people lose interest and begin to become a burden on society rather than productive people is because THEY GET OLD AND FRAIL! A vital population of older people would remain an asset
You are certainly entitled to your opinion, misguided as it may be.
Age is associated with wisdom and wisdom is associated with better decision making capabilities based on the experiences that bring that wisdom. More experience usually means better decisions.. for you to insinuate otherwise seems a trifle naieve.
I'm glad you have made peace with your mortality and are willing to accept the degeneration and suffering of the body which eventually leads to your erasure... but please don't stand in the way of the efforts of those people who don't share your philosophy to try to increase the quality and length of their lives and those of their loved ones.
That truly would be ridiculous not to mention tantamount to murder.
Well you aren't the only one I'm sure.. and your argument is well taken.
You might want to check out his website and that of the Foundation as well as keep an eye on articles that discuss the bodies natural ability to regnerate that is being discovered to be quite phenomenonal if the proper buttons are pushed.
I am one of the volunteers on this project so I am a little biased... but I am up to date.. His numbers may be off.. but they could just as easily be off in that he is overestimating the time it takes to real interventions. I have attended two international biogerontologist conferences, the International Association of Biogerontologists 10th Annual Congress and the Functional Genomics of Ageing in Crete last month, and although skepticism is quite high amongst the researchers presenting their work, the hard core feeling that aging can't be controlled is fading rapidly. There is optimism from scientists who normally would not even consider that the control of aging is possible. Even they can't denty that their studies are a powerful indication that we are entering unknown territory and that simple extrapolation is no longer useful.. its just the only thing we know how to do.
Thanks for your impression.. at least it didn't discount the possibility or the desirabiltiy of the whole thing.. which is what I REALLY don't understand.. as to timeframes... I know that Aubrey would be the first to admit that this is his 'best guess', but I assure you there is no deliberate attempt to make the timeframe seem more feasible for the benefit of obtaining funding... The facts speak for themselves, he doesn't need to.;)
What you are saying is patently WRONG and you obviously do not know what you are talking about.
Neither of the current record HOLDERS of the Methuselah Mouse PRIZES (NOTE the plural) used caloric restriction. Even if they did, caloric restriction has been demonstrated to produce very healthy and superior constitutions in all the organisms its been tried in with reduced incidence of cancer, diabetes and a whole host of other related diseases. Moreover the mechanisms by which this is accomplished has NOTHING to do with a decrease in free radicals. Your kind of jaw flapping really pisses me off.
Try doing your homework before you start bleating..
Not true..
There are actually two prize offered by the Methuselah Foundation One is a prize for postponement of aging using treatments begun when the mouse is young, and the "reversal" prize for interventions begun when the mouse is old.
The current record holder for the reversal prize is Tom Kirkwood whose mouse lived a long time because of "good husbandry" to the ripe old age of approx 1500 days.. while Andrej Bartke won the postponenement prize by genetically altering the insulin receptor of a mice allowing it to live to 1820 days..
The "problem" is that over a HUNDRED THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS with lives and loves die EVERYDAY with many deaths accompanied by the immeasurable suffering.
Certainly let us look at how to deal with the problems of extended lifespans.. but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that ultimately it would be better to let people suffer and die.
There are going to be many changes required to move things forward, but one of the biggest is to overcome the deathist mindset that you exhibit and fatalistic hopelessness of the assertion that 'death' and suffering serve any purpose other than the recycling of resources.
Please continue to think of a future where death and aging are optional, but perhaps you might want to look at it from a humanitarian aspect rather than inflating the potential temporary negative consequences of such. You entirely discount the possibility that longer lives and better technology will help build a world where the problems you talk about can be avoided...
You call me a "PollyAnna".. well I much prefer an optimistic mindset that embraces a future of health and well being than otherwise. You may find it interesting if you bother to educate yourself about what it is you think you are talking about that the one characteristic that all cenetenarians studied share is exactly that.. optimism. So be pessimistic if you wish.. its your short life.
It is possible that you can't begin to argue with me because you know instinctively that any argument that advocates death is destined for the ignomious death it itself deserves and is a non-starter.
My statements implicity have a respect for life.
To my mind there is no arguing that life is preferable than death.. that health is better than suffering.
You don't have to agree.. just don't bother advocating that you or the people you love should avail themselves of the technologies once they become available.. and they will.
The will to live is strong.. and the desire to create a better world for our children is almost as strong. People say that death is "natural".. well the will to live is just as natural. That society would "suffer" or need to change is ridiculous.. societies are built for the benefit of individuals,not the other way around!
To be able to develop the technologies to relieve the suffering of millions would also mean we would have the technology to do a lot more and perhaps even have the wisdom to avoid the problems you seem to be so hung up on occuring. You say that because there's a chance that 'negative' things might happen of which you are unsure.. we shouldn't try to make the world a better place? C'mon.. The "precautionary" principle can be taken a bit far..
Slashdot Mirror
what you say rings true, especially as I'm not in a habit of going over memborabilia and photos, although I have plenty.. very insightful and helpful... thanks for the thoughtful reply.
the outcome of the debate is debated by one of the LOSERS of the debate.. and the question asked by the Challenge was not one which one needed expertise in biology to answer as it was pretty straightforward..
The Challenge was to determine whether the proposals of the SENS platform were worthy of scientific discussion.. and there were some who dislike Aubrey de Grey so much that they took the bait despite there hardly being an argument to that fundamental assertion as all of his proposals are actually based on science which is ongoing.. so they they lost, no matter how the losers want to try to spin it. One can debate the debate and have another debate and debate the outcome of that debate.. but the realization will eventually sink in that science will be applied to aging in much the way that Aubrey de Grey proposes.. because it makes sense.
How about a little compassion for the suffering of the elderly.. including the parents of many of your friends and perhaps yourself? Or maybe you don't like your mom and dad that much?
Old people share better.. think about it.
One of the best and most interesting questions on the board!
I can't remember any but the most vivid memories from my childhood now.. and my teens are becoming vague except for the high points.. I'm quite willing to forgo the ability to remember the finer details for the chance to make new memories indefinitely.
Just because the status quo is the suffering and death of 100,000 people per day doesn't mean we have to put up with it when a choice exists because of potential social consequences.
We are dealing with the social consequences of the suffering and deaths of our loved ones (and eventually ourselves) NOW!
What kind of sense of proportion is there in suggesting that this is a situation that should be allowed to continue even one infinitesimal portion of a second past the time when we are able to do something to alleviate the carnage of 100,000 *people* dying from age-related causes everyday?
These are people with jobs, loved ones, and ultimately they are human beings. What does it say about a society that looks upon the aged as 'disposable'?; and treats the resource of wisdom and experience within their minds as if it was worthless?
Perhaps the maturity that would come to a world with healthy and actively engaged individuals of a century or more would help us approach perennial problems of wealth distribution, pollution, violence and more that our short term perspectives born of shorter lifespans gives rise to.
If there is something after life.. why live at all? Obviously it's because life is worth living and we are entirely designed for life which is why we struggle to live, even to our dying breath. Every religion that has an afterlife mythology also requires their adherents to have compassion for the suffering of others and often have additional myths that talk about building a heaven on earth. Perhaps this all fits in with those myths and there is something for everyone to agree on. It is only those who fatalistically want to avoid hoping they may escape the suffering of aging and death who make a "Stockholm Syndrome" style peace and acceptance of their eventual demise. The rest of us will fight for life.
and it is for the article in Technology Review that Jason published this comment in which led to him being soundly spanked by a huge number of readers and ultimately the "SENS Challenge" which he moderated was lost by Aubrey de Grey's detractors. Have a look.. the fact that you bring this adhominem attack up really shows you don't know much about the argument or the outcome of Jason's lack of tact.. and illustrates perfect the ignorance of the science.
With the pace of science and accumulation of medical knowledge doubling every four years I wouldn't count ANYONE out.
Tony Atala, a well respected scientist at the cutting edge of stem cell research has been able to duplicate and rejuvenate almost every living tissue in the human body with their own stem cells. For the few tissues such as the liver and pancreas which were unable to do so, embryonic stem cells are being used but its only a matter of time before we unravel how our bodies rejuvenate. Look up information on the MRL mouse of Ellen Heber-Katz that DARPA is so interested in. It can regenerate any tissue all by itself. Look at the experiments of Irena Conboy at Stanford.. she was able to demonstrate that old mice have a very strong but repressed ability to regenerate their muscles that when the brakes were taken off, they became strong and healthy again.
We haven't even begun to sniff the smelling salts that were broken out when the human genome was first drafted three years ago. Coupled with increasingly powerful supercomputers which decode the language of our biology, we are entering in an era of health that has never before been an option. We've all just had to lay down and take the fact that our bodies break down....
Put a smile on your face and some hope in your heart.. there's plenty of chances for almost everyone alive to look forward to a much longer and healthier life than has ever been possible before in the history of humanity..
Well the foreseen consequences of not doing anything about aging are well known... getting frail, sick and dying.
The Sirtuin genes are well established as a regulator of genes expressed near the ends of telomeres and there are many researchers studying its effects in mammals in fact there are pharmaceutical companies (Sirtris for instance) betting the pharm that, resveratrol, a component of red wine and activator of mammalian sir2 pathway, can be tweaked into a more powerful drug and help everyone live healthier longer.
Whichever way you look at it... aging is going to be "oh so yesterday..." within the next few years. Baby boomers will soon get the message that we know enough to start really looking at the dysfunction that increases as we get older as "treatable" by attacking it at the root cellular processes which give rise to it. Now if only those people in the "pro-aging trance" could wake-up we'd there would really be an all out War on Aging and many of our parents and loved ones would be around longer not to mention the 250 billion dollars that would be saved not having to buy diapers for them. Seems the best solution to the rising costs of Medicare from an increasingly frail population that everyone is whining about is to maker sure they don't get frail in the first place.
In fact..
There's a research prize of THREE MILLION DOLLARS being offered to the scientist that beat the world record for the lifespan of a mouse using any technologies available.
Mprize
Don't forget the clock is ticking for their children, and likely for more than a few parents of these individuals who see the possibility of extending their loved ones lives.
I would love to give the parents who gave me life the opportunity to have a few more healthy years of their own to enjoy their grandkids.
The people who benefit from this technology are REAL individuals who have value to someone.
It is highly unlikley that The MPrize will result in usable human therapies. Its purpose is to draw the attention of the general public to the fact that aging is not as 'inevitable' as one might think now that we have the technology to intervene and treat it like the universal disease it is.
Once people see that scientists are hot on the trail of making a mouse live longer they will start looking at their own lives, and those of their loved ones, and begin to ask for those same improvements.
A HUNDRED THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS SUFFER and die everyday due to age-related disease, costing over 218 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR to look after the dependent elderly in the United States alone, and this amount is set to increase by 600 percent over the next few decades. Is there anything better you think that might be accomplished with this vast amount of capital currently earmarked to give our elderly mothers and fathers some quality and dignity?
From any perspective, ethical, moral, or practical, applying the same technology and ingenuity which has allowed generations of children to survive to suffer in old age, to the problems of old-age, makes perfect sense.
And don't forget that the millions of starving Africans and all their future children ad infinitum are subject to the same fate.
The lack of control over our biology is one of the last challenges which human intellect has to surmount. I wonder what a world where the distraction of falling apart didn't exist and where the experience and wisdom of accumulated with years was preserved would be like?
Perhaps in a world of healthy supercentenarians we might move on to solving some of the more esoteric problems in life.. little things, like sharing and getting along with one another, both traits that seem to increase as we get older. Who knew?
Social Security was for people who couldn't work any more and 'retirement' was a euphemism for 'go home and prepare to die you used up husk of a human'. This is no longer the case and hasn't been for sometime as people are healthier than ever as they reach their final decades.
Certainly individuals who are capable of adding something to society by putting out more into the world than taking in, should. Perhaps in a world of lifetimes marked in centuries, one might just *posssibly* find something else interesting enough in this universe to attract their attention worth doing.
My mother has the same opinion... Loss can really kick the *** out of you..
Aging however, kicks the will to live out of anyone even more assuredly..
A nice long nap sometimes seems preferable to an unending future of being tired and increasing pain... I am hopeful that vitality can be restored to my gradually degenerating body so that my mind might face the 'ordeal' of existence with more optimism and perhaps the thought of a new day might bring opportunities for joy as well as rememberances of the beauty in the past.
Sleep well..
Of course science could be doing a lot of things to increase the quality of life and this is part of my point... under the current situation of the short (and for most of the worlds population often brutal) lifespan... there is often a feeling of the need for haste with little time to stop and help one another. Science could be doing a lot more.. but it isn't... Some people claim that it is the "shortness" of our lives which give it meaning.. I propose exactly the opposite.. that it is the rushing through life that keeps us from making better connections with others leading to a focus on materialistic accumulation and ill-thought out decisions resulting in poor relationships with our fellows.. I propose that the wisdom and knowledge of a healthy older generation is key to actually breaking through this ceiling placed on our societal development by allowing us time to "stop and smell the coffee" and take a longer term view of who we are in the world and our effect on it rather than be faced with continual crib death we seem to be threatening ourselves with as a result of our emotional and societal immaturity.
Your point that aging interventions would be available only for the wealthy, at least initially, is the only argument I feel truly warrants any ethical consideration. However, this problem is a general distribution problem which faces us today in almost every aspect of society. It has always been the wealthy who paid for the benefits as well as took the initial risks of new technologies that are now widely available. The challenge is to learn from previous mistakes and to ensure that as discoveries are made that they become as widely accessible as possible as quickly as possilble.. not to prevent the technologies from being developed in the first place because they won't be widely available. With this type of reasoning.. not technologies which benefit everyone today would ever have been developed!
The fact that people in the world have historically had a hard time sharing, ties in with my previous point that our lives are too short for us to have a perspective that older people gain, that living in harmony and symobiosis with the others and the environment is healthier and better for all in the long term. s This is really what I'm talking about...gaining long term perspectives.
Additionally, we certainly need to work now to try to distribute wealth to help alleviate the current suffering of the "have-nots" you refer to, but much more would be done I believe for these people in an atmosphere of experience which would arise from extending healthy lifespan. It can't be forgotten that these have-nots will still get old and die from old age with its attendant amount of physical suffering. We can't say that we shouldn't work on the "end game" because we haven't got the "sharing" part of things worked out when one of the reasons I believe we don't share is because we don't live long.
I'm not looking for a "goal".. What I'm talking about is an 'evolution' into a different kind of society where we can worry less about suffering from breakdowns in our physiology and begin to pay more attention to other forms of suffering of the other aspects of our lives which get put by the wayside because of the more immediate concerns of avoiding physical pain. Physical suffering that can be avoided leaves more room for working on for instance, getting along with others, distributing wealth and a host of other issues that can only get our attention when we aren't falling apart!
I haven't even discussed the financial benefits to the world and the possibility of redirecting some of the money that would be saved with healthy life-extension. Not only would we not have an increasing economic burden of aging baby boomers, but they would still be enthusiastic productive individuals. The reason why people lose interest and begin to become a burden on society rather than productive people is because THEY GET OLD AND FRAIL! A vital population of older people would remain an asset
You are certainly entitled to your opinion, misguided as it may be.
Age is associated with wisdom and wisdom is associated with better decision making capabilities based on the experiences that bring that wisdom. More experience usually means better decisions.. for you to insinuate otherwise seems a trifle naieve.
I'm glad you have made peace with your mortality and are willing to accept the degeneration and suffering of the body which eventually leads to your erasure... but please don't stand in the way of the efforts of those people who don't share your philosophy to try to increase the quality and length of their lives and those of their loved ones.
That truly would be ridiculous not to mention tantamount to murder.
Well you aren't the only one I'm sure.. and your argument is well taken.
;)
You might want to check out his website and that of the Foundation as well as keep an eye on articles that discuss the bodies natural ability to regnerate that is being discovered to be quite phenomenonal if the proper buttons are pushed.
I am one of the volunteers on this project so I am a little biased... but I am up to date.. His numbers may be off.. but they could just as easily be off in that he is overestimating the time it takes to real interventions. I have attended two international biogerontologist conferences, the International Association of Biogerontologists 10th Annual Congress and the Functional Genomics of Ageing in Crete last month, and although skepticism is quite high amongst the researchers presenting their work, the hard core feeling that aging can't be controlled is fading rapidly. There is optimism from scientists who normally would not even consider that the control of aging is possible. Even they can't denty that their studies are a powerful indication that we are entering unknown territory and that simple extrapolation is no longer useful.. its just the only thing we know how to do.
Thanks for your impression.. at least it didn't discount the possibility or the desirabiltiy of the whole thing.. which is what I REALLY don't understand.. as to timeframes... I know that Aubrey would be the first to admit that this is his 'best guess', but I assure you there is no deliberate attempt to make the timeframe seem more feasible for the benefit of obtaining funding... The facts speak for themselves, he doesn't need to.
KevsPlace.net
And people said that airplanes were too heavy to fly.. thankfully inventors didn't listen.
What you are saying is patently WRONG and you obviously do not know what you are talking about.
Neither of the current record HOLDERS of the Methuselah Mouse PRIZES (NOTE the plural) used caloric restriction. Even if they did, caloric restriction has been demonstrated to produce very healthy and superior constitutions in all the organisms its been tried in with reduced incidence of cancer, diabetes and a whole host of other related diseases. Moreover the mechanisms by which this is accomplished has NOTHING to do with a decrease in free radicals. Your kind of jaw flapping really pisses me off.
Try doing your homework before you start bleating..
Not true.. There are actually two prize offered by the Methuselah Foundation One is a prize for postponement of aging using treatments begun when the mouse is young, and the "reversal" prize for interventions begun when the mouse is old.
The current record holder for the reversal prize is Tom Kirkwood whose mouse lived a long time because of "good husbandry" to the ripe old age of approx 1500 days.. while Andrej Bartke won the postponenement prize by genetically altering the insulin receptor of a mice allowing it to live to 1820 days..
The "problem" is that over a HUNDRED THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS with lives and loves die EVERYDAY with many deaths accompanied by the immeasurable suffering.
Certainly let us look at how to deal with the problems of extended lifespans.. but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that ultimately it would be better to let people suffer and die.
There are going to be many changes required to move things forward, but one of the biggest is to overcome the deathist mindset that you exhibit and fatalistic hopelessness of the assertion that 'death' and suffering serve any purpose other than the recycling of resources.
Please continue to think of a future where death and aging are optional, but perhaps you might want to look at it from a humanitarian aspect rather than inflating the potential temporary negative consequences of such. You entirely discount the possibility that longer lives and better technology will help build a world where the problems you talk about can be avoided...
You call me a "PollyAnna".. well I much prefer an optimistic mindset that embraces a future of health and well being than otherwise. You may find it interesting if you bother to educate yourself about what it is you think you are talking about that the one characteristic that all cenetenarians studied share is exactly that.. optimism. So be pessimistic if you wish.. its your short life.
In 1900 a premature death was at 40.. now it is at 60.... oh where will this trend endup.. ?
If death is natural.. I would have argue that LIVING is just as natural.. and more desirable.
It is possible that you can't begin to argue with me because you know instinctively that any argument that advocates death is destined for the ignomious death it itself deserves and is a non-starter.
My statements implicity have a respect for life. To my mind there is no arguing that life is preferable than death.. that health is better than suffering.
You don't have to agree.. just don't bother advocating that you or the people you love should avail themselves of the technologies once they become available.. and they will.
The will to live is strong.. and the desire to create a better world for our children is almost as strong. People say that death is "natural".. well the will to live is just as natural. That society would "suffer" or need to change is ridiculous.. societies are built for the benefit of individuals,not the other way around!
To be able to develop the technologies to relieve the suffering of millions would also mean we would have the technology to do a lot more and perhaps even have the wisdom to avoid the problems you seem to be so hung up on occuring. You say that because there's a chance that 'negative' things might happen of which you are unsure.. we shouldn't try to make the world a better place? C'mon.. The "precautionary" principle can be taken a bit far..