Can someone explain why this is interesting? It looks like a directionally interesting anti-aging study, but without any major breakthroughs. I'm curious what folks upvoting see in the study that I'm missing.
"Remarkably, the microenvironmental change and the functional decline of mid-old cells could be reversed by a young cell-originated protein, SLIT2. Our data identify functional reversion of mid-old cells as a potential method to prevent or ameliorate aspects of aging-related tissue dysfunction."
That is, unfortunately!, not how these things work. But it allows people to do more targeted studies, and (many years of research later) perhaps find a drug that can have some impact.
Or sometimes we get really lucky and just find a food or spice that upregulates/downregulates the right gene or affects the right enzyme (e.g. ginger contains compounds that suppress the inflammation triggering enzyme COX-2 without affecting the related COX-1 enzyme, which is actually beneficial. Most inflammation-reducing drugs affect both).
Although I'm sure we'd have noticed it by now if a food item targeted these genes (assuming they do significantly affect how healthily people age).
Don't your telomeres get shorter, your DNA gets damaged and it doesn't replicate correctly anymore? Some animals can be immortal like lobsters but face limits like their physical size can kill them when they molt enough.
I'm not sure if this is one of the consensus primary causes but the most compelling explanation I've heard is capillary damage.
Red blood cells and capillaries have roughly the same diameter leading to constant friction. Your body repairs the capillaries but, given enough time, it makes mistakes. As these mistakes pile up your circulatory system, your body's supply chain, slowly gets less efficient. This leads to every cell in your body gets the energy it needs a little later, and has to hold onto waste for a little longer.
Aside: figure 1 epitomizes everything that I hate about high-impact results-first journals: everything has to be packed into this one figure because nobody's expected to read anything else. No disrespect to the authors, these journals force you to express your work in this reader-hostile fashion where the most important parts of the paper wind up buried in the supplement.
Formatting wise this is a very poorly made figure. I sincerely hope this is not the current standards for what’s considered to be a good journal nowadays.
"Remarkably, the microenvironmental change and the functional decline of mid-old cells could be reversed by a young cell-originated protein, SLIT2"
I wonder then if this could be the magical factor in the blood of younger people. If there is indeed one or a small set of factors that induce the positive effects of young blood transfusions, then that type of "rejuvenation" becomes available to everyone and without any ethical issue.
I don't know but as someone who is currently taken in between my kids needing a lot of support and my mother who is declining and requiring a lot of help (+ jobs), I would welcome any progress regarding aging to make people as fit as possible as currently my life is a bit difficult.
Strangely, Christopher Reeves suddenly cared about spinal injuries after he was injured spinally. If your assertion was true we'd be spending most of our money and research on ACL injuries.
I'll never understand this particular mindset. I mean, I can get _some_ of the fallacies involved. Pure envy. Scope insensitivity. But it just doesn't explain it for me.
People buying high end audio gear have disposable income and spend obscene amounts of money on their hobby, and yet they get at most mild ridicule. Old people wanting _not to die_ get hate.
It's also shortsighted. You might never develop a taste for high end audio gear. But you certainly will age and die. Unlike many things it's a problem that affects every single one of us.
I think the reaction is at least partially based on the loss of precisely that certainty: there is a sense of comfort in that no matter how unacceptable someone’s actions or ideas are to us, they will die, regardless of who they are — eventually. The thought of that eventuality becoming unusually distant in the future threatens that comfort. Doubly so when only the powerful will live longer, which will come first, everyone seems to agree.
Instead of resigning to “at least they will one day die”, wouldn’t it better to hold rich people responsible? This argument just sounds too much like in Christian theology where the “evil” are punished in the afterlife, which is just a mix of defeatism and propaganda.
I wouldn't say it's so much envy or scope insensitivity. This is more of a gut reaction people have than anything purely rational.
I've been studying this topic ("hatred of life extension") for a few years now. I would say it is caused by thousands of years of cultural evolution during which the only guardrail we had to keep our sanity was acceptance and faith. There are interesting positive feedback loops for this set of beliefs, coming all the way from Genesis 3:24 and The Epic of Gilgamesh (which one was first?), plus more modern incarnations like all our vampire movies. This case of cultural resonance has nothing to degrade it because nobody has lived long enough to prove that life extension is a good or a bad thing, but acceptance of mortality is a cheap and effective remedy to existential dread.
Comments like the one you responded to are very common. Here and on other forums, often upvoted to the top.
People look at the rich and feel envy. In an attempt to displace that feeling, they tell themselves "I'm a good person, I don't prioritize money, I care about things that matter like community and art and the poor" and also "meanwhile those rich people are shallow and pathetic, all they care about is money".
This strategy allows the thinker to hate the rich ostensibly for morally acceptable reasons. It also makes them feel better about their own lack of wealth. People who think this way are often middle class or above; the poor are able to envy the rich without all this psychodrama.
the worry is of course that in 300 years Mark Zuckerberg will be having his big pan-American birthday part and all the plebes get treated to a 30 minute newsblast about it while eating their gruel.
It's one thing to have music of lower quality, it's another to be old and dying and watching someone who was born a century before you gifted with youth and vitality. It's not hard to envision that situation if the rich have access to anti-aging.
As such it is a scenario basically based off what science fiction says will happen when anti-aging is available. And people feeling that yes, that is what will happen - which spurs their envy.
The envy of this potential future is an expression of the envy of current disparities in income and power heightened by a fear that the future will make those disparities more unbearable and less fixable than they currently are.
In the scenario you describe what's stopping one of the plebes from killing Zuckerberg?
If Zuckerberg has essentially doomed everyone else to death while he and his kin get to live on perpetually he's basically painted a giant target on his back that every one with 6 months to live on a totally curable terminal brain cancer diagnosis is going to want to hit.
I'm not too worried about this kind of scenario because I know that it's in their greater self interest to let us all have this technology.
Also, if the technology isn't too difficult to implement what will stop people from doing so? If you tell me at age 50 that there's a cure for aging you can bet I'll spend my remaining 30 years to find that cure, if not for me, than for rmy children and grand children.
>In the scenario you describe what's stopping one of the plebes from killing Zuckerberg?
Lots of people want to kill lots of different Billionaires, but billionaires ain't dropping like flies.
>very one with 6 months to live on a totally curable terminal brain cancer diagnosis is going to want to hit.
unless getting a terminal brain cancer makes people John Wick in the universe this movie is taking place in, I don't think that's how the plot will play out.
That is so short-sighted. Practically all technological breakthroughs are expensive during the discovery and R&D process. Over time, engineering makes things more affordable at scale. And markets free to respond to supply and demand are the catalyst to make it work.
I'm sorry, you're arguing that immortality, something that would probably cause all sorts of upheavals in society, will slide through the system in the same way as a new improved way for cutting your lawn.
This of course is my reference to science fiction, people in relation to this particular subject have worries that are dystopia-fodder, which I have to admit may also be silly but will probably be closer to what will happen then betting it will work the same as the process that ended up giving everyone a personal computer.
That depends entirely on whether or not they're intentionally witholding it from me.
If someone had a cure for your child's cancer in your hands and they gloated at you while saying "you no get" I'm pretty sure you're going to take whatever steps necessary to "get"
Sure, Society in its majestic equality will allow rich and poor people alike to rent a new bio-heart with youthenating agents for 1 million dollars a month.
I would hate to have to rely on society to provide services like that. Chances are nobody except the top political brass ever gets their bio-heart.
Thankfully, society in its majestic equality allows all people to establish or invest into startups. Total addressable market at $1M/month is much smaller than at $1k/month, which is still much smaller than at $100/month.
Assuming the expenses are low enough to still give the company a healthy and IMHO fair 20-50% profit margin at $1k/month or $100/month, it'd be dumb to price it at $1M/month. There would be thousands if not millions of companies offering this service - and a race to the bottom of the pricing.
Think about cars - companies are competing on lower prices and better features of these complex machines. There are many models for different kinds of buyers - not just a single option at $1M/month that'd allow the rich to move around.
If we understand the mechanisms of aging, perhaps we can reduce the health effects of aging. This might be an easier target than increasing overall life expectancy. Thus reducing the impact on society of caring for seniors.
As I understand it, the metabolic rate in most people is pretty good and constant until about 60 and starts to drop off.
I would be happy with a treatment that provides good strong health from 60 to 100 and then a sudden death. I don’t want to be infirm/disabled by age, not able to enjoy life and be a burden to my family.
There is a social issue around death that is quite complex. A wish for a sudden peaceful death at a certain old age is not an easy one. Family, doctors, society and laws should be aligned on this. Right now the norm (at least in the Netherlands) is too keep a person alive as long as reasonably possible.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, maybe due to wording, anybody old enough knew/knows some people around him who are stuck in this and suffer. My wife is a doctor here in Switzerland, and yes the idea of having nice easy retirement health wise is mostly a pipe dream. But its oftne families themselves, ie here its typical that Italian families will always ask for prolonging life of a patient as much as possible even if its clear there is no way back and its just constant coma decline. Subtle evils of religions in the real world.
Its rather a constant management of ever increasing problems ranging from small to massive ones, and eventually losing either gradually or suddenly. Absolutely no dignity from the system.
Switzerland at least has enough sanity to allow assisted suicide so all world rich and powerful come here to die. As rather strict christian country that's what showing actual respect looks like.
I don’t know about the role of religion here. Not taking a position here in either direction, but given how suicide has a social contagion component to it, it’s not surprising that societies develop social norms against allowing any form of it. Sure, it’s dehumanizing and potentially cruel to the individual, but it can have a protective effect at societal scale. Then you need to evaluate the benefits to the individual against the benefits to society and that’s always hard because the latter is amorphous and even harder to quantify. Any religious component could be more of a post hoc rationalization to make it more acceptable / enforce the resolve of the members of society when they come face to face with this situation.
My mother is going through a kind of hell created by laws that prevent her from ending her life as she wishes. I hope dignity around death for the elderly becomes more of a public issue.
My grandmother starved herself to death at 97 because any other approach was then illegal (for anyone else to facilitate). All her friends were dead and she didn’t really like old people. As her vision and hearing started to deteriorate she figured it was not worth waiting for a letter from the Queen.
Dad died in 2021 at age 78 he was sick for a long time and at lest he had the option of MAID (Medical assistance in dying). He went to palliative care and I think really that is what happened. He never said, the staff never said but they were constantly injecting him and he died in his sleep unaware.
My Mom is 79 and often says she doesn't know anyone when she goes out. Her eyesight and hearing are both poor but not to the point of not seeing or hearing at all. But she said in stores, church, anywhere she goes there is nobody she recognizes even older people. So if you make it to old age and are in good health not stuck in a home and are mobile and can converse with people it can be very lonely if you are not good at making friends at that stage of life.
Ironically, anti-aging treatment would likely make people less grumpy and reduce load on healthcare. Doesn’t address the wealth inequality issue though, which is suspect is your main gripe.
The effect you're speaking of is real, but extremely unlikely to apply to anti-aging. There are statistics showing apparently paradoxical effects, like smoking and obesity reduce overall healthcare - because people simply die sooner from heart disease.
Age is different. Look at health expenses per decade - the difference is like night and day. Most people in their 20s and 30s don't even visit a hospital. The healthcare expense for most of them can simply be rounded to zero. Some time in the 60s things change dramatically (health degradation is supralinear with age). So if you manage to push back the health of seniors to, for example, their 50s, you pretty much solve healthcare permanently.
no but , just as we are removing teenagers from the voting population, we should also be removing an equal number of voters from the other side of the age spectrum
Equal in quantity? So if the number of <18yos is X and there are X people over the age of 90 then that's the cut off, but if the following election there were far fewer old people then there might now be X over 70s so the cutoff gets redrawn there?
Seems quite awkward operationally even if everyone agrees with the principle behind it.
And even if you agree that it's problematic when older voters sway decisions that will affect future generations more than them, does matching the number of non-voters at each end of the spectrum solve that? And does the solution bring more benefits than the negatives of losing the experience of those old people + the negative of stripping a huge group of current voters of their voting rights?
Why not? Why don't we give children the right to vote? (even if delegated to their parents - might help with failing demographics too). What is the rationale behind the current rules anyway
Equality is meaningless. Why should we not have the same amount of ears as noses? That is inequality. Why should we use one fork instead of two for equality of the use of our hands and symmetry? Why not our keyboards be mirrored and equal too?
30 might be enough these days, it seems I won't get to own a home and I don't really want to work 2 days a week for the government and one and a half to pay for my landlord's mortgage.
Many are settling with getting pets, traveling a bit and not a lot more.
In the ideal world, anti-aging therapy that works well actually reduces this problem. Healthy older people can work, reducing the economic stress on the younger part of the population. The costs of the therapy may actually incentivize them to do so.
As the civilization progresses, people should be _allowed_ to work less. Workers from the fin-de-siècle will be appalled that we still work 8 hours a day and average real wages stagnate since 1970s despite all the tech and effectivity improvements.
> We don't need more old grumpy people hoarding wealth and overloading healthcare.
Agreed but why is longevity research the problem here? Our laws around money , taxation and property were fashioned when average human life was around 40. We haven't adapted since
I genuinely want to understand this mindset. Are you only against things that help extend lifespan a very large amount, or is it more nuanced?
80 years was only achieved recently because of various quality of life and medical advances. Do you feel that those are 'ok' for other reasons, or for example, that things that cure cancer, HIV, or better sanitation that increase lifespan should also be repealed if it was up to you? Or do you feel we just happen to have the perfect amount of life-extending conditions at this exact moment?
We are at a point in history that many people can live up to the natural limits of human body. They don't die during childbirth or as very young children, because of bad sanitization or through unlucky sickness.
Those improvements in healthcare are fine in my eyes. Someone could argue that dying because of some illness that we cured is also natural. Perhaps yes, but for me the baseline is healing the "unlucky" instances - viruses, cancers etc.
My golden standard worth aiming for is someone like the nonagenarians in Sardinia or Okinawa - someone who ate healthy food, lived in a tight happy community, low amount of stress and lucky to evade any serious illness. Those people still die and this is fine.
I would like everyone to have a chance to live like this, this to me is the natural limit of human body.
I am not a fan of extending life beyond this limit.
Ageing is incredibly expensive to the government atm, in healthcare costs, care costs and reduced tax revenue. The NHS would happily pay for a cure for aging if it cost £100,000 a pop!
The overloading of healthcare is because of aging.
Also, it's ridiculous that the current world is worse off than if people didn't age but there were government hitman roaming around who kill you sometime between the ages of 90 and 100...
People don't like hearing it, but if you can't make peace with your mortality in 80 years, you won't manage it in 800 either. And you (whoever is reading is) isn't actually that special that you should go on forever, instead of new life coming into the world. It would be a bigger loss for you to stay, than for you to pass on, because of the implied opportunity costs of other people being born. We all think we're hot shit, but so did the people hundreds or thousands of years ago whose outlook and lifestyle makes us cringe or even puke in our mouth a little.
This argument also extends the other direction, why not call it a day after 40 years then? You're only going to get more crochety and require more costly health interventions. And older people tend to take up more precious m2 of living space.
Sounds like an angry projection of your own value of your life. Its as if you're supposed to accept your death by 80, otherwise you'll... die and not accept it?
Very few people that die 'made peace with their morality'. Why is it a prerequisite? How do you assign value to another person's life simply based on if they made you cringe or not? That's cringe.
The whole universe runs on decay & arise of the new. From stars through chemical compounds through cells to us humans.
If the rotating cloud of gas and dust stayed forever, there would be no Earth. If the chemical compounds would be super stable, there would be no life. And so on. Systems are kept in equilibrium by this, otherwise they became unstable.
Making space for the next, better entity is a cosmological principle.
If you can't make peace with that, I am sad for you.
Carbon is very stable, so there's no life? I'm hearing 2deep4u 'philosophy' about the universe, nobody needs a condescending goofy sounding false prophet about how to think.
Carbon is created by nuclear fusion in stars. Thus, something has to perish for carbon to appear. Carbon is also mostly found as compounds in the universe, not as elemental form. Indeed, if carbon was stable as argon, there would be no life. Luckily it forms many volatile organic compounds which can be in an endless cycle of reorganizing.
It's not some deep philosophy, it's basic science.
None of those Wikipedia facts will prepare someone for death. Reciting what psychedelics are or describing color with words would yield the same result. Why would that knowledge help someone prepare for death?
Nothing can prepare a self-obsessed person for death. It is not my duty to prepare you for death or make it easy for you, it is my duty to be intellectually honest.
The tapestry of live consists of all the individual threads (lives) and if someone of those threads never ended, new threads cannot be in the space they occupy. That's trivially true. And to me that does the same to the tapestry of live what a cancer cell does to an individual body.
We already have shit like, let's say, old people starting a war of aggression over oil and profits for Halliburton et al, and then torture someone like Assange, who is still not free. And that's even though they'll only live for a few decades at most! If they knew they could potentially live hundreds or thousands of years, the gloves would come off in ways you cannot even imagine, and if that's "2deep4u" or "conspiracy theory" for you that's great, don't bother telling me.
You wrote a lot but said nothing except your own projecting of me as a self obsessed person. Your post just says accept death or I'll look down on you, because the universe and stars and assange? Lol.
Exactly right. This is a total waste of time, and this effort should be spent on something more productive and useful for humanity, such as improving advertising technologies and preventing people from blocking or ignoring advertisements.
As i assume, you are being sarcastic, i would point to the effect, that certain endeavors, that bring money today (and to the content creators) finance the other endeavors, that dont bring in money just yet or maybe never. Thank you.
Why throw out the baby with the bath water, just because the rich will live longer, no one should. This is the feeling I get everytime I see a comment that it will be only for the rich and powerful.
I don't think that will be the case, as there will be a gold rush once the possibility is proven and visible, everyone will try to get it, even the naysayers.
It will be more like the crash of prices from the Spanish mines in south America.
Yeah. I wish I had saved the quote, but someone said something along the lines of "the rich get new technologies when they are expensive and sucky; the rest of us get them when the kinks have been ironed out."
If you're worried about the rich getting things unfairly, focus on tax policy and closing all the thousands of loopholes. That's a lifetime's work.
> "I don't think that will be the case, as there will be a gold rush once the possibility is proven and visible, everyone will try to get it, even the naysayers."
Maybe; instead when this happens, e.g. hairloss and finasteride, I look at people desperately trying to fight aging and stay young forever and then replacing their worry about hairloss with worry about post-finasteride[1] depression and sexual side effects. Or the people who are obsessed with nootropics ('smart drugs') who are in a hyper-competitive world I don't want to be in at all. Or the people who slather vitamin A creams on their skin to try and look younger who may give themselves retinol burn[2] and Vitamin A, E supplements to look younger which may[3] gives bone pain, liver damage, birth defects, increased risk of fractures, skin irritation, increased risk of prostate cancer.
My point is that "once the possibility is proven and visible, everyone will try to get it, even the naysayers" is wrong. I could plausibly benefit from Finasteride, I'm not rushing for it even though I think it works. We can also see[1] which says "poor diet is recognized as the leading cause of death and disability in the United States, and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, two thirds of disease worldwide will exist because of a poor lifestyle.11-13 A large body of consistent evidence suggests eating a healthy diet can prevent, delay, or even reverse CVD, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, and certain cancers.14-19 The effect of such intake is rapid and profound." - yet people aren't rushing for healthy diets and exercise, are they?
And I think your claim is wrong; a lot of people pop vitamin supplements like candy expecting that they are harmless and would be surprised to find they are capable of causing harm; anecdotally I have read of people saying exactly that, which is enough to disprove "wouldn't be surprising to anyone at all".
> I'm not rushing for it even though I think it works
Because of the side effects, right?
> - yet people aren't rushing for healthy diets and exercise, are they?
Because that implies a lifestyle change. I think the assumption here is that this would be a treatment or a pill.
> And I think your claim is wrong; a lot of people pop vitamin supplements like candy expecting that they are harmless and would be surprised to find they are capable of causing harm;
I don't think that most people will be surprised to hear that taking any pill can have negative effects, though I do think that lots of people may be surprised by the dose at which those effects are seen, but there will always be outliers, of course, who may think that eating an entire carton of gummy vitamins is no big deal. But, I don't think that is really relevant, although I'm not sure what point you're trying to make still.
I think you're trying to say that some people won't rush to take this pill because it may have unintended side effects?
> "although I'm not sure what point you're trying to make still."
I'm countering the claim "even naysayers will want this as soon as it works" with evidence that people don't want things which work - for multiple reasons, viz. known side effects, unknown/long term side effects, your 'implying a lifestyle change', not wanting to be early adopters, for examples we have covered, along with people who don't want to 'play God', don't approve of medical treatments, don't want 200 years of working life (as mentioned in the comments elsewhere on this thread).
It's about a bazillion times easier to point out disparity than to make this work at all. If it does work, it will start out expensive, and get cheaper. Like everything.
It is a concern, look at the current monoclonal antibody alzheimer's treatment that's insanely expensive.
Generally though it's in the interest of the rich to extend the useful lifespan of their workers, training workers from babies is expensive, so it could be cheaper to keep the current ones going for 200 years.
You're picking one single treatment and saying "look, this is proof of the problem", ignoring that the treatment is extremely new - like, ~2 years of availability (and it was rushed out!). There may be inherent costs to the treatment that are specific and unrelated to whatever is found in other treatments.
The reality is that, for the majority of compounds we've found that provide "anti-aging" benefits, they are affordable by the middle class. Some are more expensive than others, but they're all well within an affordable range.
It’s in the interest of the rich that everyone else has it too. Even if you’re ultra cynical and model the rich as pure selfishness incarnate with zero altruism (which isn’t true), they’d still want the largest possible set of test subjects to find all the ways it can fail without the learning experience being a purely personal experience.
