For my money the nuclear DNA damage angle is actually the more interesting part of this. The research community has for some years been debating whether or not stochastic nuclear DNA damage is important in aging outside of the issue of cancer. The consensus educated assumption has long been to think of course, nuclear DNA damage should lead to loss of protein homeostasis, and is therefore a meaningful contributing cause of aging, not just of raised risk of cancer. However there is nowadays plenty of evidence to support the opposite view, that the levels of stochastic nuclear mutations seen in human tissues really don't matter over the present human life span. Other than cancer.
This would be good if it continues to hold up. The less we have to fix in order to produce a first generation of treatments that effectively treat aging - i.e. produce rejuvenation - the better. Fixing nuclear DNA damage is going to be plausible via global DNA editing technologies like CRISPR, but we're a long way from doing it for all genes to restore to a template and erase damage. Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection. If you're 20-40 years away from peak cancer age in a wealthy region of the world, then I don't think your odds of dying from cancer are very large at all.
So, as cancer is one of the leadng causes of death, your prediction implies that population (especially older population) will increase. Or people will die of other things. That's an important thing to be prepared for (the other thing people die of in first world countries is heart disease).
Anyway, I suspect the future won't be quite so rosy as you predict. Many people have predicted revolutions in cancer treatment, but realistically, we've only made incremental (great, but only incremental) progress.
Have you read The Emperor of all Maladies? The impression I got from the book was that we are finally beginning to understand the mechanisms behind specific cancers and create therapies to fix them. It seems like we are close to beating cancers one at a time with targeted drugs.
Yes I have read it. PS: I'm a scientist and studyng cancer is part of what I do. Please read "Molecular Biology of the Cell".
yes, we're learning a lot, but no, the promised revolutions aren't forthcoming. Not only are there technical reasons why it's unlikely we'll see a very near term revolution in treatment. There are huge political, monetary and bureaucratic reasons, too. They are just as important to understand as the technical reasons.
From the technical side of things, where do you see the biggest challenges today? Where do you see the biggest potential wins? What are we not looking at deeply enough?
This is a field that deeply interests me, but my knowledge is effectively zero. I'd love to get your insight, as one that is on the ground in the field.
On the technical side, I think we need to master data integration across many sources. For example, health records, sequencing, and clinical trials all contain tremendous amount of data, but combining them and generating knowledge is very hard. Much of this is just translating what web companies have developed, and understanding how to make it palatable to health researchers, patients and companies. That's partly technological, but honestly, the technological problems are pretty small; we could make a tremendous forward progerss in cancer if everybody's health records were fully digitalized, normalized and harmonized, and available to cancer researchers (even ones not doing trials) for aggregation and analysis. This is one reason I've donated my genome to the public domain- but we need millions more to do this.
Also, the way we fund and execute most health research is very broken. We could organize and manage this far better than we can- but it would take a lot of changes and stepping on a lot of toes. Again, there's a tech side, but the tech side is "easy" compared to the politics and money parts.
from my recent Human Genetics course, I learned quite a lot about what cancer actually is. It helped a great deal to understand why there's no "cure" and treatments are usually brute force and imprecise.
Cancer is basically a generic term for the loss of a cell's division control cycle - the cell starts to divide uncontrollably, forms tumors, metastasizes, causes neovascularization to feed itself, etc. This loss of control can happen for so many different reasons related to the quantities and ratios of proteins synthesized that each cancer is like a separate class of disease that needs its own treatment.
It's the same reason that there's no single fix for "car is broken". Except our understanding of this car is orders of magnitude more limited than one that we designed ourselves.
> Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection
There have also been innovations in holistic care, including cases of cancer remission.
Promising aspects of holistic care is it's relatively inexpensive, easy to train practitioners, & covers a wide swath of healthy living.
Some of it is incorrect and some of it works. I trust that our culture will iterate & hone in on the good practices.
You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing.
Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment. Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear.
Furthermore, we'd have even more competition over the limited amount of resources and habitable land than we have today.
Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation.
There is something about the prospect of treating aging that makes people take leave of all economic common sense.
Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies.
One of the interesting things about our age is that medicine is largely flat. Rich people can buy more time from more expensive physicians, and pay people to do their legwork and phone calls for them, and lie in pain in better-looking ward rooms, but there are very, very few forms of medical technology available to them that is unavailable to someone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and the time to make the phone calls and do the legwork.
Given that the treatments for human rejuvenation will be infusions (made up in a lab-factory in bulk, or a specialist clinical plant to order, and requiring very little attention from trained staff to administer) rather than surgeries (requiring a great deal of time from specialist staff to carry out), I think that the odds of their remaining expensive for long are minimal. Economies of scale emerge rapidly for such things.
(Infusions because these treatments will be things like delivery of engineered bacterial enzymes, gene therapies for mitochondrial DNA, drugs to break down cross-linked proteins, stem cell transplants, and so forth).
Look at stem cell transplants as the model of how the price of such therapies rapidly moves downward due to inter-regional competitive pressure for treatments of this nature.
The neat graphs start about half-way down (See Chart 1 for example), but the introduction pretty much sums the data up:
"Specifically, male Social Security–covered workers born in 1941 who had average relative earnings in the top half of the earnings distribution and who lived to age 60 would be expected to live 5.8 more years than their counterparts in the bottom half. In contrast, among male Social Security–covered workers born in 1912 who survived to age 60, those in the top half of the earnings distribution would be expected to live only 1.2 years more than those in the bottom half."
That doesn't tell you much about access to medicine unless you can exclude the other relevant factors. Maybe the 60th percentile worker went from working as a factory foreman to working as an office manager but the 10th percentile worker was still mining coal. Or womens' liberation saw the women entering the workforce take a disproportionate number of the safer unskilled labor positions, increasing the proportion of unskilled men working the more dangerous jobs. Any way to rule those out?
You missed the major factor that they ultimately didn't do anything about: frailty.
"Because this mortality risk occurred earlier in history for the 1900 birth cohort than for the 1930 birth cohort, the 1900 birth cohort faced higher probabilities of death at the ages between birth and 85. Thus, individuals surviving to age 85 in 1985 may have been more robust than individuals surviving to age 85 in 2015, because it was more difficult to survive to age 85 for the former group."
In actuality, no they didn't try to factor out socioeconomic factors that shouldn't matter (like those you mention) from those that should (like better nutrition). On the other hand, they have a large sample size (I can't find it, but from one aside it looks like around two million records) and they're only comparing two groups: above average and below average. I would imagine boundary cases like your first example would average out.
"One important contribution of this study is to highlight that the segment of the male Social Security–covered worker population experiencing slower mortality improvement is large—that is, the entire bottom half of the population, rather than just a limited group of disadvantaged at the lowest end of the earnings distribution."
And a 4.6 year difference would seem to be pretty significant.
> In actuality, no they didn't try to factor out socioeconomic factors that shouldn't matter (like those you mention) from those that should (like better nutrition).
You don't think occupation has a significant effect on lifespan? Someone whose career involved breathing coal dust, spraying lead-based paint or pumping leaded gasoline, manufacturing products with asbestos or heavy metals, etc. is significantly more likely to suffer health problems later in life. Even just having to work two jobs and not getting enough sleep will catch up with you over the course of 40 years.
> On the other hand, they have a large sample size (I can't find it, but from one aside it looks like around two million records) and they're only comparing two groups: above average and below average. I would imagine boundary cases like your first example would average out.
But that's the whole problem. You don't know if they average out or not, and if they don't in the population at large then no sample size is large enough to save you.
>Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies.
Actually only the wealthy have access for heart disease even know. Vast masses in developing and third world countries don't have access to such treatments.
Treatments become far far cheaper in the 3rd world. Healthcare as a service profession generally charges what people are willing to pay. So, in India treatment is still available but expensive even if the same prices would practically be free in the US. Note: A 5000 Indian Rupee income equals ~81 US Dollar/month income.
> Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear.
Which means that in the context of this conversation, "wealthy" means the extremely wealthy members of society (the 1%).
If you define "wealthy" as meaning anyone living in the developed world, then maybe this is true. In the context of this conversation though, medical technologies are available to broad swathes of society. In countries with socialised medical systems, heart disease treatment which is close to the forefront of medical developments is available to everyone, regardless of means.
Extreme wealth will buy you better medical treatment, but only marginally. You can afford more experienced surgeons and the latest machinery and drugs, but within 5 years that machinery drugs will be widely available.
> the extremely wealthy members of society (the 1%).
Not to be that guy, but if "society" is defined as "humanity", as it should be imo when it comes to human health, all of us in first world are the 1%.
Edit: "To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. The average family in the United States has more than three times the income of those living in poverty in America, and nearly 50 times that of the world's poorest. Many of America's 99 percenters, and the West's, are really 1 percenters on a global level."
You're distorting my meaning and trying to make this conversation thread about something that it isn't. The thread started with a discussion of healthcare advances as a means of enabling wealthy family dynasties to grow their wealth while the rest of us didn't have access to that technology. It was rightly pointed out that healthcare advances (excluding specialised labour intensive surgeries) have consistently quickly become available to the majority of people within a country.
Yes, you can always point out that elsewhere in the world people are living in extreme poverty. It's tragic, but if you try and skew every debate on inequality towards this fact you will never get anywhere. It's perfectly reasonable to have two discussions - one, to discuss the great inequalities of our global capitalist system, and a second to discuss the relative wealth equality within individual countries or countries of comparitive wealth. This comment thread was started as the second type of discussion.
Maybe I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you're saying "inequality is only important insofar as it affects me".
Advances in technology (including healthcare) are usually bankrolled by the wealthy - wealthy people and corporations. The middle class doesn't pool together a billion dollars to research drugs for heart disease. University research is funded by wealthy benefactors, grants (in turn funded by wealthy benefactors), Government money (funded by taxes, a disproportionate % paid by the wealthy) and so forth. It seems fair to me that they'd get first dibs.
We're all trying to grow our dynasties, that's why we have kids. It's not inherently evil.
Unless you are throwing in history and including all of those Roman senators who received what is by todays standards practically nonexistent medical care (I think that doing that would be a mistake, for reasons that should be obvious), then it is somewhere around 10-15% of the world's population that lives in developed countries. This is before we even consider that many developing countries have functional healthcare systems.
The population of Germany alone accounts for more than 1% of all currently living humans.
In addition to the sibling comments I'll also point out that in this context of wealthy family dynasties, we're talking about far fewer than 1 in 100 people. "1%" is just the catchy branding.
Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment.
The problem with inequality is not that rich people exist or that they live powerful, opulent lifestyles. The problem with inequality is poverty. Shutting down amazing research such as this is not going to solve poverty. To argue otherwise risks running afoul of the fallacy of relative privation.
The scientists working on this would not be able to solve the issues of poverty and inequality anyway since it has absolutely nothing to do with their area of expertise.
Oh please. The rich always pay for the research and advances that the poor eventually get for commodity prices. And even if we fully cure death by aging, death by accidents puts the average lifespan somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 year period, given the drastically dropping birth rates in the first world, we'll have more than enough time to reach space or colonize the oceans, or build low orbit cities.
With every new 1000 people we get 10 new scientists, 10 new engineers, 10 new software guys; and technological advancement is easily sharable.
Healthcare is free if not heavily subsidized in much of the world already. And there is no reason such a technology would be more expensive than existing health care.
But why am I even bothering to say this. You're literally arguing it's bad to save people's lives or advance medicine. Even if it really did only benefit rich people, so what? Rich people dying doesn't benefit poor people in any significant way. See zero-sum bias (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2gd/fight_zerosum_bias/). "I want to see rich people suffer" rather than "I want to see poor people benefit."
I am sorry ma'am, but you cannot go into retirement and will not be allowed to die, you have an important piece of infrastructure to maintain for the rich.
That's not all that bad, when you think about it. You get to work on a piece of software that is probably older than you and has been hardened over decades, your entire set of responsibilities is light maintenance. This should leave you enough time to also work on other projects, preferably open-source ones and hone your skills in preparation for the day that software gets replaced.
You say your spiel as though we haven't spent hundreds of years trying to move beyond dictatorships, empires, and dynasties that treat their citizens as chattel.
I don't know if care per se about economic inequality, but a singular group that's able to maintain and extend its status as an insular elite and accrue resources for timescales in excess of those outside its ranks is likely to have interests that become increasingly at odds with those of the everyday human with a shorter lifespan.
Now it'd be fine if rejuvenation became cheap and accessible to all, but I think there's a very real danger that it becomes available to an elite first, an elite which would then create barriers to such technology's spread as means of maintaining status.
> You're also making the assumption that rejuvenation tech
> won't be cheap enough for everyone at some point.
You're making an assumption that human life can be valued in terms of money.
Take any surgery for instance. They are all life extension technologies. If someone came to you and told you, if you don't pay us 100k you'll die within next 30 years from cancer, would you pay? If the price became 200k would you still pay? If the price became too large to pay, wouldn't you attempt to steal/beg for the money to not die? Some things are too valuable to haggle and you'll accept any price. This is why surgeries cost as much as they do in USA.
Stuff like this might be cheap or expensive depending on how it's bargained. Things like this are better left to be mandated by the government.
> Things like this are better left to be mandated by the government.
Only if you assume the government is somehow magically immune to the same problems of asymmetric power relationships that you describe. It isn't.
Also, earlier in your post you say:
> You're making an assumption that human life can be valued in terms of money.
Which is exactly what governments that are tasked with rationing health care have to do. They only have a finite amount of the taxpayers' money to spend, vs. a potentially infinite demand for health care.
> Only if you assume the government is somehow magically immune.
I didn't assume, but the fact is they are uniquely capable of solving this situation in optimal way for the ones acquiring such medicine/procedure. There are things they are bad at and things they are good at, this is the latter example.
A bad, corrupt government can do all kinds of really fucked up shit, so I don't even want to consider what a bad government might do in this case. E.g. treat a portion of people as literal cattle and feed others with it, murder the sick, etc.
> Which is exactly what governments that are tasked with rationing health care have to do.
Sorry, meant to say "You're making an assumption that you can value your life in terms of money". Your mother/father/employer might value your life in some way, but for you your life is usually precious.
Governments, can 'value life' in aggregate. Basically it comes down to bargaining power. If a doctor tricks your or cheats you on your bill, other than revenge and trying to sue them after they took your money away you aren't left with a lot of options (hell, you might even think treatments are supposed to be this expensive).
Governments on the other have more chips, bigger chips and stronger insurance when it comes to bargaining with the pharmaceutical and medical providers.
> I don't even want to consider what a bad government might do in this case
So you just magically assume that there are no bad governments? That doesn't seem very reasonable to me. Nor does your claim that this is something governments are somehow magically good at. They're not.
> for you your life is usually precious
If that were actually true, people would behave very differently than they do. Any behavior that, on average, reduces your life expectancy, is irrational under your assumption. And since most behaviors do that, your assumption leads to the conclusion that people should not do most of the things they in fact do.
> Basically it comes down to bargaining power.
If governments actually did nothing more than bargain for the best rates for any given treatment, on behalf of every citizen of the country, and then let each citizen choose (along with their doctor, of course) the best treatment they can afford, that would be fine. Even subsidizing some people to level the playing field for "what they can afford" to the extent possible would be fine. But no government limits itself to just doing that. Governments always end up rationing actual treatments. And they do it badly.
> So you just magically assume that there are no bad governments? That doesn't seem very reasonable to me. Nor does your claim that this is something governments are somehow magically good at. They're not.
No. I didn't say that. There are bad people in the world. And I walk down street all the time, not taking into consideration that every person I met today might attempt to murder me horrifically if they intended it.
Taking worse scenario in this case, isn't prudent. I'm talking how a government should behave and a lot of government, don't behave as you state. For example UK, Canadian and a lot of EU have socialized medicine and it works rather nice for them.
True, some probably had a fair share of mismanagement and probably some abuse. That doesn't detract from my point that it's possible to have decent government.
> If that were actually true, people would behave very differently than they do. Any behavior that, on average, reduces your life expectancy, is irrational under your assumption. And since most behaviors do that, your assumption leads to the conclusion that people should not do most of the things they in fact do.
You are constructing a strawman there. It won't work. I'm talking about immediate life altering changes.
Not some, you'll die if you smoked bacon. Or hot dogs. You need a heart in seven days or you are good as dead. You are given option:
A) pay X+30 amount of dollars and survive
B) go online, research the prices, try to find same procedure for amount X, then argue with current hospital to transfer to a new hospital, transport there taking large amount of risk and pay X dollars but a bigger chance that you'll die.
Usually, you'll go for option X+30 since it's less risky and those 30 bucks well, you can't spend them if you are dead anyway, right?
Next step X becomes X+30, repeat ad nauseam.
> UK, Canadian and a lot of EU have socialized medicine and it works rather nice for them
"Works rather nice" if you don't mind them rationing all forms of health care, which is precisely what I was referring to before: they don't just negotiate better rates for their citizens, they decide what health care those citizens are going to get. Which, as far as I can tell, results in longer wait times for various procedures and fewer people receiving them.
> it's possible to have decent government.
"Possible" is not the same as "likely enough to be worth betting on".
> I'm talking about immediate life altering changes.
And I'm pointing out that basing your reasoning solely on those emergency situations paints a false picture of how we actually value human life.
Sure, if a person is in a life-threatening emergency, they are willing to trade almost anything to stay alive. But they weren't thinking in those terms when they ate the smoked bacon or the hot dogs that ultimately led to the heart disease that put them in the position of needing a heart within seven days or dying. Why not? Because there was nothing in the system forcing them to actually take into account what it would cost to get a heart in seven days if it came to that.
Please note that I am not saying a "free market" in hearts, for example, would make the cost less than it is now. I am saying that nobody is forced to think of the cost at all until they are in the life-threatening situation. That's a bad system, and the government that allowed it to be put in place is bad government.
Please note also that the cost is not just monetary cost. There are fewer hearts (and kidneys, and livers, and other organs) available than there are people who need them, so decisions are going to have to be made about who gets them first. Every person who gets a heart because they failed to foresee the consequences of their bad eating habits or other lifestyle choices is taking that heart away from someone else, who might need it because they were in an accident, or for some other reason that's no fault of their own. Once the situation gets to that point, there are no good options; so the best thing we can do, to whatever extent possible, is to prevent those situations from ever happening. And that means forcing people to consider the long-term costs of their behaviors up front, while there's still time to do something about them before it becomes an emergency.
> Which, as far as I can tell, results in longer wait times for various procedures and fewer people receiving them.
Even in EU or in places with socialized medicine, you can decide to go to a private clinic. It's costly, but it's not like all doctors become state doctors or something. And from what I've read, whatever medicine they prescribe (assuming its regulated) will be lower costing, because the state bartered down the prices (procedures still cost a bundle).
> Why not? Because there was nothing in the system forcing them to actually take into account what it would cost to get a heart in seven days if it came to that.
Well, for once I'm not sure if there are definitive proof that sugar/salt/fat causes special problems and what interplay of them causes you to have heart/liver etc. problems.
However, we have all seen how states deal with something that causes great health cost like smoking -tax them and tax them good. I'm pretty sure that in Australia they managed to obliterate smoking, by replacing all brands with brownish packs with pictures of diseased lungs.
Another way could be subsidy for vegetables and other 'healthy' treats (salmon, tuna). But I don't see this being done by a non-state actor or a group. A state that has socialized medicine has most incentive to promote these programs, and a state only has enough means to put it into action.
> Even in EU or in places with socialized medicine, you can decide to go to a private clinic.
Sure, if you can afford it. But I thought the whole point of socialized medicine was to get people the health care they need regardless of whether they can afford it.
Listen, you can choose one of two options: a 'free' one you pay through your taxes or a private one you fund mostly on your dime. That said government doesn't prevent these things from happening. If you hate waiting and love to be pampered go for this option.
As for the longer wait times, sure, that happens. In fact it's supposed to happen, since MORE people can afford it (there is some abuse but I'd say it's minor).
If the price of waiting in line was $1000000 there would be no waiting in line, so I don't see much to your point. Low prices = more demand.
But low prices = less supply. And prices that the people actually getting the health care can't see = even more mismatch between demand and supply.
It's not just that people want more health care if the prices are lower; they want more health care that they shouldn't be getting, because they're not balancing the benefit to them against the actual cost; they're only balancing the benefit to them against the cost that they see. If they saw the full cost, they would not demand as much because they would realize that the resources they are demanding are not cheap.
In other words, the artificially low price of health care makes people think it's more abundant than it actually is, so they use up resources for minor problems that are then not available to address major ones; so many people are going to the doctor for colds and hangnails that people with serious illnesses aren't getting the care they need. The longer wait times are a symptom of that.
Also, since the prices are artificially controlled, there's less incentive for people to become doctors, nurses, and other health care workers; so there are fewer of them to go around, but more demand. Which further exacerbates the above problems. The longer wait times are a symptom of that too.
If someone came and told me I would die three years earlier than normal unless I paid 5M, I would say no. I disagree with your assertion that life is too valuable to put any number on. This is especially true in cases where treatment isn't a cure and it or paying for it severely decreases quality of life.
It might be expensive, but chances are it will be accessible to everyone. If rejuvenation tech can extend someone's working career, I would expect all sorts of loans would be available. You want to stay young and continue working for another 40 years? Well then of course we can front you $50k.
And not all components of a discussion/conversation/debate have to be "arguments" as you put it. Ironic how your comment is the one that didn't actually add anything to the conversation/topic I was having with that other guy.
HN has a particular culture; it would do you well to learn it. Arguments are encouraged, contentless posts are discouraged in every case. My post to you was to explain my downvote--also part of the HN culture.
Looks like someone has been watching too many Matt Damon movies. <ducks>
On a more serious, less snarky note, though: Why are you so scared of there even being a "wealthy dynasty"? For that matter, you and people with similar views as you are yet to prove that it would even be a bad thing. I'm curious how you arrive at such a conclusion; step me through it?
"Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation."
Doom-sayers were spreading similar fud about food and population growth barely a century ago, and look how that turned out. Science is always a few steps away from fixing a plethora of the world's ills. Precisely as the above food-dilemma shows. And yet on the other side, you would seek to deny science power to prevent such things from actually being a problem? Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy you have there, buddy.
The trouble with the "space travel will save us from overpopulation" argument is that, no matter what technology we come up with in the medium-term future, it is difficult to imagine ever solving overpopulation problems with emigration of any type - we just can't move enough people fast enough. As far as I know, in the entire history of the world, we have never moved enough of a population of healthy, established citizens of any region to alleviate any overpopulation issues. Anything even kind of like that mostly involves heavily threatened populations relocating under duress with little more than what they can carry. If they're lucky, they might manage to settle somewhere that will help them get back on their feet.
There was an interesting passage in the Red Mars series about this. On their Earth, then had 11 (!) operational space elevators and a severe overpopulation problem. The numbers were all theoretical, of course, but they calculated that, even with 11 space elevators working full-tilt on sending people off the planet, they still wouldn't come close to making a dent in the world population. It's hard to imagine any kind of technology that could actually move and settle people off of Earth by the billions.
It's not the poor or the rich that matter. Its the advancement of human race that matters. Just think of scientists being able to use their experience for ever in pushing the boundaries. We probably won't even have to be earth bound anymore and can expand to other planets due quickening of scientific pace.
Rejuvenation would be a good thing. It may not be available to everyone immediately, but that's true of every technology.
What makes you think this would only be available to the rich? That could happen, but it's not a given. The actual techniques that we're talking about might not be expensive. The original article mentioned saving stem cells extracted early in life and reintroducing them in old age. That sounds like something that could be done cheaply on a large scale.
And even if it is expensive, we don't have to make everyone pay out of their own pocket. Redistribution is a dirty word in the US, but that's not true everywhere in the world.
So yes, there may be social issues to deal with, but that's not a reason not to develop the technology. It's a reason to develop our society.
I think more emphasis should be put on reduction of suffering rather than number of years lived.
It is kind of cool that we are beginning to get rid of many diseases and people are living longer, but the people doing such research so never seem to give much thought to overpopulation and limited resources.
Imagine for example that no one dies ever, as of tomorrow, do we think the world would be a more pleasant place in 100 years time? More people, more pollution, less resources to be shared. It seems obvious to me that the environment is struggling with the current number of people (climate change, seas being over fished, oil that is going to run out relatively soon....) How will it be if we have even more people?
> It is kind of cool that we are beginning to get rid of many diseases and people are living longer, but the people doing such research so never seem to give much thought to overpopulation and limited resources.
So you'd like to kill 100 people per minute to solve overpopulation and limited resources?
That was the conclusion you came to on the basis of the OP's remarks? What about free access to birth control methods? Are you aware that fertility control is a huge political issue in the U.S., complete with the occasional murder and terrorist attacks on doctor's offices?
Unless, of course, you regard birth control as "killing".
An argument that research into curing mortality is somehow immoral based on overpopulation or limited resources directly suggests that it's better for people to die than for us to have those problems. I seriously doubt that was the intent of the argument, but that's the implication of such an argument. If my response sounded absurd, it's because making the argument was absurd to begin with.
Now, if someone wants to look into those other problems too, that's fine; in particular, we do need research into solutions for other causes of suffering, not just mortality, and resource shortage is a fine place to start. But complaining about research into mortality is ridiculous. Doubly so because such an argument assumes fungibility of research resources: the people doing that research are not arbitrarily repurposable towards other issues.
The rest of your post seems like an unrelated red herring combined with a vague attack.
I didn't say it was immoral (my comment has generated a lot of straw men). I just think it creates other problems that no one seems to consider. I personally would rather live to 75 and be fairly healthy for most to that, than live to 100 and be in poor health for a significant part of that.
Hmm, this reminds me of Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation universe.
In this universe, before the events of Foundation, there are two main waves of human expansion. During the first, humans populate and terraform a few dozen planets. By tightly regulating their man-made planets, automating everything, and having excessively tight import restrictions, they live better lives than those packed in on Earth. Their lifespans increase dramatically, and their birth rates drop to sustenance levels. These factors create a strong cultural divide between them and the humans who are still on Earth.
Eventually the humans on Earth get their act together and begin expanding throughout the galaxy again. This time however they do it quick and dirty. Short lives, lots of kids. Their population growth remains unbounded while the initial wave of human settlers becomes increasingly isolationist. Eventually the people and worlds in the first wave of expansion are forgotten.
No, he presents a valid problem, what if rich people would automatically mean smarter, faster, stronger (harder) people? It would turn the current divide between rich and poor into a chasm.
I doubt they wouldn't demonize the poor as the lesser species, much like Americans did to Native Americans and British did to their colonies?
Another problem that might present itself is that often people have to die for new ideas to be accepted. Think of racist uncle, but now think he can live for a thousand years.
Thinking stuff like that will 'trickle down' is a fallacy. Just look at the American health system.
"...what if rich people would automatically mean smarter, faster, stronger (harder) people?"
Why is that part of the problem? The easiest way to get very rich is to start out rich and I'm having difficulty believing that there is any strong correlation between being "smarter, faster, stronger" and the ability to accumulate money.
What if your racist uncle, crazy and none-too-bright, can live for a thousand years and owns everything?
Yes, inheritance is obviously the easiest way to be very rich. However, it's not the most common way. Far from it, in fact. Only 30% of those on the Forbes 400 list, for example, grew up in wealthy families.
30%, under the circumstances that anyone who becomes wealthy has to eventually turn their wealth over to someone else. Because the wealthy person is dead.
No, he presents a valid problem, what if rich people would automatically mean smarter, faster, stronger (harder) people? It would turn the current divide between rich and poor into a chasm.
He presents an irrelevant problem. OK, what if it would? So what?
Right now, do you say "rich people can afford more medicine and thereby live longer, therefore we should not develop medicine for anyone, to keep things fair"?
Do you say "rich people can afford more food and live healthier, therefore we should do away with agriculture and everyone should be a subsistence farmer to make it fair"?
Do you say "rich people can afford more education about health, and thereby live longer. Therefore we should forbid people from learning to make it fair"?
De you say "many poor/working class people have to work as basically indentured servants to survive, therefore they are better off dead"?
No, you don't.
There is a rift between rich and poor.
It's better to have inequality and life, than equality and death.
I'm not saying that. I said it's best to have equality and life. Please don't warp my words. The GP has a point, if flawed one at that.
Extending life by a certain amount isn't bad, it's bad if only the rich can have it. Also directly extending life is a huge boon, I think it puts many other methods (even if it's +20 years) in the dust.
I think maybe, just maybe there can be an option between only the rich can have it and none can have it, i.e. all can have it, some sooner than others.
A great many people put all sorts of things that don't exist (ideologies, dreams, wishes) as more important than the suffering and death of real live actual humans who are really here on earth and really alive.
No. They've rationally decided that the quality of a life is more important than simple quantity.
Please realize that, if someone else disagrees with you (even if you don't understand their position), that does not mean that they are crazy. It doesn't even mean that they are wrong.
This part caught my interest:
"Holstege says the results raise the possibility of rejuvenating ageing bodies with re-injections of stem cells saved from birth or early life. These stem cells would be substantially free of mutations and have full-length telomeres."
Makes me wonder if I should take a blood sample now (age 26) and have it frozen on the off chance that it would be of use later in life. Basically a hedge against, 50 years from now, "well we have the amazing rejuvenation technology that can replenish the fresh blood cells, but only if we have a sample of 'young' blood. Sorry everyone aged 60+."
My thinking on this is that by the time your banked cells might in theory be useful, the research community will have figured out how to make any old cell do everything that they want it to.
You might look at progress in induced pluripotency and very small embryonic like stem cells to see how rapidly things are moving there for the creation of useful cells.
Also worth noting: the preliminary signs are so far weighing on the side of concluding that cells from old people are not significantly less useful than cells from a young person for the purposes of therapy. The bigger differences are inside the body, in the cellular environment.
And again, all the incentives in the very well funded stem cell research community lie in the direction of fixing or working around everything that will prevent them from applying treatments to old people. The overwhelming majority of people (i.e. potential customers) with conditions that would benefit from stem cell treatments are old people, and thus large sections of the research community are working on understanding and manipulating the activities of stem cells in old tissues to try to (a) figure out exactly why they are not working as well as they used to, and (b) restore them to action.
There are some interesting experiments in heterochronic parabiosis that are worth looking into, but also many other lines of work in which researchers are identifying specific signal proteins that direct stem cells into ever greater quiescence. This is most likely an evolved program to lower the risk of death by cancer, reacting to rising levels of cellular damage, at the cost of greater dysfunction and eventual death by tissue failure.
Yep. I jumped to the exact same conclusion. I did a quick search to see what was out there and I came across this article from 2008 talking about a few such companies and how it was being discounted by many scientists as not likely to be useful:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/health/29stem.html?pagewan...
At least a couple of the companies mentioned in that article appear to be out of business. The prices quoted back then are non-trivial for middle class Americans.
It still seems like the sort of thing that might be worth the expense. If they come up with the solution when I'm 80, but I don't have any source of young stem cells to rely on...
This really isn't worth worrying about. I know it seems like a Pascal's wager scenario but "youth of stem cells" isn't a problem. We know how to lengthen telomeres (hTERT) and generating human iPSCs is a routine procedure.
I think that would be wise. We don't know what kind of technology we'll have in 50 years. On the other hand, perhaps it will be so advanced that you won't even need your own stem cells to get rejuvenated. Would that be possible?
I'd like to pull out some stem cells and make a slight alteration to my phi-GULO pseudogene, and inject the altered cells into my liver. That seems relatively simple and within the reach of current technology.
Within 40 years, I can envision sequencing multiple instances of my nuclear DNA, detecting and correcting the transcription error noise, and resequencing what is likely my "original" DNA sequence as the basis for a reconstructed stem cell.
That cell would be multiplied, and the resulting rejuva-goo injected into several points on my body under general anaesthesia.
But that process would still be 10 to 100 times more expensive than one used by people who had access to preserved cells from their younger self. The upside is that this process could also screen for and correct known genetically-linked diseases, or species-wide flaws such as the aforementioned phi-GULO at a marginal additional cost.
What would prevent someone from simply getting a blood transfusion from someone younger?
In that same line of thinking, if I'm donating blood or giving blood samples regularly, does that increase the chance that I will die at a younger age?
Meta: I love that lately there have been more health and biology related submissions here on HN. Dovetails nicely with YC new shift/interest, and matches one of my great personal interests.
Do other like this as well, or do people wish that HN would stay focused on software, VC, and traditional tech? Just curious. Obviously it's getting upmodded, but still curious to hear if there is another side.
Technology + medicine = huge advancement for humanity.
This really is a frontier that has yet to come to full fruition. I'm all for YC/HN spreading into biology and medicine.
Personally, it is an area I'd like to move towards in my own career. I love web development and technology, but I'd love it more if I could apply it to medicine in some way, to produce a more tangible benefit to humanity.
Technology by itself, existing inside of computers alone, limits the possibilities of impacting our lives.
Companies which manage to use technology to actually change the lives of people usually cause greater impact overall, and I am just as you happy to read articles of such examples. In this case, it isn't a ready product, nor any change at this point, but a fundamental step towards.
Our body contains literally trillions of cells. It is absurd to think that among all these cells there will be only a few mutations. Mutations will occur in all cell types all over the body.
What I find really interesting is that the mortality distribution in Gompertz's law may be predicted using the Euler-Lotka equation. This says that the reason we die is because there is an absence of selective pressure for the individual in a species to live longer (link: http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full.pdf)
The longer an organism lives the more it can reproduce, the more copies of it's genes there will be. Any gene that increases (reproductive) lifespan is strongly selected for.
Not correct, though intuitive. Consider each offspring to be 50% of the genes of the parent. A parent with three children is competing with hir own genetics, and losing.
It seems like the rate of reproduction rather than total reproductive lifespan is what matters for selection. A longer lifespan at the expense of a lower rate of reproduction would not be selected for.
Older people die from not being able to perform mitosis of vital cells (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12573379) -- a decade-old observation. She is just a new, other data point.
Hmmm, my guess would be probably not? The internet says that white blood cells only live 3-4 days. If you donate 1 of your 10 pints of blood every 8 weeks, and your body actually replaces the white blood cells immediately (instead of just being down 10% for 3-4 days), you would only be increasing white blood cell production by about 0.7%.
I wonder if the technology and the knowledge will ever be at the point where "life hackers" are extracting their own stem cells, applying home-brewed telomerase, and reinjecting them. It seems like the sort of thing that a subset of HN folks would do.
I met a woman at the first Quantified Self (http://quantifiedself.com/) conference who was very much into such activities. She wasn't performing the process you described, but she absolutely would be willing. Experimenting with biology in your own homemade closet lab becomes more and more financially feasible everyday.
I've been waiting 20 years for people to do this. Still waiting. As the people who want to make glowing plants for streetlights have learned, reality is tough
It is my understanding that some forms of cancerous cells extend their own telomeres, so having stem cells with shorter telomeres is not a defense against this. In any case, wouldn't the cancer be the result of damage to the coding DNA or the intercellular environment anyway, and not a function of telomere length?
The telomeres are there to ensure that the cells with more transcription errors die first. But in the case of aging, there are no younger cells for this die-off process to prefer. Given the choice between a certainty of cancer and cells that cannot even reproduce, some people may roll the dice with cancer, and hope they can live long enough to overcome that problem as well.
The article mentions that possibly all you would have to do is remove some stem cells at a young age and inject them when you are older. Presumably the cells would be kept alive at very low metabolism so they don't divide much.
A comment in this article about the "worn-down" telomeres in the lady's white-blood cells makes me wonder if it would be possible to study the size of white-blood telomeres in any person relative to their brain cell telomeres and predict how long someone is likely to live (given no other health problems)...
I wonder if there is a way to save some of your stem cells now, while you are are younger, just in case the technology is available when you are older.
This would be good if it continues to hold up. The less we have to fix in order to produce a first generation of treatments that effectively treat aging - i.e. produce rejuvenation - the better. Fixing nuclear DNA damage is going to be plausible via global DNA editing technologies like CRISPR, but we're a long way from doing it for all genes to restore to a template and erase damage. Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection. If you're 20-40 years away from peak cancer age in a wealthy region of the world, then I don't think your odds of dying from cancer are very large at all.