3 ms·

The Secret to a Longer Life? Don’t Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers

13 points by jonah 9y ago

reasonattlm 9y ago
Mildly amusing, but basically silly. There is a reason why everyone in the past failed, and that is because they didn't have sufficiently advanced biotechnology to (a) understand the causes of aging in terms of specific low-level cell and tissue damage, and (b) identify and build ways to repair those forms of damage. We've only had a way to progress towards therapies for aging with this model of development for somewhere between 30-50 years, and no way to make progress towards therapies for aging with anything short of massive war-on-cancer style programs prior to the last 20 years. (Those programs didn't happen, but in a different world could have; arguably it wouldn't have made much difference as to where we are now, just as the war on cancer has only been a foundational effort for the last ten years of exponentially rapid development just prior to the advent of universal effective cancer therapies. It is possible that senolytics could have happened much earlier, decades ago, but finding and validating the candidate drugs would have been very hard back then). But now everything in biotech costs 100 times less than it did not so very long ago - that is really why things are heating up in applied longevity science. The article also commits the usual journalistic sin of equating every effort. There is a vast difference between all of: eating a different diet; running a pharmaceutical discovery program aimed at a mechanism of aging; running that program to build a way to replicate calorie restriction; running that program to kill senescent cells or clear glucosepane cross-links. These activities have radically different expectation values in terms of best plausible outcome. The biggest mistake most people make in their approach to the new world of rejuvenation science is to think of every possible methodology as having similar best plausible outcomes in terms of years gained. Nothing could be further from the truth.
JPLeRouzic 9y ago
What this article told: "It is much more our collective decisions that matter than individual decisions" is common sense but an inconvenient truth is never well received and often simply not listen at all. I was baffled in the early 80' when France subsidized Diesel engines, then convinced EU that it was a sensible decision. At that time there were people that did not hesitate to tell that breathing Diesel exhaust gases was harmless! Another is Cathodic TV which was known to emit X-rays from the start [0] nevertheless people never cared and no scientists, nor journalists asked any question. [0] https://www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/ResourcesforYouRadiationEmittingProducts/ucm252764.htm https://www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/ResourcesforY...

13 points by jonah 9y ago

Mildly amusing, but basically silly. There is a reason why everyone in the past failed, and that is because they didn't have sufficiently advanced biotechnology to (a) understand the causes of aging in terms of specific low-level cell and tissue damage, and (b) identify and build ways to repair those forms of damage. We've only had a way to progress towards therapies for aging with this model of development for somewhere between 30-50 years, and no way to make progress towards therapies for aging with anything short of massive war-on-cancer style programs prior to the last 20 years. (Those programs didn't happen, but in a different world could have; arguably it wouldn't have made much difference as to where we are now, just as the war on cancer has only been a foundational effort for the last ten years of exponentially rapid development just prior to the advent of universal effective cancer therapies. It is possible that senolytics could have happened much earlier, decades ago, but finding and validating the candidate drugs would have been very hard back then). But now everything in biotech costs 100 times less than it did not so very long ago - that is really why things are heating up in applied longevity science. The article also commits the usual journalistic sin of equating every effort. There is a vast difference between all of: eating a different diet; running a pharmaceutical discovery program aimed at a mechanism of aging; running that program to build a way to replicate calorie restriction; running that program to kill senescent cells or clear glucosepane cross-links. These activities have radically different expectation values in terms of best plausible outcome. The biggest mistake most people make in their approach to the new world of rejuvenation science is to think of every possible methodology as having similar best plausible outcomes in terms of years gained. Nothing could be further from the truth.

JPLeRouzic 9y ago

What this article told: "It is much more our collective decisions that matter than individual decisions" is common sense but an inconvenient truth is never well received and often simply not listen at all. I was baffled in the early 80' when France subsidized Diesel engines, then convinced EU that it was a sensible decision. At that time there were people that did not hesitate to tell that breathing Diesel exhaust gases was harmless! Another is Cathodic TV which was known to emit X-rays from the start [0] nevertheless people never cared and no scientists, nor journalists asked any question. [0] https://www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/ResourcesforYouRadiationEmittingProducts/ucm252764.htm https://www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/ResourcesforY...