3 ms·

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

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.

drharby 9y ago
Suppose short of an eccentric bankrolling a jumpstart to institutionalizing a longevity research culture (for discussions sake, lets say Elon or the ghost of howard hughes) how do you imagine todays research culture would evolve into the necessary scale such longevity research would allegedly require?
- reasonattlm 9y ago
  An aging research community already exists that is ten times or more larger than would be needed to get to a comprehensive implementation of mouse rejuvenation after the SENS Research Foundation model in ten to twenty years. They are just largely not working on that. Amyloid removal is about the only area that does have a lot of attention focused on it. The next few decades will be a slow process of proving that the SENS model works well, and that other models don't work well, when it comes to reversing age-related disease and producing rejuvenation in older individuals. There will be reluctant acceptance on the part of the mainstream, and development will largely shift to what works, slowly and late. This can be seen in its infancy today in the rapid progression of work on senolytics. In just six years, clearance of senescent cells has already far outpaced the past few decades of work on calorie restriction mimetics, producing more impressive and reliable results in animal studies. Things that work are hard to ignore, so everyone now retrofits senescent cells into their models of aging and development - that didn't include them seven years ago - and continues to try to ignore the rest of the SENS to-do list. Senolytics development is becoming heavily funded, and is on its way to the clinic. This process will reoccur every time the poorly funded bootstrapping side of the SENS research community manages to advance to the point of a technology demonstration, which happened in 2011 for cellular senescence. Expect this to happen for cross-link breaking sometime in the next few years, which will be just as impressive for cardiovascular aging as senescent cell clearance is for inflammatory/fibrotic conditions of aging. One would hope that at some point, some people involving in this process make the realization that they could just implement the rest of SENS themselves, with the successful biotech company they are involved in. There are a number of existing companies/groups where this may well happen, if they grow sufficiently large.
p1esk 9y ago
I sense some wishful thinking in your comment. Let me guess, you believe that "sufficiently advanced biotechnology" should appear just in time to reverse your own aging, correct? I'd say, if you're 20 year old, and your ancestors typically lived past 80, then you probably have a chance. Perhaps in 60 years they will at least find a way to freeze you properly.
narrator 9y ago
There's a bit of a bikeshedding effect in longevity science. Getting old only involves not dying aftet all. For most people that seems as simple as getting up in the morning every day and following often repeated diet and excercise advice. To most people, any advance in longevity science just seems like a scam to sell vitamins or expensive cosmetic procedures.

drharby 9y ago

Suppose short of an eccentric bankrolling a jumpstart to institutionalizing a longevity research culture (for discussions sake, lets say Elon or the ghost of howard hughes) how do you imagine todays research culture would evolve into the necessary scale such longevity research would allegedly require?

reasonattlm 9y ago
An aging research community already exists that is ten times or more larger than would be needed to get to a comprehensive implementation of mouse rejuvenation after the SENS Research Foundation model in ten to twenty years. They are just largely not working on that. Amyloid removal is about the only area that does have a lot of attention focused on it. The next few decades will be a slow process of proving that the SENS model works well, and that other models don't work well, when it comes to reversing age-related disease and producing rejuvenation in older individuals. There will be reluctant acceptance on the part of the mainstream, and development will largely shift to what works, slowly and late. This can be seen in its infancy today in the rapid progression of work on senolytics. In just six years, clearance of senescent cells has already far outpaced the past few decades of work on calorie restriction mimetics, producing more impressive and reliable results in animal studies. Things that work are hard to ignore, so everyone now retrofits senescent cells into their models of aging and development - that didn't include them seven years ago - and continues to try to ignore the rest of the SENS to-do list. Senolytics development is becoming heavily funded, and is on its way to the clinic. This process will reoccur every time the poorly funded bootstrapping side of the SENS research community manages to advance to the point of a technology demonstration, which happened in 2011 for cellular senescence. Expect this to happen for cross-link breaking sometime in the next few years, which will be just as impressive for cardiovascular aging as senescent cell clearance is for inflammatory/fibrotic conditions of aging. One would hope that at some point, some people involving in this process make the realization that they could just implement the rest of SENS themselves, with the successful biotech company they are involved in. There are a number of existing companies/groups where this may well happen, if they grow sufficiently large.

p1esk 9y ago

I sense some wishful thinking in your comment. Let me guess, you believe that "sufficiently advanced biotechnology" should appear just in time to reverse your own aging, correct? I'd say, if you're 20 year old, and your ancestors typically lived past 80, then you probably have a chance. Perhaps in 60 years they will at least find a way to freeze you properly.

narrator 9y ago

There's a bit of a bikeshedding effect in longevity science. Getting old only involves not dying aftet all. For most people that seems as simple as getting up in the morning every day and following often repeated diet and excercise advice. To most people, any advance in longevity science just seems like a scam to sell vitamins or expensive cosmetic procedures.