8 ms·

Three New Longevity Startups

152 points by apsec112 7y ago

deegles 7y ago
At what age would these treatments be applied? How often?
- rantwasp 7y ago
  this is mostly research. there are a lot of things you can do to slow down aging right now - almost orthogonal to your age: sleep 7+ hours per night, hit the gym (mix of cardio+strength), eat high quality food - the less processed the better - also try to eat a plant based diet, reduce the level of stress in your life, properly hydrate yourself, hang out with people you like, get a pet, get a side project that is a work of love, learn something every day, read books, reduce your social media (and media in general) consumption.
  - nostromo 7y ago
    > eat a plant based diet I agree with everything else you've said, but the jury is definitely out on this one.
    - rantwasp 7y ago
      there is some research out there that suggests you may live longer if you can actually pull this off.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      The current life expectancy for Iceland in 2020 is 83.07 years, a 0.18% increase from 2019. [1] Life expectancy for Hong Kong is 84.7 years. [2] Based on a comparison of 158 countries in 2013, Maldives ranked the highest in fish consumption per capita with 166 kg followed by Iceland and Hong Kong [3] Hong Kong also beats most countries in beef consumption, out-eating Americans by nearly 50% per capita. [4] So of the countries in the top 10 for life expectancy, we see a lot of meat in the diet. India has the most vegetarians of any country (at 38%). And their life expectancy ranks 133rd at 69.4 years. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life-expec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... [3] https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption-per-capita/ https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption-per... [4] https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capita-ranking-countries-0-111634 https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capit...
      - Rotten194 7y ago
        Some big confounding factors there. Hong Kong and Iceland are also very wealthy compared to India.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Well at 133rd there are plenty of 3rd world countries above them. There's only 185 countries on the planet. It certainly shows that meat consumption doesn't hurt.
        scarejunba 7y ago
        There is a fortunate coincidence here. There are wealthy vegetarian castes in India, and India tracks demographics by caste, so it's likely that the data is out there for us to figure this part out. An alternative is to do something like follow second-generation Western people of Indian origin. I know at least one study of Tuberculosis in the UK tested the effect of vegetarianism there and used the British Asian sub-population to do so, so there's probably some info there too. I don't know of any other large vegetarian groups.
      - gdudeman 7y ago
        These are highly confounding statistics. Meat consumption grows with wealth and lifespan also grows with wealth. To say lifespan grows with wealth because of meat consumption doesn’t make sense. Hong Kong’s beef consumption doubled since 2003. I’d wager your average elderly American ate more meat in their life than your average Hong Kong resident. Source: https://medium.com/@ecyY/meat-consumption-growth-in-hong-kong-is-alarming-872e46bf40ca https://medium.com/@ecyY/meat-consumption-growth-in-hong-kon...
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Their life expectancy keeps increasing right along with their meat consumption: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HKG/hong-kong/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HKG/hong-kong/life-exp...
    - jv22222 7y ago
      From the OP > AGEs can also be encountered in foods, particularly foods that have been exposed to high temperatures, such as in grilling or frying. I wonder if non plant based diets promote more grilling and frying hence the bad wrap.
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    Can you give a pointer to the research on non-social media consumption decreasing longevity? From what I read physical fitness correlates much better with it than mental fitness.
    - realtalk_sp 7y ago
      Wild guess but this could be related to stress. Specifically, the closer you can get to stoic and indifferent to the 'successes' of other people, the more content you are likely to be. Without the corrosive influence of social media, you might also be more likely to live a more authentic life that you find personally meaningful. That said, I doubt everyone has the same relationship with social media that I had. I found myself influenced by it even in small doses, and it always felt like it was detracting from my wellbeing. Going cold turkey ended up being a life-changing decision for me and I wouldn't dream of going back.
    - rantwasp 7y ago
      being social and interacting with people is actually beneficial. increasing your stress level by watching mainstream media and consuming regurgitated content probably is not.
- hobofan 7y ago
  Complete guess: Every 5-10 years (as it looks none of them are gene thereapies), depending of lifestyle and specific rate of damage of the individual starting around ~30.
wwwtyro 7y ago
More on Underdog Pharma: https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/11/an-interview-with-matthew-oconnor-as-underdog-pharmaceuticals-secures-seed-funding/ https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/11/an-interview-wit... "We've taken a well-known and extremely safe compound, and have created novel derivatives that can specifically target the toxic biomolecule that drives the development of atherosclerosis, the cause of most heart attacks and strokes." I'm excited for this one. Seems like a reasonable possibility for success addressing a huge killer.
- mjfl 7y ago
  Are they engineering the macrophages to produce the enzyme? How does it work?
- assadk 7y ago
  > The company is focused on a class of molecule known cyclodextrins, and have candidates capable of efficiently binding and sequestering 7-ketocholesterol. This form of oxidized cholesterol is of great importance to the progression of atherosclerosis, and possibly other age-related conditions as well. The thing is cyclodextrins have been linked to causing deafness, in as little as a week. As per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5676048/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5676048/ and https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/deaf-or-death-in-drug-trial-parents-weigh-life-vs-hearing-loss-1425267002 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/deaf-or-death-in-drug-trial... Heart disease or hearing – tough trade-offs. Here’s to hoping that they’ve engineered a novel compound without any of the downsides.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Wonder how long they'll last...
- rantwasp 7y ago
  the whole point of these spin-offs is that the majority of them will not survive. there are a lot of ideas around aging and it’s really easy to get carried away to the point we throw everything against a wall and see what sticks.
kresten 7y ago
Billionaires and ultra rich seem to take a special interest in longevity. Ref: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-immortality-financiers-the-billionaires-who-want-to-live-forever https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-immortality-financiers-the...
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  Billionaires should give up their money once per century, IMO.
- mjfl 7y ago
  Would you rather billionaires place their money in a big trust fund so their giant tree of descendents don’t have to work for a living or would you rather them spend their entire fortune on longevity research in a desperate plea to stay alive? Which one would be better for society? I would argue the latter.
  - peteretep 7y ago
    Leaving the rest of this alone, it’s very far from clear that raising life expectancy beyond what it currently is would be “better for society”.
  - ginko 7y ago
    I'd rather 90% of a billionaire's fortune will get eaten by inheritance tax upon their deaths.
    - mjfl 7y ago
      It's totally obvious to me that you would but that wasn't a choice.
tempsy 7y ago
Longevity is a interesting one because there are so many studies out there that have looked into calorie restriction as having a large positive influence on healthy aging...
jv22222 7y ago
Reading this article makes me very glad that I've been donating to SENS for some time now. They are doing awesome work: https://www.sens.org/get-involved/donate/ https://www.sens.org/get-involved/donate/
BiochemOki 7y ago
Hi, I'm co-founder of Underdog and the scientist who invented the drugs we are developing. Cool that this community has taken an interest. I agree with a lot of the insightful comments here. If you're interested in diving deeper into the toxic cholesterol that we're targeting I've just published a review article all about its biology and all the aspects of aging and disease that it's involved in: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213231719311759 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221323171... To touch on a couple of the other points that have been raised here, no our drugs aren't enzymes. We at SENS were working on an enzymatic approach for many years. There is still potential to engineering enzymes for this, but I designed our cyclodextrins to be a faster/cheaper/easier path to the clinic. Well, not that much cheaper. It's still very expensive. And yes, we are well aware of the hearing loss issue. It's avoidable, we believe we understand what caused it, and we're engineering around it. We'll be able to test whether we are successfully avoiding hearing loss in a very sensitive system in the next 9 months. How long will we last? 16 more months with our current funding and burn rate. By then we need to have moved into series A so if anyone has any pharma VC contacts I'm definitely looking for warm intros :)
- DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
  What is your opinion of using a monoclonal antibody against 7KC instead of cyclodextrin since mAbs are very well understood from a regulatory and PK/PD point of view. In your review I only see that you discuss 7KC antibodies as a method of screening for people who could benefit from your therapeutic idea.
  - BiochemOki 7y ago
    Great question. Two problems with making a therapeutic antibody against seven KC. One is that we are not sure how good the seven KC antibodies are yet. We are working on this. The problem there is that 7KC only differs from cholesterol by one atom. The other problem is that the 7KC that we are worried about is inside of cells, so our drug is designed to mechanically pull the seven KC out, which antibodies can't really do. Also, cyclodextrins are very well accepted by regulators, it's just that they are usually used as excipients rather than as Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs). There are two examples of cyclodextrin APIs already, however, one approved and one in late stage clinical trials.
TheUndead96 7y ago
I think longevity is vastly underestimated. Besides the natural innate desire to live longer, every extra year of healthspan is an opportunity to reap benefits on long term investment in friends, family and financial instruments. Knowing that you may live to 150 changes how you might approach investing and spending your time in money and skills development. People with the conscientiousness and forethought to apply themselves to important but not urgent tasks might experience compound interest the likes of which we have never seen before. Imagine if Warren Buffet was only half way through his healthspan.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > I think longevity is vastly underestimated. Many people would give up their entire life fortune, any inheritance to their children, just to live for a few more years. People have been killing and dying searching for the fountain of youth for centuries. Everyone is going to die eventually, yet the extremes people go to extend life is unlike any normal supply and demand curve. I'm not sure there's anything more overestimated and over-hyped than longevity.
  - luspr 7y ago
    There is not enough funding or investment in longevity to consider it over-hyped. Compare it to, say, AI and VR. Or even meat substitutes.
    - speedplane 7y ago
      > There is not enough funding or investment in longevity to consider it over-hyped. Compare it to, say, AI and VR. Or even meat substitutes. You're very much mistaken. The National Institute of Health gets $31B of government funds every year for research. The NSF gets $8B, NASA gets $20B, and DARPA gets around $3B. So healthcare research gets roughly 50% of the entire U.S. public research budget, and that's not including private investment. It's difficult to pull accurate numbers, but meat substitutes, VR, and even super-hot AI get far less every year, it's nowhere near healthcare research. Extending life has been a priority of the US government for many years, largely because it's politically popular. Everyone rich or poor wants to live longer.
scandox 7y ago
I'm interested if there is much anti-longevity sentiment here. I admit I'm very much against further moves to artificially increase human lifespan. Am I quite alone in this?
- macrolime 7y ago
  Even if everyone was against it, at some point science would reach the state that it would happen, or become trivial, without anyone trying.
  - scandox 7y ago
    Scientific progress may not continue indefinitely. We don't really know what will happen.
- balfirevic 7y ago
  > Am I quite alone in this? I sure hope so. But, to take your line of thinking further, what are the odds that we are currently at just the right lifespan for humans? If you are against increasing human lifespan, you should also probably be in favor of decreasing it, unless you think we are at very special point in time in entire human history.
  - scandox 7y ago
    I think the number is possibly arbitrary. I am not making any argument about it. I am just at present trying to understand why temperamentally and instinctively I am against it. I am also seeking to understand if others feel as I do on this subject.
    - mat4magic 7y ago
      Dying was Impossible to evade so far. So the best thing for happiness and Mental Health is to accept or not think about it. Maybe even see it as a "good" thing To even Aknowledge that it might be possible could lead to false hope and disappointment. I think thats the main reason many people are instinctively against it The mind basically tries to protect them from fighting against the impossible and earning nothing but dread and disappointment.
placebo 7y ago
Love of life is not the same as fear of death. If the latter is what drives the search for longevity then it will never be enough. So long as longevity isn't used to find peace with life and death, and transcend our limited perspective on life then I see it as just a frantic attempt to delay the inevitable. Resisting death at 150 will be just as painful as resisting it at any other age. If on the other hand it will give people more time to gain wisdom and perspective on what life is about then that's a whole different story.
- waterhouse 7y ago
  Assuming it's like any other product or service, the people that implement longevity (if they do) will be a tiny fraction of the general population, and certainly not a random sampling thereof. Most people who end up being able to make use of longevity treatments will have had nothing to do with those who implemented them (except by working for company A which made product X which was used by company B to make ... which was one of the components the longevity researchers used); I think it'll happen regardless of their opinion about it (well, I guess if they violently opposed it, maybe they could stop it). So, it's less a question of what drives the search for longevity than what we'll do with it once it arrives.
khaledkteily 7y ago
I learned a lot through this, thank you for sharing. I run a sperm freezing company (YC S19) incubated at Harvard and we've always thought about freezing sperm as an extremely logical pairing with any life extension technology; sperm can be frozen indefinitely with no loss in quality (as far as we know), you could have 30-year old sperm frozen for us when you're 130. Since sperm develops mutations over time (~1 every 8 months) and DNA fragmentation is associated with all manner of congenital conditions like autism, younger sperm is generally speaking healthier. Just wanted to share since it's something we talk about internally quite a bit. What does it mean to live forever if you lose all your family members along the way? How will society change to accommodate?

152 points by apsec112 7y ago

deegles 7y ago

At what age would these treatments be applied? How often?

rantwasp 7y ago
this is mostly research. there are a lot of things you can do to slow down aging right now - almost orthogonal to your age: sleep 7+ hours per night, hit the gym (mix of cardio+strength), eat high quality food - the less processed the better - also try to eat a plant based diet, reduce the level of stress in your life, properly hydrate yourself, hang out with people you like, get a pet, get a side project that is a work of love, learn something every day, read books, reduce your social media (and media in general) consumption.
- nostromo 7y ago
  > eat a plant based diet I agree with everything else you've said, but the jury is definitely out on this one.
  - rantwasp 7y ago
    there is some research out there that suggests you may live longer if you can actually pull this off.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    The current life expectancy for Iceland in 2020 is 83.07 years, a 0.18% increase from 2019. [1] Life expectancy for Hong Kong is 84.7 years. [2] Based on a comparison of 158 countries in 2013, Maldives ranked the highest in fish consumption per capita with 166 kg followed by Iceland and Hong Kong [3] Hong Kong also beats most countries in beef consumption, out-eating Americans by nearly 50% per capita. [4] So of the countries in the top 10 for life expectancy, we see a lot of meat in the diet. India has the most vegetarians of any country (at 38%). And their life expectancy ranks 133rd at 69.4 years. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISL/iceland/life-expec... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... [3] https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption-per-capita/ https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/fish-consumption-per... [4] https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capita-ranking-countries-0-111634 https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-per-capit...
    - Rotten194 7y ago
      Some big confounding factors there. Hong Kong and Iceland are also very wealthy compared to India.
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        Well at 133rd there are plenty of 3rd world countries above them. There's only 185 countries on the planet. It certainly shows that meat consumption doesn't hurt.
      - scarejunba 7y ago
        There is a fortunate coincidence here. There are wealthy vegetarian castes in India, and India tracks demographics by caste, so it's likely that the data is out there for us to figure this part out. An alternative is to do something like follow second-generation Western people of Indian origin. I know at least one study of Tuberculosis in the UK tested the effect of vegetarianism there and used the British Asian sub-population to do so, so there's probably some info there too. I don't know of any other large vegetarian groups.
    - gdudeman 7y ago
      These are highly confounding statistics. Meat consumption grows with wealth and lifespan also grows with wealth. To say lifespan grows with wealth because of meat consumption doesn’t make sense. Hong Kong’s beef consumption doubled since 2003. I’d wager your average elderly American ate more meat in their life than your average Hong Kong resident. Source: https://medium.com/@ecyY/meat-consumption-growth-in-hong-kong-is-alarming-872e46bf40ca https://medium.com/@ecyY/meat-consumption-growth-in-hong-kon...
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        Their life expectancy keeps increasing right along with their meat consumption: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HKG/hong-kong/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HKG/hong-kong/life-exp...
  - jv22222 7y ago
    From the OP > AGEs can also be encountered in foods, particularly foods that have been exposed to high temperatures, such as in grilling or frying. I wonder if non plant based diets promote more grilling and frying hence the bad wrap.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  Can you give a pointer to the research on non-social media consumption decreasing longevity? From what I read physical fitness correlates much better with it than mental fitness.
  - realtalk_sp 7y ago
    Wild guess but this could be related to stress. Specifically, the closer you can get to stoic and indifferent to the 'successes' of other people, the more content you are likely to be. Without the corrosive influence of social media, you might also be more likely to live a more authentic life that you find personally meaningful. That said, I doubt everyone has the same relationship with social media that I had. I found myself influenced by it even in small doses, and it always felt like it was detracting from my wellbeing. Going cold turkey ended up being a life-changing decision for me and I wouldn't dream of going back.
  - rantwasp 7y ago
    being social and interacting with people is actually beneficial. increasing your stress level by watching mainstream media and consuming regurgitated content probably is not.
hobofan 7y ago
Complete guess: Every 5-10 years (as it looks none of them are gene thereapies), depending of lifestyle and specific rate of damage of the individual starting around ~30.

wwwtyro 7y ago

More on Underdog Pharma: https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/11/an-interview-with-matthew-oconnor-as-underdog-pharmaceuticals-secures-seed-funding/ https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/11/an-interview-wit... "We've taken a well-known and extremely safe compound, and have created novel derivatives that can specifically target the toxic biomolecule that drives the development of atherosclerosis, the cause of most heart attacks and strokes." I'm excited for this one. Seems like a reasonable possibility for success addressing a huge killer.

mjfl 7y ago
Are they engineering the macrophages to produce the enzyme? How does it work?
assadk 7y ago
> The company is focused on a class of molecule known cyclodextrins, and have candidates capable of efficiently binding and sequestering 7-ketocholesterol. This form of oxidized cholesterol is of great importance to the progression of atherosclerosis, and possibly other age-related conditions as well. The thing is cyclodextrins have been linked to causing deafness, in as little as a week. As per https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5676048/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5676048/ and https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/deaf-or-death-in-drug-trial-parents-weigh-life-vs-hearing-loss-1425267002 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/deaf-or-death-in-drug-trial... Heart disease or hearing – tough trade-offs. Here’s to hoping that they’ve engineered a novel compound without any of the downsides.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

Wonder how long they'll last...

rantwasp 7y ago
the whole point of these spin-offs is that the majority of them will not survive. there are a lot of ideas around aging and it’s really easy to get carried away to the point we throw everything against a wall and see what sticks.

kresten 7y ago

Billionaires and ultra rich seem to take a special interest in longevity. Ref: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-immortality-financiers-the-billionaires-who-want-to-live-forever https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-immortality-financiers-the...

SubiculumCode 7y ago
Billionaires should give up their money once per century, IMO.
mjfl 7y ago
Would you rather billionaires place their money in a big trust fund so their giant tree of descendents don’t have to work for a living or would you rather them spend their entire fortune on longevity research in a desperate plea to stay alive? Which one would be better for society? I would argue the latter.
- peteretep 7y ago
  Leaving the rest of this alone, it’s very far from clear that raising life expectancy beyond what it currently is would be “better for society”.
- ginko 7y ago
  I'd rather 90% of a billionaire's fortune will get eaten by inheritance tax upon their deaths.
  - mjfl 7y ago
    It's totally obvious to me that you would but that wasn't a choice.

tempsy 7y ago

Longevity is a interesting one because there are so many studies out there that have looked into calorie restriction as having a large positive influence on healthy aging...

jv22222 7y ago

Reading this article makes me very glad that I've been donating to SENS for some time now. They are doing awesome work: https://www.sens.org/get-involved/donate/ https://www.sens.org/get-involved/donate/

BiochemOki 7y ago

Hi, I'm co-founder of Underdog and the scientist who invented the drugs we are developing. Cool that this community has taken an interest. I agree with a lot of the insightful comments here. If you're interested in diving deeper into the toxic cholesterol that we're targeting I've just published a review article all about its biology and all the aspects of aging and disease that it's involved in: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213231719311759 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221323171... To touch on a couple of the other points that have been raised here, no our drugs aren't enzymes. We at SENS were working on an enzymatic approach for many years. There is still potential to engineering enzymes for this, but I designed our cyclodextrins to be a faster/cheaper/easier path to the clinic. Well, not that much cheaper. It's still very expensive. And yes, we are well aware of the hearing loss issue. It's avoidable, we believe we understand what caused it, and we're engineering around it. We'll be able to test whether we are successfully avoiding hearing loss in a very sensitive system in the next 9 months. How long will we last? 16 more months with our current funding and burn rate. By then we need to have moved into series A so if anyone has any pharma VC contacts I'm definitely looking for warm intros :)

DrAwdeOccarim 7y ago
What is your opinion of using a monoclonal antibody against 7KC instead of cyclodextrin since mAbs are very well understood from a regulatory and PK/PD point of view. In your review I only see that you discuss 7KC antibodies as a method of screening for people who could benefit from your therapeutic idea.
- BiochemOki 7y ago
  Great question. Two problems with making a therapeutic antibody against seven KC. One is that we are not sure how good the seven KC antibodies are yet. We are working on this. The problem there is that 7KC only differs from cholesterol by one atom. The other problem is that the 7KC that we are worried about is inside of cells, so our drug is designed to mechanically pull the seven KC out, which antibodies can't really do. Also, cyclodextrins are very well accepted by regulators, it's just that they are usually used as excipients rather than as Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs). There are two examples of cyclodextrin APIs already, however, one approved and one in late stage clinical trials.

TheUndead96 7y ago

I think longevity is vastly underestimated. Besides the natural innate desire to live longer, every extra year of healthspan is an opportunity to reap benefits on long term investment in friends, family and financial instruments. Knowing that you may live to 150 changes how you might approach investing and spending your time in money and skills development. People with the conscientiousness and forethought to apply themselves to important but not urgent tasks might experience compound interest the likes of which we have never seen before. Imagine if Warren Buffet was only half way through his healthspan.

speedplane 7y ago
> I think longevity is vastly underestimated. Many people would give up their entire life fortune, any inheritance to their children, just to live for a few more years. People have been killing and dying searching for the fountain of youth for centuries. Everyone is going to die eventually, yet the extremes people go to extend life is unlike any normal supply and demand curve. I'm not sure there's anything more overestimated and over-hyped than longevity.
- luspr 7y ago
  There is not enough funding or investment in longevity to consider it over-hyped. Compare it to, say, AI and VR. Or even meat substitutes.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > There is not enough funding or investment in longevity to consider it over-hyped. Compare it to, say, AI and VR. Or even meat substitutes. You're very much mistaken. The National Institute of Health gets $31B of government funds every year for research. The NSF gets $8B, NASA gets $20B, and DARPA gets around $3B. So healthcare research gets roughly 50% of the entire U.S. public research budget, and that's not including private investment. It's difficult to pull accurate numbers, but meat substitutes, VR, and even super-hot AI get far less every year, it's nowhere near healthcare research. Extending life has been a priority of the US government for many years, largely because it's politically popular. Everyone rich or poor wants to live longer.

scandox 7y ago

I'm interested if there is much anti-longevity sentiment here. I admit I'm very much against further moves to artificially increase human lifespan. Am I quite alone in this?

macrolime 7y ago
Even if everyone was against it, at some point science would reach the state that it would happen, or become trivial, without anyone trying.
- scandox 7y ago
  Scientific progress may not continue indefinitely. We don't really know what will happen.
balfirevic 7y ago
> Am I quite alone in this? I sure hope so. But, to take your line of thinking further, what are the odds that we are currently at just the right lifespan for humans? If you are against increasing human lifespan, you should also probably be in favor of decreasing it, unless you think we are at very special point in time in entire human history.
- scandox 7y ago
  I think the number is possibly arbitrary. I am not making any argument about it. I am just at present trying to understand why temperamentally and instinctively I am against it. I am also seeking to understand if others feel as I do on this subject.
  - mat4magic 7y ago
    Dying was Impossible to evade so far. So the best thing for happiness and Mental Health is to accept or not think about it. Maybe even see it as a "good" thing To even Aknowledge that it might be possible could lead to false hope and disappointment. I think thats the main reason many people are instinctively against it The mind basically tries to protect them from fighting against the impossible and earning nothing but dread and disappointment.

placebo 7y ago

Love of life is not the same as fear of death. If the latter is what drives the search for longevity then it will never be enough. So long as longevity isn't used to find peace with life and death, and transcend our limited perspective on life then I see it as just a frantic attempt to delay the inevitable. Resisting death at 150 will be just as painful as resisting it at any other age. If on the other hand it will give people more time to gain wisdom and perspective on what life is about then that's a whole different story.

waterhouse 7y ago
Assuming it's like any other product or service, the people that implement longevity (if they do) will be a tiny fraction of the general population, and certainly not a random sampling thereof. Most people who end up being able to make use of longevity treatments will have had nothing to do with those who implemented them (except by working for company A which made product X which was used by company B to make ... which was one of the components the longevity researchers used); I think it'll happen regardless of their opinion about it (well, I guess if they violently opposed it, maybe they could stop it). So, it's less a question of what drives the search for longevity than what we'll do with it once it arrives.

khaledkteily 7y ago

I learned a lot through this, thank you for sharing. I run a sperm freezing company (YC S19) incubated at Harvard and we've always thought about freezing sperm as an extremely logical pairing with any life extension technology; sperm can be frozen indefinitely with no loss in quality (as far as we know), you could have 30-year old sperm frozen for us when you're 130. Since sperm develops mutations over time (~1 every 8 months) and DNA fragmentation is associated with all manner of congenital conditions like autism, younger sperm is generally speaking healthier. Just wanted to share since it's something we talk about internally quite a bit. What does it mean to live forever if you lose all your family members along the way? How will society change to accommodate?