8 ms·

As someone entirely outside this field, can someone with more inside knowledge give any insight into where this lies on the crank/hoax spectrum? A biorxv paper

As someone entirely outside this field, can someone with more inside knowledge give any insight into where this lies on the crank/hoax spectrum? A biorxv paper and a well-written blogpost don't really point either way.

throw1234651234 6y ago
Ask Thiel.
op03 6y ago
It's not targeting you. It targeted at dumbasses with cash who are scared of dying.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  What's wrong with not wanting to die?
  - strofcon 6y ago
    It's a pretty mentally unhealthy way to live, mostly.
    - RunawayGalaxy 6y ago
      Even if it's possible?
      - strofcon 6y ago
        I mean, "won't die of old age quite as soon" doesn't equate to "immortal", yea? To be fair though, my comment was way too broad. I should have clarified that I mean a constant, overbearing dread of the prospect of death is super unhealthy. Make life suck, and effectively shortens it in the experience of the scared one. (source: did that for a long time, got healthy, stopped being scared. Sample size of 1. :-D )
    - modzu 6y ago
      said with the entire world cooped up scared in their homes...
      - strofcon 6y ago
        Yup, current situation sucks massively. Doesn't change the fact that a disproportionate fear of death is exceedingly unhealthy and robs folks of some of the joy of being alive.
        aea12 6y ago
        Except nobody said, or even suggested, a fear of dying. Only you did. There's a significant difference between wanting more time to do things and sitting around terrified, and conflating the two is problematic. Reading your siblings, you're projecting your own feelings onto a completely reasonable feeling that most people have: with another hundred years of experience, what's possible?
        strofcon 6y ago
        Fair enough, I read fear into the parent comment, my apologies. As for projection, not so much - I've not really had any significant fear of death, aside from instinct to avoid certain demise. :-) Instead it's more that I've only ever seen "I'm at peace with the idea of dying" and "desperately clinging to anything that can prolong my life, even if only by a little." Admittedly, that's my anecdotal experience of the people with whom I interact, and I did indeed present a false dichotomy. :-\ Again, my apologies there. In the proper logical sense, "not wanting to die" is only technically negated as "wanting to die". Quite literally the definition of negation - introducing a "not" in front of whatever the thing is. So that's my oops. It's a weird place though, because the negation of "at peace with the idea of dying one day" is "NOT at peace" with the same. Which implies fear. Which... I dunno, I've reached my limit now. :-) Death is a weird concept to consider in a neutral / rational manner, eh?
    - dwaltrip 6y ago
      There are some animals that don't "age" like we do. These animals can live indefinitely, until they are eaten or die in some accidental way. Aging is a set of complex bio-physical-chemical processes. We have actually made a lot of progress in recent decades understanding how this happens. There is no fundamental reason we won't be able to better understand these processes and then mitigate them heavily, if not entirely. Aubrey de Grey is one of the scientists leading these efforts and his work, along with others, is very interesting. It seems to me there is real potential here. There are many difficult hurdles, but I find it plausible we might overcome them to an extent where it is possible to significantly extend the human lifespan. If course, if this actually happens, there will be massive social, political, and economic consequences. I'm not exactly sure how that would play out. I'm a bit of an optimist, so I imagine there would be some sort of new non-dystopic paradigm that arises.
      - erpellan 6y ago
        I'm terrified. Imagine the current crop of elderly rich mostly white men in positions of political power. Now imagine they're never going to die or retire. Sounds pretty dystopian to me.
        dwaltrip 6y ago
        Guillotines would still work, so there's that. But it's true, there is definitely potential for it to go badly.
        FriendlyNormie 6y ago
        How are there still retards who think “elderly rich mostly white men” run anything and not Jews. Kill yourself, smoothbrain.
        dependenttypes 6y ago
        Let's not bring race into this. It would be extremely easy to claim that for a lot of other races as well depending on how racist I wanted to sound. Anyway, once they die their children will take over, as it is usual, so nothing will change if they were to just live forever.
    - twojacobtwo 6y ago
      Isn't that the way that every single organism ever has lived?
    - himinlomax 6y ago
      Assuming it is, is it anywhere near the most unhealthy way to live?
  - ryandvm 6y ago
    Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born. I'm not terribly upset about all the things I missed before 1977 AD. Not sure why I should be too worried about what I'll miss when I'm gone.
    - newsbinator 6y ago
      I'm not as afraid of being dead as I am about the process of getting sick and dying.
    - AQuantized 6y ago
      That seems orthogonal to his question.
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      > Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born Completely untrue. Maybe as an individual, but your impact on other humans is the biggest difference. Particularly if you have children, there is no equivalence.
    - pstuart 6y ago
      I would miss my children, and I believe they would miss me.
    - c1ccccc1 6y ago
      Sure the experience of being dead isn't too bad, because there is no such experience, but consider this: Thanks to the arrow of time, you can know what happened in the past, even if you weren't personally there. Many details are forgotten, but important events are typically recorded in historical documents, or fossils. The same is not true of the future. If I died tomorrow, I would die not knowing the answer to P vs. NP, not knowing whether humanity would last another hundred years, or another million, not knowing if we were alone in the universe. Wouldn't you be disturbed if you had to live in a world where all of human history before 1977 was forgotten? If people knew that there had been such a history, but had no memories or records of it?
    - rossnordby 6y ago
  - ohyes 6y ago
    You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or gets old then we never make way for the next generation. If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. What are the rules? Do you give something up to be in your 20s forever? Generational change seems like a strong force for good in a lot of ways, to me at least. It can be harder to rewire a neural network than it is to start fresh. Note that any non-magical intervention will likely be 'increasing longevity' not granting immortality. And even if that were the case, there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. What is the storage limit for a brain anyway? Personally I find some cold comfort that everything I do is meaningless and will be forgotten. I will once rest and be gone. So will everything.
    - rossnordby 6y ago
      >If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. At the risk of repeating myself: imagine a world where everyone was ageless by default, and they started to experience issues like inequality or overpopulation. What would that world's top scientists come up with? Would it be "kill everyone above a certain age"? I doubt it, because that would be very silly, and anyone seriously suggesting it in that world would be considered obviously insane. There are a lot of better options that don't require mass early death; these problems aren't inevitable. >there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. This has always struck me as a very, very odd argument. Assuming protons decay, we're talking ~10^37 years until physics starts getting in the way. That's 10^27 times longer than the age of the universe. An entity observing those timescales would have time to see entire solar systems grow, mature, and die a billion billion times over, without exhausting even a billionth of that duration. Sure, such an entity would run out of stars to observe, and biology would get tricky, but computation wouldn't cease, and fundamentally that's all that's needed for a rich existence. It's an eternity nested in an eternity nested in an eternity. And if protons don't decay... It's not infinite, but as a human, the distinction is completely irrelevant. Whatever a human would become on those timescales can decide what it wants to do later- for now, I'd just like more than a measly 100 years. It's not like we're wishing on a monkey paw.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Stated more charitably, it is targeted towards potential investors that see the potential in something that could improve the lives of millions and eventually billions of people.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    If people are going to invest in significantly extending the lives of billions of people, are they also going to invest in drastically limiting human procreation? It seems pretty clear there are too many of us already...
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      I used to believe the same thing. We hear constantly how the world is overpopulated, and that made me think that things like poverty alleviation weren't worth it. Then I read a book called Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World. In it, they discuss various cognitive distortions that leave most people with a warped view of reality. The truth is that almost all people living above global poverty levels are reproducing at or below the rates needed to keep the population level. When people are confident that their children will live, they tend to just have one or two children. With this in mind, if we want to avoid overpopulation, it should actually be poverty that we want to alleviate, not longevity. I highly recommend that book, by the way.
      - pharke 6y ago
        If we ever eliminate poverty globally we're going to have exactly the opposite problem at which point lifespan and healthspan extension become critical for the continued existence of humanity.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- himinlomax 6y ago
  Is it being a dumbass to buy some hope of not dying/aging when you already have enough money to buy anything else you could wish? Seems pretty rational to me.
amluto 6y ago
When the author says things like: > But Katcher has no research grants or university lab or venture capital funding, no team of grad students mining databases and screening chemicals in the back room. > One thing Katcher has going for him is the correct theory. I start to suspect the author’s opinion is stronger than their evidence.
- EndXA 6y ago
  I'm not taking a stance on the topic, but I think that if you quote the part that you did, then you should also quote the part right before it, for full context: > In the race to effect substantial, system-wide rejuvenation, Harold Katcher is a dark horse. He has the right academic credentials and a solid history of research. In fact, in earlier life he was part of a team that discovered the breast cancer gene, brca1. I asked Harold for a biographical sketch, and have printed it in a box at the end of this posting. And here's the bio sketch itself: > So, you might consider me a late bloomer. While I have thousands of citations in the literature, with publications ranging from the discovery of the human ‘breast cancer gene’, to protein structure, bacteriology, biotechnology, bioinformatics, and biochemistry, there was no center or direction to my work as I had given up my personal goal of solving/curing aging when I learned that ‘wear and tear’ was the cause of it. Yet something happened in year 1985 when I was in California working with Michael Waterman and Temple Smith (fathers of bioinformatics) that is inexplicable: I found myself in Intensive Care with a tube inserted into my trachea and the knowledge that I might not live. And then I had a dream: I dreamed that somehow in the far future (and on another world), I was being feted for ‘bringing immortality to mankind’. Clearly, I survived that incident (started with an infected tooth). I lived a wonderful life – becoming a computer programmer (which I loved), leaving that for the University of Maryland’s Asian division, becoming a full professor and then the Academic Director for the Sciences, in Tokyo, Japan. By the time I left Japan in 2004, (my daughter Sasha was a fourth-grader, (yonensei), in the Japanese school system), I was teaching for U of M online – somewhat retired, and looking forwards to writing computer programs for fun and profit. Yet I never ever forgot that dream. It was clearly impossible; I had no lab – and really, there was no way to repair all damaged cells – it’d be like sweeping back the ocean. And then, in 2009, I read an old paper from 2005, a paper written by the Conboys, (Michael and Irina), Tom Rando and others, coming from Irv Weisman’s lab, that completely changed my life; that showed me that everything I believed about aging was wrong – that aging occurred at the organismic level, not at the cellular level and could be reversed. Well, the rest of the story is about persistence and the blessed intervention of Akshay Sanghvi who too saw there was another way and provided the structural, monetary, and emotional support (and some good ideas) that had me start a new career at age 72 in Mumbai, India. I feel twenty years younger than I did three years ago, I guess that’s another hint about aging. Now the ‘mystical’ dream? It wouldn’t be the first time in history that that happened – take that as a datum.
lnanek2 6y ago
There's been a lot of nasty news articles about rich white people getting pumped with young people's blood. It's something easy to manufacture outrage against. There are callouts in the article that try to calm down that viewpoint at least like: " Katcher thinks that the molecules involved will not be difficult to manufacture, so that when a product is eventually commercialized, it will not require extraction from the blood of live subjects, rodent or human. "
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  > It's something easy to manufacture outrage against Perhaps for a good reason
WhompingWindows 6y ago
1) It's only rat tissues and human tissues; any research published in only tissues only or in ratsonly , and not a large RCT in actual humans, needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. 2) The research in the blog post is not fully summarized. You know it's a weak blog post when they post results WITHOUT SAMPLE SIZE. This is a GLARING omission and highly unscientific. The actual paper shows n=593 rat tissues and n=850 human tissues, which is fine but the blog post should report on these details. 3) It's not that new to suggest that younger individuals' blood plasma might have a rejuvenating effect. 4) They look at certain tissue types, which wouldn't result in changes to all tissue types, like skin, hair, brain, etc. 5) This is very early stages, again, we need actual trials in humans, and then those trials probably need to be followed up for years and years, since aging is a long-run phenomenon. This is more like a cohort study where we enroll a huge number into a cohort of aging-treatments and controls who have some other placebo-treatment.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  This sounds to me like a very strong pilot study: something that's very likely to attract additional grant funding, but may or may not pan out in the real world.
- tropheusduboisi 6y ago
  Some of the figures are based on N=6 treated old rats.
chemeng 6y ago
It's within the realm of possibility. Parabiosis as a rejuvenation method has been slowly gaining attention since the 1970s and increasing credibility in the last two decades. Research seems to indicate that the introduction of blood parts from the young->old reduces markers of aging in the old. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5662775/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5662775/ for a reasonable quick overview.
entee 6y ago
There’s a host of evidence that parabiosis (blood transfer from young to old) works well in mice/rats for a variety of aging issues. Some of the more concrete claims that it will transfer to humans are not as well supported to my knowledge, but that doesn’t mean impossible, just not known yet. I would also question some of the strong claims about the hypothalamus as a centrally controlled aging clock, and that DNA methylation is a driver (rather than a marker) of aging. These are big claims, the article supports them poorly. DNA methylation is an on/off signal for genes in the cell and is a subject of active research. As you can imagine it’s been implicated in a large number of biological processes including cancer. I’d be careful messing around with it in a global way. I know of one at least one company (Spring Discovery) that is following some of this work up to find some driver molecules that could have the same effect as parabiosis. If interested in the topic I’d look at the work from the labs mentioned in the article as well as Saul Villeda (former grad student of Wyss-Coray, full disclosure I know him socially) at UCSF. TLDR: This article is a breathless take on active research, clearly the author is excited. There’s reason to keep investigating, but the conclusions in the article are stronger than what the research can say conclusively at the moment. Very early days.
cs02rm0 6y ago
Sadly, I'd revert to the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
tropheusduboisi 6y ago
I'm a grad student in the aging bio field. Steve Horvath is well known and well regarded, but I'm pretty sure he just did the regressions. Other characters on the paper are more unusual including a former Investment Banker from India. I think the mainstream aging community view would be "wow these results too good to be true and I wish they presented more methodical details and individual data points". If it's true, it's quite exciting. In my own work, I've seen the rejuvenating effects of young blood.
- tanzbaer 6y ago
  That took a dark turn there at the end.

throw1234651234 6y ago

Ask Thiel.

op03 6y ago

It's not targeting you. It targeted at dumbasses with cash who are scared of dying.

throw1234651234 6y ago
What's wrong with not wanting to die?
- strofcon 6y ago
  It's a pretty mentally unhealthy way to live, mostly.
  - RunawayGalaxy 6y ago
    Even if it's possible?
    - strofcon 6y ago
      I mean, "won't die of old age quite as soon" doesn't equate to "immortal", yea? To be fair though, my comment was way too broad. I should have clarified that I mean a constant, overbearing dread of the prospect of death is super unhealthy. Make life suck, and effectively shortens it in the experience of the scared one. (source: did that for a long time, got healthy, stopped being scared. Sample size of 1. :-D )
  - modzu 6y ago
    said with the entire world cooped up scared in their homes...
    - strofcon 6y ago
      Yup, current situation sucks massively. Doesn't change the fact that a disproportionate fear of death is exceedingly unhealthy and robs folks of some of the joy of being alive.
      - aea12 6y ago
        Except nobody said, or even suggested, a fear of dying. Only you did. There's a significant difference between wanting more time to do things and sitting around terrified, and conflating the two is problematic. Reading your siblings, you're projecting your own feelings onto a completely reasonable feeling that most people have: with another hundred years of experience, what's possible?
        strofcon 6y ago
        Fair enough, I read fear into the parent comment, my apologies. As for projection, not so much - I've not really had any significant fear of death, aside from instinct to avoid certain demise. :-) Instead it's more that I've only ever seen "I'm at peace with the idea of dying" and "desperately clinging to anything that can prolong my life, even if only by a little." Admittedly, that's my anecdotal experience of the people with whom I interact, and I did indeed present a false dichotomy. :-\ Again, my apologies there. In the proper logical sense, "not wanting to die" is only technically negated as "wanting to die". Quite literally the definition of negation - introducing a "not" in front of whatever the thing is. So that's my oops. It's a weird place though, because the negation of "at peace with the idea of dying one day" is "NOT at peace" with the same. Which implies fear. Which... I dunno, I've reached my limit now. :-) Death is a weird concept to consider in a neutral / rational manner, eh?
  - dwaltrip 6y ago
    There are some animals that don't "age" like we do. These animals can live indefinitely, until they are eaten or die in some accidental way. Aging is a set of complex bio-physical-chemical processes. We have actually made a lot of progress in recent decades understanding how this happens. There is no fundamental reason we won't be able to better understand these processes and then mitigate them heavily, if not entirely. Aubrey de Grey is one of the scientists leading these efforts and his work, along with others, is very interesting. It seems to me there is real potential here. There are many difficult hurdles, but I find it plausible we might overcome them to an extent where it is possible to significantly extend the human lifespan. If course, if this actually happens, there will be massive social, political, and economic consequences. I'm not exactly sure how that would play out. I'm a bit of an optimist, so I imagine there would be some sort of new non-dystopic paradigm that arises.
    - erpellan 6y ago
      I'm terrified. Imagine the current crop of elderly rich mostly white men in positions of political power. Now imagine they're never going to die or retire. Sounds pretty dystopian to me.
      - dwaltrip 6y ago
        Guillotines would still work, so there's that. But it's true, there is definitely potential for it to go badly.
      - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
        How are there still retards who think “elderly rich mostly white men” run anything and not Jews. Kill yourself, smoothbrain.
      - dependenttypes 6y ago
        Let's not bring race into this. It would be extremely easy to claim that for a lot of other races as well depending on how racist I wanted to sound. Anyway, once they die their children will take over, as it is usual, so nothing will change if they were to just live forever.
  - twojacobtwo 6y ago
    Isn't that the way that every single organism ever has lived?
  - himinlomax 6y ago
    Assuming it is, is it anywhere near the most unhealthy way to live?
- ryandvm 6y ago
  Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born. I'm not terribly upset about all the things I missed before 1977 AD. Not sure why I should be too worried about what I'll miss when I'm gone.
  - newsbinator 6y ago
    I'm not as afraid of being dead as I am about the process of getting sick and dying.
  - AQuantized 6y ago
    That seems orthogonal to his question.
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    > Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born Completely untrue. Maybe as an individual, but your impact on other humans is the biggest difference. Particularly if you have children, there is no equivalence.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    I would miss my children, and I believe they would miss me.
  - c1ccccc1 6y ago
    Sure the experience of being dead isn't too bad, because there is no such experience, but consider this: Thanks to the arrow of time, you can know what happened in the past, even if you weren't personally there. Many details are forgotten, but important events are typically recorded in historical documents, or fossils. The same is not true of the future. If I died tomorrow, I would die not knowing the answer to P vs. NP, not knowing whether humanity would last another hundred years, or another million, not knowing if we were alone in the universe. Wouldn't you be disturbed if you had to live in a world where all of human history before 1977 was forgotten? If people knew that there had been such a history, but had no memories or records of it?
  - rossnordby 6y ago
- ohyes 6y ago
  You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or gets old then we never make way for the next generation. If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. What are the rules? Do you give something up to be in your 20s forever? Generational change seems like a strong force for good in a lot of ways, to me at least. It can be harder to rewire a neural network than it is to start fresh. Note that any non-magical intervention will likely be 'increasing longevity' not granting immortality. And even if that were the case, there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. What is the storage limit for a brain anyway? Personally I find some cold comfort that everything I do is meaningless and will be forgotten. I will once rest and be gone. So will everything.
  - rossnordby 6y ago
    >If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. At the risk of repeating myself: imagine a world where everyone was ageless by default, and they started to experience issues like inequality or overpopulation. What would that world's top scientists come up with? Would it be "kill everyone above a certain age"? I doubt it, because that would be very silly, and anyone seriously suggesting it in that world would be considered obviously insane. There are a lot of better options that don't require mass early death; these problems aren't inevitable. >there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. This has always struck me as a very, very odd argument. Assuming protons decay, we're talking ~10^37 years until physics starts getting in the way. That's 10^27 times longer than the age of the universe. An entity observing those timescales would have time to see entire solar systems grow, mature, and die a billion billion times over, without exhausting even a billionth of that duration. Sure, such an entity would run out of stars to observe, and biology would get tricky, but computation wouldn't cease, and fundamentally that's all that's needed for a rich existence. It's an eternity nested in an eternity nested in an eternity. And if protons don't decay... It's not infinite, but as a human, the distinction is completely irrelevant. Whatever a human would become on those timescales can decide what it wants to do later- for now, I'd just like more than a measly 100 years. It's not like we're wishing on a monkey paw.
TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
Stated more charitably, it is targeted towards potential investors that see the potential in something that could improve the lives of millions and eventually billions of people.
- jfk13 6y ago
  If people are going to invest in significantly extending the lives of billions of people, are they also going to invest in drastically limiting human procreation? It seems pretty clear there are too many of us already...
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    I used to believe the same thing. We hear constantly how the world is overpopulated, and that made me think that things like poverty alleviation weren't worth it. Then I read a book called Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World. In it, they discuss various cognitive distortions that leave most people with a warped view of reality. The truth is that almost all people living above global poverty levels are reproducing at or below the rates needed to keep the population level. When people are confident that their children will live, they tend to just have one or two children. With this in mind, if we want to avoid overpopulation, it should actually be poverty that we want to alleviate, not longevity. I highly recommend that book, by the way.
    - pharke 6y ago
      If we ever eliminate poverty globally we're going to have exactly the opposite problem at which point lifespan and healthspan extension become critical for the continued existence of humanity.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
himinlomax 6y ago
Is it being a dumbass to buy some hope of not dying/aging when you already have enough money to buy anything else you could wish? Seems pretty rational to me.

amluto 6y ago

When the author says things like: > But Katcher has no research grants or university lab or venture capital funding, no team of grad students mining databases and screening chemicals in the back room. > One thing Katcher has going for him is the correct theory. I start to suspect the author’s opinion is stronger than their evidence.

EndXA 6y ago
I'm not taking a stance on the topic, but I think that if you quote the part that you did, then you should also quote the part right before it, for full context: > In the race to effect substantial, system-wide rejuvenation, Harold Katcher is a dark horse. He has the right academic credentials and a solid history of research. In fact, in earlier life he was part of a team that discovered the breast cancer gene, brca1. I asked Harold for a biographical sketch, and have printed it in a box at the end of this posting. And here's the bio sketch itself: > So, you might consider me a late bloomer. While I have thousands of citations in the literature, with publications ranging from the discovery of the human ‘breast cancer gene’, to protein structure, bacteriology, biotechnology, bioinformatics, and biochemistry, there was no center or direction to my work as I had given up my personal goal of solving/curing aging when I learned that ‘wear and tear’ was the cause of it. Yet something happened in year 1985 when I was in California working with Michael Waterman and Temple Smith (fathers of bioinformatics) that is inexplicable: I found myself in Intensive Care with a tube inserted into my trachea and the knowledge that I might not live. And then I had a dream: I dreamed that somehow in the far future (and on another world), I was being feted for ‘bringing immortality to mankind’. Clearly, I survived that incident (started with an infected tooth). I lived a wonderful life – becoming a computer programmer (which I loved), leaving that for the University of Maryland’s Asian division, becoming a full professor and then the Academic Director for the Sciences, in Tokyo, Japan. By the time I left Japan in 2004, (my daughter Sasha was a fourth-grader, (yonensei), in the Japanese school system), I was teaching for U of M online – somewhat retired, and looking forwards to writing computer programs for fun and profit. Yet I never ever forgot that dream. It was clearly impossible; I had no lab – and really, there was no way to repair all damaged cells – it’d be like sweeping back the ocean. And then, in 2009, I read an old paper from 2005, a paper written by the Conboys, (Michael and Irina), Tom Rando and others, coming from Irv Weisman’s lab, that completely changed my life; that showed me that everything I believed about aging was wrong – that aging occurred at the organismic level, not at the cellular level and could be reversed. Well, the rest of the story is about persistence and the blessed intervention of Akshay Sanghvi who too saw there was another way and provided the structural, monetary, and emotional support (and some good ideas) that had me start a new career at age 72 in Mumbai, India. I feel twenty years younger than I did three years ago, I guess that’s another hint about aging. Now the ‘mystical’ dream? It wouldn’t be the first time in history that that happened – take that as a datum.

lnanek2 6y ago

There's been a lot of nasty news articles about rich white people getting pumped with young people's blood. It's something easy to manufacture outrage against. There are callouts in the article that try to calm down that viewpoint at least like: " Katcher thinks that the molecules involved will not be difficult to manufacture, so that when a product is eventually commercialized, it will not require extraction from the blood of live subjects, rodent or human. "

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> It's something easy to manufacture outrage against Perhaps for a good reason

WhompingWindows 6y ago

1) It's only rat tissues and human tissues; any research published in only tissues only or in ratsonly , and not a large RCT in actual humans, needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. 2) The research in the blog post is not fully summarized. You know it's a weak blog post when they post results WITHOUT SAMPLE SIZE. This is a GLARING omission and highly unscientific. The actual paper shows n=593 rat tissues and n=850 human tissues, which is fine but the blog post should report on these details. 3) It's not that new to suggest that younger individuals' blood plasma might have a rejuvenating effect. 4) They look at certain tissue types, which wouldn't result in changes to all tissue types, like skin, hair, brain, etc. 5) This is very early stages, again, we need actual trials in humans, and then those trials probably need to be followed up for years and years, since aging is a long-run phenomenon. This is more like a cohort study where we enroll a huge number into a cohort of aging-treatments and controls who have some other placebo-treatment.

pmiller2 6y ago
This sounds to me like a very strong pilot study: something that's very likely to attract additional grant funding, but may or may not pan out in the real world.
tropheusduboisi 6y ago
Some of the figures are based on N=6 treated old rats.

chemeng 6y ago

It's within the realm of possibility. Parabiosis as a rejuvenation method has been slowly gaining attention since the 1970s and increasing credibility in the last two decades. Research seems to indicate that the introduction of blood parts from the young->old reduces markers of aging in the old. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5662775/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5662775/ for a reasonable quick overview.

entee 6y ago

There’s a host of evidence that parabiosis (blood transfer from young to old) works well in mice/rats for a variety of aging issues. Some of the more concrete claims that it will transfer to humans are not as well supported to my knowledge, but that doesn’t mean impossible, just not known yet. I would also question some of the strong claims about the hypothalamus as a centrally controlled aging clock, and that DNA methylation is a driver (rather than a marker) of aging. These are big claims, the article supports them poorly. DNA methylation is an on/off signal for genes in the cell and is a subject of active research. As you can imagine it’s been implicated in a large number of biological processes including cancer. I’d be careful messing around with it in a global way. I know of one at least one company (Spring Discovery) that is following some of this work up to find some driver molecules that could have the same effect as parabiosis. If interested in the topic I’d look at the work from the labs mentioned in the article as well as Saul Villeda (former grad student of Wyss-Coray, full disclosure I know him socially) at UCSF. TLDR: This article is a breathless take on active research, clearly the author is excited. There’s reason to keep investigating, but the conclusions in the article are stronger than what the research can say conclusively at the moment. Very early days.

cs02rm0 6y ago

Sadly, I'd revert to the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

tropheusduboisi 6y ago

I'm a grad student in the aging bio field. Steve Horvath is well known and well regarded, but I'm pretty sure he just did the regressions. Other characters on the paper are more unusual including a former Investment Banker from India. I think the mainstream aging community view would be "wow these results too good to be true and I wish they presented more methodical details and individual data points". If it's true, it's quite exciting. In my own work, I've seen the rejuvenating effects of young blood.

tanzbaer 6y ago
That took a dark turn there at the end.