6 ms·

Science of Aging Is Focus of New Bakar Research Institute

73 points by apsec112 6y ago

Qwertious 6y ago
I don't see how this is interesting - it's basically "new institute opens, is researching aging". Plus a page or two of buzzwords. I could comb through the article sentence by sentence maybe, looking for something worth discussing, but you could do that with any article.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  The article is dull, but the fact that the "ball" of aging science is finally starting to roll is interesting and very welcome to me. We spent too much time thinking that aging is something inevitable, unaddressable and thus not worth studying too much. Now that many scientists are ready to dive into the topic, some low-hanging fruit is likely to be picked within a decade or so.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    >The article is dull, but the fact that the "ball" of aging science is finally starting to roll is interesting and very welcome to me. I'm also quite keenly interested in not dying, and I'm also sick of people talking about "a cure for cancer" being possible but "a cure for aging" somehow not, let alone a healthy discussion of researching mitigation for aging to keep people alive long enough to receive the cure. But, I feel like that - the ideology, even if I quite like and agree with said ideology - is the only thing this article has going for it. The article's link could 404 and nothing of value would be lost, as long as nobody touched the title.
    - esperent 6y ago
      > I'm also sick of people talking about "a cure for cancer" being possible but "a cure for aging" somehow not The scope of these two things is wildly different. To cure aging, we would have to solve seven* or so problems of a similar scope to curing cancer - and one of those problems is, in fact, curing cancer. * According to the sens foundation: http://www.longlonglife.org/en/transhumanism-longevity/aging/aubrey-de-grey/transhumanism-aubrey-de-greys-causes-of-aging-with-sens-foundation/ http://www.longlonglife.org/en/transhumanism-longevity/aging...
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        I am not sure if "curing cancer" is the best description of the problem to solve. A possible answer is "keep the immune system in its youthful state and it will take care of any emerging cancer cells and terminate them with extreme prejudice without you even noticing". Natural killer cells are basically unstoppable once they home in on a target. E.g. prevention, not a cure.
        Retric 6y ago
        People of every age still get cancer. It’s unclear how much youth is really helping vs cancer simply requiring multiple mutations which become more likely with age.
        the__alchemist 6y ago
        Not in equal amounts - cancer is highly correlated with senescence.
        Retric 6y ago
        The requiring multiple mutations bit is correlated with senescence. For the simplest model assume you need 2 mutations each at 1 in 1 billion odds from 1 of 30,000,000,000,000 cells in the human body. After 1 year, there are 60,000 cells 1 mutation away from cancer. Year N there are N * 60,000 cells. Such a simple model results in linear increases in cancer risks over time without any other effects from age. More complex models can get very close to the observed annual risk of cancer adjusted for age etc. The question is how much this is just over fitting the data.
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        In a healthy organism, damaged cells may be forced to kill themselves (apoptosis) before they do any harm, or killed outright by NK cells during their surveillance patrols. There are corrective mechanisms that animals including humans use to control cancer; even if a cell mutates into something dangerous, it does not mean that a malignant tumor follows. Mice, who have much fewer cells than humans, get cancer much earlier than we do. Elephants and whales, whose cell count exceeds that of humans by several orders of magnitude, seem to be actually less prone to cancer than humans are. This is all about the ability of the body to squash individual cancerous cells or smallish tumors into nonexistence before they have a chance to take hold. As long as this self-defensive mechanism works, everything is fine.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    > We spent too much time thinking that aging is something inevitable, unaddressable and thus not worth studying too much. We have so many more important and urgent problems to take care of. Not even technical ones, but societal ones. Let's not even talk about the fact that any meaningful advances in the field would benefit the top 0.0001% of the world and would never trickle down to the rest of us.
    - conjectures 6y ago
      Not totally true. There's a whole suite of social problems stemming from having a large elderly population in poor health. Insufficient pensions, how to pay for healthcare, staffing in caring professions. If 'studying the science of ageing' translates into 'keep older people healthier for longer', then those problems may be mitigated somewhat. Also, scientific advances can make treaments cheaper. E.g. modifying bacteria to produce insulin is cheaper than extracting it from pigs.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        True, but an ageing cure is also likely to cause a lot of problem around overpopulation.
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        My worst expectation is actually people in lifetime offices (e.g. judges) sticking there much longer than today. A SCOTUS formed entirely of centenarians - what could go wrong?
        esperent 6y ago
        Lifetime appointments are already a dumb idea. The obvious solution is term limits of ten years or so.
      - lm28469 6y ago
        > 'keep older people healthier for longer', then those problems may be mitigated somewhat. Do you want to work until your very last breath ? Because this is where we're heading. This is exactly the kind of problem I'm concerned about when people start talking about "curing age". https://www.liveinhomecare.com/elderly-in-japan-are-wearing-exoskeletons-to-keep-working-past-retirement-age/information/ https://www.liveinhomecare.com/elderly-in-japan-are-wearing-... > Also, scientific advances can make treaments cheaper. E.g. modifying bacteria to produce insulin is cheaper than extracting it from pigs. Yes, but again, scientific advances without societal advances = doom. Look at the price of insulin in the US, it's the living proof health is much more complex than "X = Y, hence Z will be cheaper and everyone will live happily ever after" https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1431F/production/_105991728_optimised-insulin_1-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1431F/production...
dmix 6y ago
> Bakar Aging Research Institute (BARI) members will be drawn from the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, the UCSF Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging, the Department of Medicine’s Division of Geriatrics, and the UCSF Institute for Health and Aging This is a great research subject and all but how did UCSF end up with 4 (now 5) institutes related aging in the first place and why isn’t this entirely replacing them? Is this the excessive administrative bureaucracy in academia I keep hearing about?
surlyadopter 6y ago
“For aging research, the Bay Area is one of the best places in the world to be,” I've been laughing about this fact for years. Give a guy a billion dollars and all of a sudden he wants to live forever.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

73 points by apsec112 6y ago

I don't see how this is interesting - it's basically "new institute opens, is researching aging". Plus a page or two of buzzwords. I could comb through the article sentence by sentence maybe, looking for something worth discussing, but you could do that with any article.

inglor_cz 6y ago
The article is dull, but the fact that the "ball" of aging science is finally starting to roll is interesting and very welcome to me. We spent too much time thinking that aging is something inevitable, unaddressable and thus not worth studying too much. Now that many scientists are ready to dive into the topic, some low-hanging fruit is likely to be picked within a decade or so.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  >The article is dull, but the fact that the "ball" of aging science is finally starting to roll is interesting and very welcome to me. I'm also quite keenly interested in not dying, and I'm also sick of people talking about "a cure for cancer" being possible but "a cure for aging" somehow not, let alone a healthy discussion of researching mitigation for aging to keep people alive long enough to receive the cure. But, I feel like that - the ideology, even if I quite like and agree with said ideology - is the only thing this article has going for it. The article's link could 404 and nothing of value would be lost, as long as nobody touched the title.
  - esperent 6y ago
    > I'm also sick of people talking about "a cure for cancer" being possible but "a cure for aging" somehow not The scope of these two things is wildly different. To cure aging, we would have to solve seven* or so problems of a similar scope to curing cancer - and one of those problems is, in fact, curing cancer. * According to the sens foundation: http://www.longlonglife.org/en/transhumanism-longevity/aging/aubrey-de-grey/transhumanism-aubrey-de-greys-causes-of-aging-with-sens-foundation/ http://www.longlonglife.org/en/transhumanism-longevity/aging...
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      I am not sure if "curing cancer" is the best description of the problem to solve. A possible answer is "keep the immune system in its youthful state and it will take care of any emerging cancer cells and terminate them with extreme prejudice without you even noticing". Natural killer cells are basically unstoppable once they home in on a target. E.g. prevention, not a cure.
      - Retric 6y ago
        People of every age still get cancer. It’s unclear how much youth is really helping vs cancer simply requiring multiple mutations which become more likely with age.
        the__alchemist 6y ago
        Not in equal amounts - cancer is highly correlated with senescence.
        Retric 6y ago
        The requiring multiple mutations bit is correlated with senescence. For the simplest model assume you need 2 mutations each at 1 in 1 billion odds from 1 of 30,000,000,000,000 cells in the human body. After 1 year, there are 60,000 cells 1 mutation away from cancer. Year N there are N * 60,000 cells. Such a simple model results in linear increases in cancer risks over time without any other effects from age. More complex models can get very close to the observed annual risk of cancer adjusted for age etc. The question is how much this is just over fitting the data.
        inglor_cz 6y ago
        In a healthy organism, damaged cells may be forced to kill themselves (apoptosis) before they do any harm, or killed outright by NK cells during their surveillance patrols. There are corrective mechanisms that animals including humans use to control cancer; even if a cell mutates into something dangerous, it does not mean that a malignant tumor follows. Mice, who have much fewer cells than humans, get cancer much earlier than we do. Elephants and whales, whose cell count exceeds that of humans by several orders of magnitude, seem to be actually less prone to cancer than humans are. This is all about the ability of the body to squash individual cancerous cells or smallish tumors into nonexistence before they have a chance to take hold. As long as this self-defensive mechanism works, everything is fine.
- lm28469 6y ago
  > We spent too much time thinking that aging is something inevitable, unaddressable and thus not worth studying too much. We have so many more important and urgent problems to take care of. Not even technical ones, but societal ones. Let's not even talk about the fact that any meaningful advances in the field would benefit the top 0.0001% of the world and would never trickle down to the rest of us.
  - conjectures 6y ago
    Not totally true. There's a whole suite of social problems stemming from having a large elderly population in poor health. Insufficient pensions, how to pay for healthcare, staffing in caring professions. If 'studying the science of ageing' translates into 'keep older people healthier for longer', then those problems may be mitigated somewhat. Also, scientific advances can make treaments cheaper. E.g. modifying bacteria to produce insulin is cheaper than extracting it from pigs.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      True, but an ageing cure is also likely to cause a lot of problem around overpopulation.
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        My worst expectation is actually people in lifetime offices (e.g. judges) sticking there much longer than today. A SCOTUS formed entirely of centenarians - what could go wrong?
        esperent 6y ago
        Lifetime appointments are already a dumb idea. The obvious solution is term limits of ten years or so.
    - lm28469 6y ago
      > 'keep older people healthier for longer', then those problems may be mitigated somewhat. Do you want to work until your very last breath ? Because this is where we're heading. This is exactly the kind of problem I'm concerned about when people start talking about "curing age". https://www.liveinhomecare.com/elderly-in-japan-are-wearing-exoskeletons-to-keep-working-past-retirement-age/information/ https://www.liveinhomecare.com/elderly-in-japan-are-wearing-... > Also, scientific advances can make treaments cheaper. E.g. modifying bacteria to produce insulin is cheaper than extracting it from pigs. Yes, but again, scientific advances without societal advances = doom. Look at the price of insulin in the US, it's the living proof health is much more complex than "X = Y, hence Z will be cheaper and everyone will live happily ever after" https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1431F/production/_105991728_optimised-insulin_1-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1431F/production...

dmix 6y ago

> Bakar Aging Research Institute (BARI) members will be drawn from the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, the UCSF Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging, the Department of Medicine’s Division of Geriatrics, and the UCSF Institute for Health and Aging This is a great research subject and all but how did UCSF end up with 4 (now 5) institutes related aging in the first place and why isn’t this entirely replacing them? Is this the excessive administrative bureaucracy in academia I keep hearing about?

surlyadopter 6y ago

“For aging research, the Bay Area is one of the best places in the world to be,” I've been laughing about this fact for years. Give a guy a billion dollars and all of a sudden he wants to live forever.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]