4 ms·
Sure, it’s just a number. The point is that if we made the effort, there’s likely easy things we can do to extend life beyond 100. Studying Blue Zones, for ex
by melling 5y ago
Sure, it’s just a number.
The point is that if we made the effort, there’s likely easy things we can do to extend life beyond 100.
Studying Blue Zones, for example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
We really haven’t made an effort to study aging.
Why do some people live well into their 90’s and appear to be in good health?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Van_Dyke https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Van_Dyke
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoOne thing to be careful with “Blue Zones” is that a lot of blue zones didn’t have that great record keeping, especially 50-100 years ago. Unlike modern developed countries where we have pretty good records of the exact moment of birth for people, in a lot of areas in the past, there could be a lot of guesstimating about the actual age of someone.
- throwawaygh 5y agoYeah, places without great record keeping when people were born, but with fantastic age-contingent state pensions today. What actually unifies the blue zones is the ability and incentive to fudge numbers.
- Someone 5y agohttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1: “Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans” To me, that looks pretty damning to the theory that blue zones somehow are good for longevity.
- WJW 5y ago> We really haven’t made an effort to study aging. We haven't? Just 2 seconds of googling "study aging" brings up results from places like Harvard, the NIH, RAND and hundreds of other universities where people study aging all day everyday.
- melling 5y agoHow much money are we spending? I’m sure it’s getting some research but compared to other medical research I don’t think it amounts to much
- hodgesrm 5y agoThe 2020 budget request for the National Institutes on Aging was ca. $2.7B US. [1] The overall budget of the National Institutes of Health for 2020 was $42B US. [2] [1] https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fy-2020-justification-budget-request/fy-2020-directors-overview https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fy-2020-justification-b... [2] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-national-institutes-health https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-natio...
- hodgesrm 5y agoIndeed. Geriatric medicine has been a thing for millennia. [1] I worked at the UW Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in Seattle for several years in the 1980s. Research on aging was a major topic. The minimal progress on cures for Alzheimer's since that time should be sobering to anyone claiming that we can hack humans to extend lifespan significantly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geriatrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geriatrics
- rowanG077 5y agoI don't feel there is any theoretical reason why humans could not live forever. Biology has already solved this problem in some organisms. Whether we are capable of solving it is a different question. But I think it's certain that it's possible for humans to become biologically immortal.
- nradov 5y agoWell our cancer cells can become biologically immortal. The rest of our bodies, not so much.
- teachingassist 5y agoI was surprised that Wikipedia's description of Blue Zones seems to miss that they have minimal road traffic pollution. Through traffic is physically constrained in each case - due to them being islands or peninsulas or mountain villages.