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There's an anecdote from AIDS research that I'm frequently reminded of. People started off not knowing what was causing symptoms, then they began to understand

There's an anecdote from AIDS research that I'm frequently reminded of. People started off not knowing what was causing symptoms, then they began to understand the virus, then they started to produce chemicals to attack HIV, prevent its spread, reduce it's harmful effects, until one day when results of a study of a cocktail of these drugs was released showing dramatic reduction in symptoms and increased survival rates. People in the audience when the results were presented had access to these drugs individually and went home and started taking the cocktail regime themselves. They got better. This was only the successful path, along the way innumerable theories were tried and refuted, chemicals produced which did nothing or caused harm, and hopes were raised and dashed over and over. Aging research is in the world before solid theory, before we understand the many causes, but chemicals are being developed and people are taking them. It might be that one of the proposed theories is right, and self-medicators will be the first to know. More likely though is that it will take years and billions of dollars in basic research to develop good theory and better drugs. Unlike HIV/AIDS there probably won't be a single cause and aging (by definition) doesn't impact a young, healthy, active population. In fact, we are so conditioned to accept aging as normal the fight for resources is the fight to convince funders that there is a problem worth addressing. It's a pretty big, and terrifying, mindset change to go from "death from old age is natural and to be accepted" to "death from old age is preventable and tragic."

Someone 5y ago
To kill something, you need to know one way to do that. To keep it alive, you need to avoid _all_ the ways of killing it. I think that is a strong argument for preventing aging being a much more difficult problem.
- AuthorizedCust 5y ago
  Not really. It’s more of a “how do you eat an elephant” problem. Answer: one bite at a time. We’re doing that, even without the anti-aging label. E.g., things we now call “preventable deaths”. Even within that label, there’s a lot of opportunities that are far more tractable than others.
  - citizenpaul 5y ago
    That onky gets us so far. Mostly just extending us to the limits of our natural lifespan with aging included. There will have to be direct work on tje processes that lead to aging. Audrey degray has a good ted talk on what he belives are the primary processes that cause aging. Seven of them i think and all of them are vastly complex
  - xixixao 5y ago
    Not really. Longevity research is about significantly extending the healthy lifespan. What we’ve done so far is increased the likelihood that an individual will live as long as the longest living human. But we haven’t meaningfully increased the lifespan of the longest living human. Theoretical human lifespan is about the same it has been thousands of years ago.
  - cameronh90 5y ago
    I don't feel like you can treat aging as simply a sum of its parts. Sure, there are some major causes of age related deaths like heart disease that we can work on and potentially expand average lifespan by a few years. However, the core problem of aging is probably best thought of as a disease in and of itself, where the things that actually kill you are symptoms. We need to make progress on the underlying mechanism that makes us more brittle over time.
- dsizzle 5y ago
  I'm reminded of the story about Henry Ford asking which part never broke down, and then using that to cut costs -- maybe evolution is like that too, and once we fix one problem we'll find the next isn't far behind? Except now that I've searched for a link for that, one of the first results actually questions that story, ha! https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_fords_king_pins.html https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_ford...
300bps 5y ago
Insightful take on it. Yet to be seen whether age halting/regression goes the path of HIV medication or the perpetual motion machine that humanity has likewise spent significant effort to attain.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  I get what you're trying to say, but it's not that hard to make a perpetual motion machine if you're willing to keep putting energy into it. It's just hard to maintain, which is a much better match for aging research.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- thoms_a 5y ago
  The perpetual motion machine analogy is quite apt, because fighting aging is ultimately fighting entropy. Both are doomed to fail in their quixotic battle against thermodynamics.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    If you take this stance you might as well start arguing for the extinction of humanity and destruction of earth. After all everything is "doomed to fail in their quixotic battle against thermodynamics".
    - thoms_a 5y ago
      A classic is/ought distinction error. Observing reality is not the same as prescribing a particular course of action.
      - rowanG077 5y ago
        Your post heavily implies anti aging beeing futile. Likening it to the search of a perpetual motion machine. I fail to see how this is not heavily suggesting a course of a action.
xixixao 5y ago
I keep wondering how the pandemic will affect public opinion. I think it’s an opportunity. Excess deaths and total death rates are being reported to wide public for the first time. Czech Republic is one of the worst affected countries, it has at times doubled it’s monthly death rate. If people mourn and are angry about the half that died from covid, will they be more opposed to the other half dying of other causes (most related to aging). Covid of course is linked to aging as well. I wonder, but I’m not sure. The “death is a natural part of life” is an extremely strong narrative, a coping mechanism really.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Death of old age /is/ a natural part of life, but so was high infant mortality until we found solutions to that. The problem is that until we actually have solid proof of anti aging science, people will continue to believe it's part of life.
citizenpaul 5y ago
Its always been astounding to me that these muti billionairs we have today put so little of their vast fortunes into research for something that will 100%affect them. I know one of the rockafellers was into life extenssion big time but he died of old age (91) a few years back. Im not sure what kind of legacy he as left if any on that front as far as funding. I fear his death likely set back research by decades though
- notahacker 5y ago
  Billionaires either have to volunteer to be the guinea pigs for radical experimental anti-ageing therapies or accept that by the time treatments are proved safe and somewhat effective it's probably going to be too late for them. And if it isn't going to save them, there's plenty of strong competition for their philanthropic dollars, some of it with impressive results.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Surely it's not hard to come up with ways to avoid being the guinea pig. Find multiple aging based ailments that have lots of patients and fund a study.
    - ivandenysov 5y ago
      Won’t help much. I read that if we cure all types of cancer it will extend average life expectancy by just over a couple of years. Because if not cancer then something else will get you in old age. I guess if cancer did not affect younger people then we wouldn’t have cared about curing it as much. 8 year old with leukemia looks a lot more dramatic than a 80 years old :)
    - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
      The issue is that you will get the results on the subjects after your life is over or coming to end, unless it is the case that we could make life of a person currently >60 years old long which seems unlikely to me. So you would have to wait for 40 years before you know the results with good enough certainty.
dsizzle 5y ago
> aging (by definition) doesn't impact a young, healthy, active population There's actually a rare syndrome, progeria, that does cause aging in young people and this will likely provide insight toward solving aging https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/progeria/symptoms-causes/syc-20356038 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/progeria/symp... To your larger point, I would agree that self-medicators will be useful too. Can't that be true at the same time as the problems described in the article?
vanusa 5y ago
It's a pretty big, and terrifying, mindset change to go from "death from old age is natural and to be accepted" to "death from old age is preventable and tragic." But arguably it is natural because .. it's what our organisms are designed to do. That is, we're not "designed" (I mean by evolution, of course) to have lifespans beyond 100 or so years. We're specifically optimized to have about two or three decades as healthy, independent adults (from age 20 to about 40-50) which are devoted either to (1) raising children or (2) contributing to the welfare of the species or tribe as a whole. That is -- we're specifically designed and optimized to promote the longevity of the group, not the individual. In fact, individual longevity is explicitly sacrificed in favor of group longevity. That's just how we're built. And that's what's why longevity research is (apart from all the unknowns) fundamentally different from, say, finding research for cancer or AIDS. The latter group are unequivocal dysfunctional states ("preventable and tragic" if you will), and the basic goal of the research for these cases is to return the organism to it's correct, functional state. But aging (with its inevitable end state), on the other hand... is the organism's "correct, functional" state. So to find a categorical "remedy" for aging (beyond extending its horizon for a decade or two) is not to merely find the right "correction" for a certain set of dysfunctional states... but to alter the organism's functional nature entirely. That's why it is categorically a completely different beast of problem than, say, finding a treatment for AIDS. It may also be "terrifying" to our poor psyches strapped into these inevitably self-destructing organisms -- but to the collective goal of our DNA (that is, to promote the group over the individual -- it is also entirely moot.
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  I think you're ignoring the "to be accepted" part of the text you quoted. Just because something is what we were "designed" for or how we lived prehistorically doesn't make it right or desirable (nor the opposite--in this case fighting aging--wrong or undesirable).
  - vanusa 5y ago
    You're right I am, basically. I offer no insight as to whether the finiteness of our lifespans is "right" or "desirable". And I certainly am not saying that fighting aging is wrong or undesirable. Just that there's a structural reason as to why our organisms are built the way they are -- and a pretty deep structural reason at that.
duxup 5y ago
Yeah biotech by its nature is super iterative and has fits and starts and takes a long time.
bserge 5y ago
We're not even in the "death from mental illness is preventable and tragic" phase yet, so don't hold your breath. And if we get there, I have no doubt anti-aging treatments will be seen as performance enhancement. Another idiotic roadblock that is currently very widespread. I'm not even talking about physical enhancement. Just treating someone of "laziness" (ADHD/ADD) is not accepted in most of the world. Tbf, the US is doing it to kids for some reason. At least the adults suffering from it can benefit, too. And I gotta add, it would be hilarious if people had to beg doctors for medication to let them live longer. I bet the (literal) dick sucking rate would go up by a lot :D (Tip: if you don't get what you want from a psych, bring a knife, roll up your sleeves and start cutting. A bit of blood does wonders in convincing them you have problems!)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Someone 5y ago

To kill something, you need to know one way to do that. To keep it alive, you need to avoid _all_ the ways of killing it. I think that is a strong argument for preventing aging being a much more difficult problem.

AuthorizedCust 5y ago
Not really. It’s more of a “how do you eat an elephant” problem. Answer: one bite at a time. We’re doing that, even without the anti-aging label. E.g., things we now call “preventable deaths”. Even within that label, there’s a lot of opportunities that are far more tractable than others.
- citizenpaul 5y ago
  That onky gets us so far. Mostly just extending us to the limits of our natural lifespan with aging included. There will have to be direct work on tje processes that lead to aging. Audrey degray has a good ted talk on what he belives are the primary processes that cause aging. Seven of them i think and all of them are vastly complex
- xixixao 5y ago
  Not really. Longevity research is about significantly extending the healthy lifespan. What we’ve done so far is increased the likelihood that an individual will live as long as the longest living human. But we haven’t meaningfully increased the lifespan of the longest living human. Theoretical human lifespan is about the same it has been thousands of years ago.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  I don't feel like you can treat aging as simply a sum of its parts. Sure, there are some major causes of age related deaths like heart disease that we can work on and potentially expand average lifespan by a few years. However, the core problem of aging is probably best thought of as a disease in and of itself, where the things that actually kill you are symptoms. We need to make progress on the underlying mechanism that makes us more brittle over time.
dsizzle 5y ago
I'm reminded of the story about Henry Ford asking which part never broke down, and then using that to cut costs -- maybe evolution is like that too, and once we fix one problem we'll find the next isn't far behind? Except now that I've searched for a link for that, one of the first results actually questions that story, ha! https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_fords_king_pins.html https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_ford...

300bps 5y ago

Insightful take on it. Yet to be seen whether age halting/regression goes the path of HIV medication or the perpetual motion machine that humanity has likewise spent significant effort to attain.

ravi-delia 5y ago
I get what you're trying to say, but it's not that hard to make a perpetual motion machine if you're willing to keep putting energy into it. It's just hard to maintain, which is a much better match for aging research.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
thoms_a 5y ago
The perpetual motion machine analogy is quite apt, because fighting aging is ultimately fighting entropy. Both are doomed to fail in their quixotic battle against thermodynamics.
- rowanG077 5y ago
  If you take this stance you might as well start arguing for the extinction of humanity and destruction of earth. After all everything is "doomed to fail in their quixotic battle against thermodynamics".
  - thoms_a 5y ago
    A classic is/ought distinction error. Observing reality is not the same as prescribing a particular course of action.
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      Your post heavily implies anti aging beeing futile. Likening it to the search of a perpetual motion machine. I fail to see how this is not heavily suggesting a course of a action.

xixixao 5y ago

I keep wondering how the pandemic will affect public opinion. I think it’s an opportunity. Excess deaths and total death rates are being reported to wide public for the first time. Czech Republic is one of the worst affected countries, it has at times doubled it’s monthly death rate. If people mourn and are angry about the half that died from covid, will they be more opposed to the other half dying of other causes (most related to aging). Covid of course is linked to aging as well. I wonder, but I’m not sure. The “death is a natural part of life” is an extremely strong narrative, a coping mechanism really.

beaconstudios 5y ago
Death of old age /is/ a natural part of life, but so was high infant mortality until we found solutions to that. The problem is that until we actually have solid proof of anti aging science, people will continue to believe it's part of life.

citizenpaul 5y ago

Its always been astounding to me that these muti billionairs we have today put so little of their vast fortunes into research for something that will 100%affect them. I know one of the rockafellers was into life extenssion big time but he died of old age (91) a few years back. Im not sure what kind of legacy he as left if any on that front as far as funding. I fear his death likely set back research by decades though

notahacker 5y ago
Billionaires either have to volunteer to be the guinea pigs for radical experimental anti-ageing therapies or accept that by the time treatments are proved safe and somewhat effective it's probably going to be too late for them. And if it isn't going to save them, there's plenty of strong competition for their philanthropic dollars, some of it with impressive results.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Surely it's not hard to come up with ways to avoid being the guinea pig. Find multiple aging based ailments that have lots of patients and fund a study.
  - ivandenysov 5y ago
    Won’t help much. I read that if we cure all types of cancer it will extend average life expectancy by just over a couple of years. Because if not cancer then something else will get you in old age. I guess if cancer did not affect younger people then we wouldn’t have cared about curing it as much. 8 year old with leukemia looks a lot more dramatic than a 80 years old :)
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    The issue is that you will get the results on the subjects after your life is over or coming to end, unless it is the case that we could make life of a person currently >60 years old long which seems unlikely to me. So you would have to wait for 40 years before you know the results with good enough certainty.

dsizzle 5y ago

> aging (by definition) doesn't impact a young, healthy, active population There's actually a rare syndrome, progeria, that does cause aging in young people and this will likely provide insight toward solving aging https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/progeria/symptoms-causes/syc-20356038 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/progeria/symp... To your larger point, I would agree that self-medicators will be useful too. Can't that be true at the same time as the problems described in the article?

vanusa 5y ago

It's a pretty big, and terrifying, mindset change to go from "death from old age is natural and to be accepted" to "death from old age is preventable and tragic." But arguably it is natural because .. it's what our organisms are designed to do. That is, we're not "designed" (I mean by evolution, of course) to have lifespans beyond 100 or so years. We're specifically optimized to have about two or three decades as healthy, independent adults (from age 20 to about 40-50) which are devoted either to (1) raising children or (2) contributing to the welfare of the species or tribe as a whole. That is -- we're specifically designed and optimized to promote the longevity of the group, not the individual. In fact, individual longevity is explicitly sacrificed in favor of group longevity. That's just how we're built. And that's what's why longevity research is (apart from all the unknowns) fundamentally different from, say, finding research for cancer or AIDS. The latter group are unequivocal dysfunctional states ("preventable and tragic" if you will), and the basic goal of the research for these cases is to return the organism to it's correct, functional state. But aging (with its inevitable end state), on the other hand... is the organism's "correct, functional" state. So to find a categorical "remedy" for aging (beyond extending its horizon for a decade or two) is not to merely find the right "correction" for a certain set of dysfunctional states... but to alter the organism's functional nature entirely. That's why it is categorically a completely different beast of problem than, say, finding a treatment for AIDS. It may also be "terrifying" to our poor psyches strapped into these inevitably self-destructing organisms -- but to the collective goal of our DNA (that is, to promote the group over the individual -- it is also entirely moot.

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
I think you're ignoring the "to be accepted" part of the text you quoted. Just because something is what we were "designed" for or how we lived prehistorically doesn't make it right or desirable (nor the opposite--in this case fighting aging--wrong or undesirable).
- vanusa 5y ago
  You're right I am, basically. I offer no insight as to whether the finiteness of our lifespans is "right" or "desirable". And I certainly am not saying that fighting aging is wrong or undesirable. Just that there's a structural reason as to why our organisms are built the way they are -- and a pretty deep structural reason at that.

duxup 5y ago

Yeah biotech by its nature is super iterative and has fits and starts and takes a long time.

bserge 5y ago

We're not even in the "death from mental illness is preventable and tragic" phase yet, so don't hold your breath. And if we get there, I have no doubt anti-aging treatments will be seen as performance enhancement. Another idiotic roadblock that is currently very widespread. I'm not even talking about physical enhancement. Just treating someone of "laziness" (ADHD/ADD) is not accepted in most of the world. Tbf, the US is doing it to kids for some reason. At least the adults suffering from it can benefit, too. And I gotta add, it would be hilarious if people had to beg doctors for medication to let them live longer. I bet the (literal) dick sucking rate would go up by a lot :D (Tip: if you don't get what you want from a psych, bring a knife, roll up your sleeves and start cutting. A bit of blood does wonders in convincing them you have problems!)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]