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Japanese scientists develop vaccine to eliminate cells behind aging
- pseudolus 5y agoIn a somewhat similar vein on the mouse research circuit "Grape seed extract found to extend lifespan of old mice" [0]. [0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-grape-seed-lifespan-mice.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-grape-seed-lifespan-m... .
- Tieje 5y agoThe less of a strangle-hold the old has over the young, the better. It's difficult for young adults in the U.S. to form new relationships due to this current strangle-hold. The cost of longevity will be the depopulation of our nation because young people, even smart young people, will not have the resources to raise children. It takes a village to raise a child.
- swader999 5y agoJust take fisetin.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoSign me up for this the second it is available. As an aside, to spite anti vaxxers I’m on a mission to get every vaccine I can. I want my bloodstream to be like the Library at Alexandria before it burned down.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoAnd yet you still won't be fully protected. Seems to me there's lots of vaxx regret from the double dosed, when they find out about omicron. I'll check if you post in a few months. Otherwise, thank you for your contribution to science. In the mean time, don't recommend taking up competitive soccer.
- mechanical_bear 5y agoVaxx regret? Nah, I’m good.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoPlease don't post generic flamebait to HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kiba 5y agoIt's probably not a good idea to get every single vaccines that's not recommended to you by the CDC/your doctor. Vaccines could potentially trigger some dangerous side effects, however rare it is.
- hasmolo 5y agodon't drive cars, they can crash and it can be fatal while having other side effects, however rare they are.
- userbinator 5y agoI don't know anyone who finds getting vaccinated to be pleasurable, unlike driving.
- freen 5y agoNow you have an N of one. I found it highly pleasurable.
- TravHatesMe 5y agoOne is a conscious decision the other is rolling the dice.
- matbatt38 5y agoThis but unironically
- hattar 5y agoIgnoring the sarcasm, more than 32,000 people are killed and 2 million are injured each year from motor vehicle crashes in the US. It’s no heart disease (600,000+ deaths - leading cause in the US) but for the healthy and young, it’s a leading cause of death/side effects (injury). So in some sense you’re probably right.
- blip54321 5y agoYou already have the Library of Alexandria. That's your lymph nodes. What vaccines do is move some books to the front of the building, so your dentritic cells don't have to spend a few days finding them. You want the right books at the front. A mission to move all the books to the front is perhaps misguided.
- cma 5y agoI think it is more like the library of Borges, but with stuff that would interact with self culled.
- sdenton4 5y agoWe have an infinite library, but the literary criticism section has been carefully curated to remove all criticism of books in this library. The Library of Burges, though, we are happy to criticize unto oblivion.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoSome libraries don't have certain books. Vaccines buy those books for your library (and, as you say, put them in the front).
- majkinetor 5y agoNot those books. More like snippets of those books.
- trhway 5y agoand then second edition of the book comes out with that snippet deleted or updated to look completely different.
- tux3 5y agoYou have antibodies that will bind to just about anything foreign, including viruses that your body has never seen before, M-type immunoglobulin (IgM). It's the kind of antibodies that responds in the first phases of an infection. The problem is that IgMs are not very specific. They bind to a lot of things, but they bind poorly. In the library of Alexandria analogy, it's like a book that happens to mention a subject you care about, but only in passing. Vaccines (and infections) result in your immune system developing IgG. That's the hyper-specific books for the pathogen you care about. So it's not that the book wasn't at the front. Your immune system has to write the book on the fly, during the fight, using chopped up pieces of pathogen gathered by antigen-presenting cells.
- web3fixescensor 5y agoEnjoy your heart attack in 3 to 6 months.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoI’m with you. I’ve gotten vaccinated for everything my doctor lets me. Japanese Encephalitis? Pshaw. I don’t even know what it is, but good luck with my immune system. It’s like getting a superpower in a video game! And, vaccines have general positive effects of health: https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/qa-how-vaccines-can-strengthen-immune-response-beyond-specific-disease https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
- tux3 5y agoI'm not going to tell you that you're wrong, but I would be more careful than that. Infections can be the trigger for auto-immune diseases. We're not sure precisely how, but there seems to be a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors. Your immune system is very much not playing games, it's in the business of reacting on a hair trigger, and doing more damage to foreign bodies than it does to your own body. It has an intricate system to avoid turning against yourself, but the system can fail. If a B cell that produces auto-antibodies falls through the cracks, it will not die. You now have the problem of being in a permanent fight against your own immune system, with a variety of unfortunate results. Now that's a lot of scary outcomes, and thankfully those diseases are uncommon. The system almost always works well. But it's a very complex system with ugly failure modes, so I wouldn't encourage you to poke the beast too much.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThis would be like being worried about playing outside and being exposed to germs. Yes, it’s true that every new infection has the possibility of killing you. But, now we have evidence that exposure to diverse mild pathogens actually makes your immune system less dangerous to the self. Otherwise it would be safer to live in a clean room.
- tux3 5y agoI agree you should not try to live in a clean room, and you shouldn't be worried about being exposed to normal amount of germs. When you say "exposure to diverse mild pathogens actually makes your immune system less dangerous to the self", I suspect you're referring to the hygiene hypothesis that has become part of popular culture. It's important to know that that hypothesis, nowadays, is about early exposure to benign microbes. Meaning from in utero exposure to early childhood at the latest. I have seen no evidence that voluntarily exposing yourself to pathogens is a good idea. The point to my post was that you shouldn't understand the immune system like an RPG element that needs training to level up. Please do get vaccinated for relevant diseases, but I would not go too far in the direction of treating your immune system like a safe thing to play with.
- postsantum 5y agoThat's tribal thinking, "us vs them". You want to spite "them", who ostensibly don't know a thing about vaccine, but you never bothered to learn it yourself
- devmunchies 5y agoThe worse part is that anti-vax can just mean anti-mandate. Spiting in that context doesn’t make any sense since anti-vaxers still believe in effectiveness of vaccines.
- postsantum 5y agoI hate this rhetoric with passion. Even mentioning heartstrokes is an "antivaxer dogwhistle" now
- f0e4c2f7 5y agoAn old friend of mine used to compare getting a vaccine to getting a power-up in Mario.
- bool3max 5y agoYou sound as if your mental capacity is severely limited.
- juanani 5y agoSignalling pride in your own ignorance is effective trolling. One can always hide behind that one razor.
- plumeria 5y agoDid you get the rabies vaccine, yet? Also, the Dengvaxia is supposedly not recommended unless you've contracted Dengue already.
- majkinetor 5y agoI am pretty sure this would lead to more faster aging. Immune system ages itself, and collateral damage it does during fight response is not 0. There is limited amount of resources for stuff, it the only stuff you do is fighting various shit around, the body will probably turn off other non important stuff for immediate survival. Also, you should think sometimes about aspirin and Spanish fever phenomena.
- pininja 5y agoFor people like me who weren’t familiar, aspirin toxicity may have led to the extreme mortality at the peak of the Spanish flu. [0] > The hypothesis presented herein is that aspirin contributed to the incidence and severity of viral pathology, bacterial infection, and death, because physicians of the day were unaware that the regimens (8.0–31.2 g per day) produce levels associated with hyperventilation and pulmonary edema in 33% and 3% of recipients, respectively. [0] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/9/1405/301441 https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/9/1405/301441
- majkinetor 5y agoIts more fact then hypothesis. There was also a control group, something we don't have now with vaccines. 5% death in military vs 1% in sanitoriums which used heat therapy. Its amazing what modern medicine did back then, and you know... history repeats.
- aasasd 5y agoI opened Wikipedia to see what you mean with the mention of the library, and there I read: > Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries.
- Jimmc414 5y agoBefore signing up for this particular vaccine you might want to read up on what inhibition of antiapoptotic & apoptotic pathways means for your health.
- anonuser123456 5y agoI do not recommend getting vaccinated for dengue fever :P
- hnbrainwashed 5y agoEnjoy dying a slow painful dead you piece of shit :)
- slickrick216 5y agoI hope this is satire. The medical industry doesn’t always have your best intentions at heart. From talcum powder to thalidomide. Be careful.
- freen 5y agoYou assume thalidomide was intentional?
- slickrick216 5y agoNot fully but it’s fair to say. greed plays a role in all human interactions. Organisational failure is a hard thing to pin down. Mix in the banality of evil and strange things can happen. Felix Hoffman the scientist at Bayer who is credited (somewhat disputed now) as discovering heroin and aspirin in the same week. He was just a chemist. The company was just out to make a profit. Crack epidemics in almost every country were the effect. Bit of a long winded way to say it doesn’t have to be black or white and to also that we can’t tell for sure the full effects of anything until well after.
- Jansen312 5y agoYeah, why be immuned when you can be invincible. Keep us updated when you gotten all the vax injected. How you plan to deal with recurring one that become ineffective fast like the rabbies vax. You scheduled every couple of weeks? Maybe an online blog and checklist to motivate others to compete who get jabbed the most.
- khazhoux 5y agoA blog is a great idea, though it probably won't be very interesting. Unless he happens to have adverse reactions (which are rare), there won't be anything to report on except "I still feel fine and I still haven't contracted xyz." As for the rabies vaccine, I don't think you can just ask for that to be administered -- unless, I suppose, you lie about being bitten by a random animal. As an aside, I have amusing memories of my own rabies vaccine 25 years ago -- a series of injections of thick syrup into my butt.
- natded 5y agoWe are going to see just how much people love The Science when they make mRNA vaccine to cure homosexuality.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- johnisgood 5y agoWhy would you poke your immune system unnecessarily just to spite other people? Strange.
- ffggvv 5y agothat sounds pretty cringe to get unnecessarily medical treatments just to spite people. even if its harmless in the end. have you considered just getting the ones you need and not worrying about anti-vaxxers?
- godDLL 5y agoYou should understand that there's a hard limit of how much of it is usable. Get too much in, something will never again wake up. You can't be all-around immune, that's not how it works. Unless you alter how it works, you won't ever be.
- silexia 5y agoWhat does HN think of the actual science behind this?
- steve76 5y agoBiochemical cascades in just one cell are very complex, and involve very large molecules. They are triggered by changes in solutions of these very large molecules, heat, and immuno cells. Tissue consists of billions of cells. These are "just" chemical reactions which we still haven't come close to getting right, such as the right dose of blood thinners to prevent clots from afib while not causing brain bleeds, or the right dose of statins that reverse artery plaques while not destroying your liver or the right dose of beta blockers that lower blood pressure without diluting your kidneys. Gene space is extremely large, close to a cosmic scale. At first genes were only thought to play a role in cell division. Then came gene expression and transcription inside and outside the cell, such as protein receptors and secretion. It is very likely genetic mutations do not rely on "just" chemistry and take into account quantum effects. Despite mapping the billions of genes required and structuring them all the right way, you still get unexpected runaway mutations, because genetic molecule outsides do not represent the insides, it's impossible to determine, and impossible to configure. Genetic molecules may not exhibit quantum behavior. Likely they do regards to genetic mutations. But neurons certainly do, in regards to their chemical and electrical synapses. I have heart disease. 10 months out of the year I'm barely consciousness. However my family members say I'm still in there somewhere. Compare this to my heart disease is cured, but family members fail to recognize me anymore, adamantly agree across the board I'm not me and now won't have anything to do with me. With mice, you can kill them by the thousands until you get one that glows in the dark or has a human ear growing out it's back. You're left with an incredibly large set of genetic and neural data you will never fully understand, never know its complete, and never know if it has been recorded correctly as that one mouse's body decomposes, and then dump it all in someone else's lap and ask for more money and more privileges to do this to everyone in the world. Science is still very incomplete and what it needs is often directly opposed by the legitimate needs of people, such as not being horribly poisoned. It's still very much trial and error: "Hey, this guy got by with it. Let's try it on someone who's dying. What have we got to loose"? And also opportunity, as in "the Earth will experience an interference pattern of gravity waves as two neutron stars collide in front of a series of black holes acting as a divider. Get the data." Science still involves much hope, as in, even when you lack opportunity, rules of decency still apply.
- dane-pgp 5y ago> A Japanese research team said it developed a vaccine to remove so-called zombie cells that accumulate with age So it's designed to make humans immortal? Sounds like it's more likely to create zombies than destroy them. I half suspected the article to say that this vaccine was a product of the Umbrella Corporation.
- kiba 5y agoIt will hardly make a human immortal. That's just fixing one problem with the human body, if the vaccine's promise is to be believed. It will probably be incredibly cheap to make and administer, but not a silver bullet.
- battles 5y ago*in mice
- cinntaile 5y agoHaha of course it is... Whenever you see an amazing research result you immediately know it's in mice. If I want to be a bit cynical... In the future we will likely find that these cells serve an important purpose and that we can't just eliminate them. The research needs to be done though!
- mensetmanusman 5y agoFor the sake of discussion, which age would you want to pause at? 16, 24 for insurance reasons?
- kyriakos 5y ago16 is too young and you won't be able to do a lot of things unless you walk around with paperwork all the time. 24 sounds good but I'd pick 30 cause looking 30 people take you a bit more seriously. You will be able to relate more with people in their 30swhen you are 50 but look 30 than with people in their 20s. Of course in this hypothetical scenario if everyone is not aging then it all cahnges.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoYeah, maybe a separate question would be what the age would be if everyone in society was forced to pause at that age. I wonder what immortal oligarchs would even do…
- clairity 5y agothey’d find other ways to kill each other. that’s not facetious—our egos depend on getting an edge, however microscopic, over others, and when that doesn’t happen, we get angry (that is, desperate and irrational) and do things we shouldn’t. it’s a tale as old as time. that ‘modern’, ‘developed’ civilizations haven’t devolved this way yet isn’t because we’re all so cultivated now, but because we’ve lived in an unusual period of extended growth and excessive abundance which keeps destructive competition at bay. but infighting (i.e., tribalism) has been rising over the past 50+ years and is threatening to overthrow that period of prosperity and civility.
- eska 5y agoI bet that assessment would cease to be the case once we have gotten used to 100 year olds that look 16
- kyriakos 5y ago
- AtticHacker 5y agoHow is this different from taking Senolytics? Is it that the vaccine helps your body fight senescent cells rather than having Senolytics remove them?
- JamesBarney 5y agoI think the end result is the same. But not all senolytics are created equal. They differ in what cells they work on, how powerful they are, and how specific they are (the ratio of senescent to healthy cells they kill). Here's a quote from the article > Many of the existing drugs to remove senescent cells are used as anti-cancer agents and may cause negative side effects. Side effects from the new vaccine were fewer, while its efficacy lasted longer, the team said
- booleandilemma 5y agoImagine the costs of a vaccine that would make you immortal in the US? Surely not everyone would be able to afford it. But then we could implement an immortality lottery, to give everyone a shot. That could be the devious slogan: “everyone gets a shot”. Devious because not everyone does, of course. If you win you get the vaccine and live forever, but your friends and family aren’t included.
- dougmwne 5y agoDeath represents a pretty serious destruction of human capital. If people will work forever, then why not let them live forever, much less retraining and less money spent on recruiting. This is only semi-sarcastic;)
- lordnacho 5y agoThank you for your application for "Junior Developer". Unfortunately we only take applicants with 100 years of JavaScript experience, 100 years of c++, at least 2M stars on GitHub contributions, and 4 PhDs in machine learning, and 200 StackOverflow points. Feel free to apply again next time Halley's comet is visible.
- NullPrefix 5y ago>200 StackOverflow points You forgot to mention Excel and Word.
- Andy_G11 5y agoIt would allow career diversification, though. Maybe there's a bit part going in Sly Stallone's 'Expendables 3194'?
- no_way 5y agoDeath does allow for new cultural shift in society, imagine if all the politicians lived forever, the space for change would be even more limited than it is now/
- gremloni 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pezzana 5y ago> The team, including Juntendo University professor Toru Minamino, confirmed that mice administered with the vaccine showed decreases in the zombie cells, medically known as senescent cells, and in areas affected by arterial stiffening. By now this has become a trope. "Researchers develop new treatment for {UNTREATED_DISEASE}" ... in mice. Mouse models of human disease are very limited in their predictive ability. There's a lot of research that needs to follow this before there's even a hope of a human trial, let alone vaccine. And the failure rate for treatments at the mouse stage is quite high. Some of the comments on this thread treat this research paper as the announcement of an an imminent anti-aging vaccine. It's not.
- arboghast 5y agoThere are many imminent aging therapies in clinical trials though or upcoming. Not saying it will reverse it but it may slow it down and compress the morbidity period. Such therapies include the promising Mayo Clinic trial on using large doses of Fisetin to get rid of senescent cells, or similarly Dasatnib + Quercetin, gene therapy like PGC-1a for maintaining muscle mass in older age, epigenetic reprogramming, mTOR inhibitors like Sirolimus or other rapalogues, etc. So it’s very likely that some of the advances we see today that are still in clinical stage will hit the market in 5 to 15 years. Edit: typo
- dbcurtis 5y agoGotta admit though, there has never been a better time to be a mouse.
- netizen-936824 5y agoReally? Because they get experimented on and then slaughtered by the thousands
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rixed 5y agoActually, by the million (monthly) https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-rats-are-used-us-labs-controversial-study-says-more-100-million https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-ra...
- manmal 5y agoFisetin is quite cheap and has been shown to eliminate senescent cells: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30279143/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30279143/
- inglor_cz 5y agoI tried fisetin once. No obvious effects (I am 43 only), save one: in the week afterwards, I lost about 4 pounds of weight effortlessly.
- manmal 5y agoI don’t recommend this, nor have I tried it: Some people experiment with high doses, like 1-2g, within one day, twice a week. Anecdotal reports of scars fading, but also scary effects like hypocoagulation (won’t stop bleeding). Just internet rumors though, I‘d wait for clinical studies.
- arboghast 5y agoDoses used in the Mayo Clinic trial was about 1.5g to 2g for humans, 5 days per month, iirc. Also keep in mind that if you are young and healthy you won’t notice much and it’s the kind of treatment like most that are long-term, meaning you can’t do it 3 months and expect results.
- rp1 5y agoFrom reading that paper, the purpose of senescent cells is to prevent tumor growth. I don't know if I'd want to suppress or eliminate that functionality over a long period of time.
- salehenrahman 5y agoSenescent cells themselves do not exist to prevent tumor growth. Cells becoming senescent is a mechanism that exists to prevent them from becoming a possible tumor, due to DNA damage. The problem with senescent cells is that accumulation of them results in tissues not functioning correctly. Eliminating them should make tissues function better. After all, your own immune system gets rid of senescent cell, but as we age, I believe your immune system is unable to keep up.
- hirenj 5y agoHere's the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00151-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00151-2
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hirenj 5y agoIt's an odd protein they're hitting - GPMNB is expressed pretty widely, so I wonder what the proteoform is that they're targeting/recognising here. Can't get to the paper using all the usual tricks, so it's hard to say what exactly they're immunising with, which could answer a lot of my questions.
- narrator 5y agoGPMNB seems to be expressed in cancer cells. Cancer cells are usually kind of screwed up and senescent. Maybe it's one of those little anti-cancer Rube Goldberg machines like p53 that starts popping off triggering apoptosis when things get weird in the cell.
- MichaelBurge 5y agoThere's a limit on the number of times a cell can divide(the telomere length), so it seems like a "vaccine" against them would decrease lifespan by reducing the limit by 1. But it sounds like cells reaching that limit, cause other effects(inflammation, etc.) that are perhaps even worse for lifespan. So this wouldn't be an anti-aging vaccine, but would reduce symptoms of aging.
- bsenftner 5y agoIf this is real, it will be huge, but my suspicions are on high alert. Why only Japan Times, and not "Breaking News! Immortality in humanity's grasp!" taking over the airwaves like O.J. Simpson's car chase?
- zxcvbn4038 5y agoOnce US media sees this the headline will become “Japan Researchers Cure Death” and then the article will be disappointing to read. ;)
- shon 5y agoSometimes I hit the comments first because at times they’ve been more interesting than the article as topically educated folks weigh in on the content. What happened?
- hourislate 5y ago>When the team administered the vaccine to mice.... There is something that already exists that's free. Multi day fasting to induce autophagy. It's not pleasant or as convenient as getting a shot/taking pills but it's been perfected over the last couple of million years with no side affects except discomfort. You might also try adding a dose of exercise (more discomfort) and cutting out things like Fructose (20% of the American diet) completely.
- fithisux 5y agoYeap and you can definitely eliminate cancer if you inject chlorine. But .....
- eezurr 5y agoThe day we escape death will begin the descent into the longest dark age humanity will ever experience. Death is necessary to allow new ideas and change to be brought into the world. Death is necessary to prevent wealth and power accumulating into fewer hands. Death is necessary for others to enjoy the right to bear and raise children. EDIT: 2 minutes go by and this comment has already been downvoted 3+ times. At least respond before you downvote.
- pas 5y agoWtf is this deathcult bullshit. Maybe in 2A Jesusland death is the only option, but in other parts of the world there are taxes and proportional representation and euthanasia. Yes, there are problems, but saying that death (and more specifically aging with all of its shitty slow painful consequences) is great (okay, you said necessary), because it somehow "solves" other problems is a logical fallacy. Plus, "actually" aging is one of the things that causes inequality, because wealthy people live longer thanks to having access to better healthcare, food, lifestyle, etc.
- catlikesshrimp 5y agoI think parent comment is going along the lines "Altered Carbon" tv series ( and novels ) thread. For instance, if eternal life could be bought, the first one to buy it could be the richest man in the world. Parent is not happy with the idea of an inmortal ruler. In the mean time, I would like to stay younger for longer. And older people are still afraid of death, even if they are not healthy.
- BizarroLand 5y agoMore like, if eternal life can be bought, the first one to sell it would be the richest man in the world.
- pas 5y ago> immortal ruler term limits. what I'm trying to say (besides that the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy is aweeeesome!) is that these problems are already here, and are already solvable. regular dictators consolidate their power in a 5-10 years. corporations/memes/ideologies/religions are already immortal. and so on, and so on. aging and death is basically a disease of the poor. the solution is not more aging/death, but less poverty.
- bsd44 5y agoPeople spend their lives in misery and then go out of their way to try and artificially prolong it. :)
- penjelly 5y agothe comments saying they get any and every vaccine implying each one is like a new superpower lmao.. society is in for a wild ride the next 100 years
- obblekk 5y ago1. Removing senescent cells extends life by 30-40% with huge quality of life improvements in the last 25% of the life (relative to control), in mice. This isn't an elimination of all aging, but quite a valuable thing regardless. Eventually, other causes of aging would kick in and still cause death, without a single senescent cell in your body (e.g. DNA methylation). 2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. At the depths of covid lockdowns, GDP was down 20%. Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity. To avoid another 10 years of my parents death is something I'd do a lot for. Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else. 3. This approach is scientifically sound. Certain aspects of aging cures are approaching engineering levels of work rather than pure science. We simply know that many diseases are caused or amplified by senescent cells. And we have ample evidence that elimination of these cells reverses diseases in complex mammals, as long as you don't remove too many, too quickly. The rest, is the engineering problem of how to remove the right cells at the right cadence. 4. This is the kind of thing biohackers should hack on. Find an aging part of your skin, and attempt to convince your body to kill the senescent cells. If you succeed, you will have benefited humanity, become beautiful, become wealthy, and be remembered forever (is there any other fundamental need humans have, not covered)? Let the race begin!
- Synaesthesia 5y agoMaybe instead of maximising GDP we should maximise happiness and there's plenty of low hanging fruit. I mean people are still starving to death and dying of preventable diseases...
- kingcharles 5y agoDo we want peak happiness, though? Almost all advances of civilisation are created through unhappiness about something. Would a state of total happiness stop creativity?
- randmeerkat 5y agoIt’s an interesting idea, but how would you measure happiness? For example coal pollutes, so at first glance maybe coal plants should get a negative happiness index. Then some plants close, and heating costs go up and people get cold because they can’t afford the electric heat in their homes. Are they happier without the coal? Would they be happier with the coal and the pollution? Does this solve the problem in a way that GDP measures can’t?
- btheshoe 5y agoI just turned 19, and I hope. To God that I'm young enough that when this stuff comes to market I won't be so old I can't use it
- sakopov 5y agoWhen I was your age I too wished that such medical breakthroughs would help me live a little longer. As I got to my mid 30s I started wishing that it'll hopefully help my parents live a little longer and enjoy their time with grandkids.
- xwdv 5y agoI feel like one of the problems with anti-aging tech is that even if you can stop aging for yourself, the people you love or care about will still grow old all around you, and wither and die. Then you realize the real goal is not really to stop aging, it’s to stop all change, to freeze the world in a state of familiar comfort for as long as you can, to waste days laying out under a tree on a sunny day, guilt free, knowing that no time is being wasted, and that there is absolutely still time for everything in this world.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoI wonder if fasting has similar effects. Would it be wrong to speculate that it would kill off the weakest cells deprived of resources.
- Gatsky 5y agoNote that these mice were fed a high fat diet (HFD), essentially toxic fat overload to generate disease phenotypes that one can demonstrate an improvement in. Mice normally eat a mainly grain based diet, so getting 45% of calories from fat is as you can imagine pretty bad for them. This is a common theme in anti-ageing research. When you administer some cariacature of poor lifestyle, it is much easier to find ways to improve things. The long running calorie restriction experiements in monkeys illustrate this well [1,2] - in monkeys being fed a bad diet, calorie restriction works great. In monkeys eating a kinda normal monkey diet, calorie restriction doesn't do much (and the unrestricted healthy eating monkeys live longer than the calorie restricted junky monkeys). Peter Attia had a good podcast with Steve Austad where they discuss this, albeit paywalled. Unfortunately the style of experiment in the OP is good for publishing papers but hardly advances knowledge or helps us to explain anything. It is much more difficult to demonstrate improvements in healthspan in animals that are living well. The ITP experiments have shown a few drugs can do this, with rapamycin being the most broadly effective. [1] Junky monkey: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2812811/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2812811/ [2] Healthy monkey: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11432 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11432
- Inufu 5y agoDoesn't sound too different from the diet a lot of humans eat ;)