3 ms·

That's insane optimism to me. We don't even know how to get a nail to re-attach to a nail bed. We can't put some crystals on a tooth. We can't create a single h

That's insane optimism to me. We don't even know how to get a nail to re-attach to a nail bed. We can't put some crystals on a tooth. We can't create a single hair follicle. We have zero non-surgical ways to repair arteries. Etc, etc, etc. We have made zero progress in anti-aging other than controlling blood pressure and identifying harmful chemicals in an environment. We ARE good at extreme, surgical and or heavy medicating intervention. Doesn't go hand-in-hand with life extension at all.

grishka 5y ago
We're now capable of programming cells to produce arbitrary proteins at will, how cool is that? Also please do look through the playlist in a sibling comment. Michael Levin's research is truly badass. He has grown tadpoles with an extra working eye on the back, and recently he has regrown an amputated leg on a frog. There's an astonishing amount of untapped possibilities in biology that are opening up only now as we finally have the right tools.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  Right, CRISPR is ok, but they haven't figured out that many real applications. This approach to vaccines has actually been around forever. I bookmarked this thread specifically to watch your links later. I appreciate them and will watch, as I am really interested in the topic. My hope is that biotech is the next step, but as I mentioned, for now I am highly pessimistic. We can't seem to treat virtually anything in any real sense, despite the experiments you mention. If anything, the progress in prosthetics (including the spinal bypass) has been great, but nothing to do with life extension or genuine recovery of lost functionality without surgical intervention. Personally, it seems to be me that the closest thing we can do so far as individuals is reduce risk factors and try to stay high on Death Clocks: https://www.lifespan.io/news/grimage-is-the-best-clock-for-predicting-death/ https://www.lifespan.io/news/grimage-is-the-best-clock-for-p... Completely unrelated, but this reminded me that we can't seem to regrow cartilage either. This is a huge issue after cancers and cardiac deaths. Any falls, excessive wear and tear, etc all destroy quality of life with the joints. Latest efforts here: https://www.studyfinds.org/arthritis-pain-regrowing-cartilage/ https://www.studyfinds.org/arthritis-pain-regrowing-cartilag...
  - grishka 5y ago
    We can now treat a lot of conditions we couldn't before. People used to die all the time of infections or any number of other conditions we now consider fully curable. Medicine as we know it is a relatively young science compared to physics or mathematics for example. We can treat most bacterial infections. We can manage most virus infections. We can perform life-saving, high-precision surgeries. We couldn't do any of these things just 100 years ago — that's nothing on a historical timescale. Thing is, medicine/biology is a unique field because it relies quite a lot on advancements in other fields for its tools. You couldn't research cells before microscope was invented. You can't begin figuring out what each part of a genome does before you've sequenced it. You can't begin to research functions of specific proteins before you've solved their structures and got the ability to manipulate their production and/or attach markers to them. And so on, and so forth. Not so long ago the main approach in medical research was basically "try stuff randomly on lab animals and see what has a beneficial effect". Now that we can peek into the internal workings of biological systems we can use a more direct, more engineering-like approach.
forgetfulness 5y ago
At least there is such a thing as growing tissues from stem cells. Nothing at all in the category of "uploading" one's consciousness anywhere exists. Not "uploading a memory", not "uploading a thought process", those are abstract concepts we've made to describe what the extremely strange organs that brains are do, anyway, and we're nowhere near close to understanding its biology much less replicating what it actually does with a machine.

grishka 5y ago

We're now capable of programming cells to produce arbitrary proteins at will, how cool is that? Also please do look through the playlist in a sibling comment. Michael Levin's research is truly badass. He has grown tadpoles with an extra working eye on the back, and recently he has regrown an amputated leg on a frog. There's an astonishing amount of untapped possibilities in biology that are opening up only now as we finally have the right tools.

throw1234651234 5y ago
Right, CRISPR is ok, but they haven't figured out that many real applications. This approach to vaccines has actually been around forever. I bookmarked this thread specifically to watch your links later. I appreciate them and will watch, as I am really interested in the topic. My hope is that biotech is the next step, but as I mentioned, for now I am highly pessimistic. We can't seem to treat virtually anything in any real sense, despite the experiments you mention. If anything, the progress in prosthetics (including the spinal bypass) has been great, but nothing to do with life extension or genuine recovery of lost functionality without surgical intervention. Personally, it seems to be me that the closest thing we can do so far as individuals is reduce risk factors and try to stay high on Death Clocks: https://www.lifespan.io/news/grimage-is-the-best-clock-for-predicting-death/ https://www.lifespan.io/news/grimage-is-the-best-clock-for-p... Completely unrelated, but this reminded me that we can't seem to regrow cartilage either. This is a huge issue after cancers and cardiac deaths. Any falls, excessive wear and tear, etc all destroy quality of life with the joints. Latest efforts here: https://www.studyfinds.org/arthritis-pain-regrowing-cartilage/ https://www.studyfinds.org/arthritis-pain-regrowing-cartilag...
- grishka 5y ago
  We can now treat a lot of conditions we couldn't before. People used to die all the time of infections or any number of other conditions we now consider fully curable. Medicine as we know it is a relatively young science compared to physics or mathematics for example. We can treat most bacterial infections. We can manage most virus infections. We can perform life-saving, high-precision surgeries. We couldn't do any of these things just 100 years ago — that's nothing on a historical timescale. Thing is, medicine/biology is a unique field because it relies quite a lot on advancements in other fields for its tools. You couldn't research cells before microscope was invented. You can't begin figuring out what each part of a genome does before you've sequenced it. You can't begin to research functions of specific proteins before you've solved their structures and got the ability to manipulate their production and/or attach markers to them. And so on, and so forth. Not so long ago the main approach in medical research was basically "try stuff randomly on lab animals and see what has a beneficial effect". Now that we can peek into the internal workings of biological systems we can use a more direct, more engineering-like approach.

forgetfulness 5y ago

At least there is such a thing as growing tissues from stem cells. Nothing at all in the category of "uploading" one's consciousness anywhere exists. Not "uploading a memory", not "uploading a thought process", those are abstract concepts we've made to describe what the extremely strange organs that brains are do, anyway, and we're nowhere near close to understanding its biology much less replicating what it actually does with a machine.