32 ms·
Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research
- gw67 5y agoAll the public companies backed are now down badly. - METACRINE -92% (1 year) - Unity biotechnology -86% (1 year) - DECIBEL THERAPEUTICS -80% (1 year) - PRECISION BIOSCIENCES -62% (1 year) https://www.longevity.vc/ https://www.longevity.vc/
- jacquesm 5y agoOf course they are. It's so far beyond our current understanding of aging that there is no way that you are going to turn this into applied science today. These are at best open research problems and they will likely be so for many years to come. Assuming we don't collectively kill ourselves first.
- culi 5y agoPerhaps its not necessarily a bad thing that there's a delay in this type of research. Given the extreme inequality in the world today, it might end up really hard to overcome the way that that inequality manifests itself with regards to access to these types of medicine/research. Even your own comment hinted that perhaps we have some more pressing issues to figure out first
- adamisom 5y agoI’ve always suspected this sentiment to exist somewhere— essentially “death is the great equalizer (and thus good)”—but don’t think I’ve seen it until now. It’s always been obvious to me that the problem with singular focus on inequality is precisely this — the easiest way for everyone to be equal is to be dead. This is appalling and a strong argument against a singular focus on inequality. I would say the same thing about wealth. The easiest way for everyone to be equal is for everyone to be poor. So, make sure your preferred economic policies don’t follow this adverse incentive and just “cut the tall grasses”, so to speak, and just make everyone poor and/or limit upward mobility.
- culi 5y agoI never made such a statement. I never said death makes people equal I don't see how my argument is any different from the arguments about us not being ready for general AI because of how much it could concentrate power.
- adamisom 5y agoSorry for misstating you. It does seem bad if only some have the tech. Maybe in the worst case, rich nations lock others out? That just seems implausible to me, I think any such medicine tech would be shared without delay. With general AI, I think that’s a tech that would not be fully shared and would stay concentrated.
- krageon 5y ago> us not being ready for [thing] because of how much it could concentrate power. Power is already concentrated, such an advancement would not change the indelible fact that we've reinvented kings and dynasties and we can't seem to get rid of them. Given that life has gotten better for everyone anyway when we discover great things, such concerns must be seen as immaterial. Improving the life of all people is more important.
- krageon 5y agoI'd take a world in which immortality is possible over one where it is not, even if I have to work very hard and do questionable things to get it.
- ericmcer 5y agoThe investing strategy for longevity companies is probably 49/50 have -90% returns but the you can't miss the one that actually achieves something.
- gw67 5y agoIf you have 50 stocks equally weighted: - 49 stock -90% - 1 stock 10x Final portofolio is (0.1 * 49 + 10 * 1)/50 = 0.29 or -71%
- prakhar897 5y agoDo you think the stock will go 10x or 100000000x. Every single human on the planet needs only what only u can provide. Do the math again. Also its not 1 in 50 but 1 in 50000
- manmal 5y agoEven if we „solved“ death and disease, accidents and wars would end our live eventually. Lifespan would increase for sure (I think there was a model that predicted sthg like 500 years?), but immortality just won’t work.
- jdrc 5y agothe goal of lifespan extension would be extend it far enough that we 'd be able to move the conscious self to some other mechanical entity
- brian_spiering 5y agoYou are correct. A better word is amortality - a lifestyle that defies the process of aging.
- orangecat 5y agoCorrect. Eliminating aging doesn't mean immortality, it just means you don't have to watch your body and often your mind deteriorate over the course of several decades. It would still be extraordinarily valuable even if humans had unremovable biological time bombs that caused us to drop dead at 100 years regardless of our health.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI think the only way we get “true” immortality is memory transfer to silicon (or whatever is in-vogue at the time) barring all the gibberish about “souls” and “what does consciousness mean”. People like me who are materialistic and think we are chemistry and sensations manifest as consciousness. Assuming tech ever actually reaches that point, and probably not in our lifetimes. It's one reason I read all the Warhammer 40k novels about the Necrons. I know it's pulp fiction but is fun to ponder while daydreaming.
- DantesKite 5y agoPeter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good. But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least. I’ve thought for a while now that every philosophy problem is in some sense, just a health problem waiting to be solved. Occasionally I think about the Bible too and the way Christ (regardless of your religious beliefs) upended this tradition of rationalizing death as good. There’s a line in the Bible that’s the shortest verse in the English version: “Jesus wept.” And he was weeping for Lazarus, a man who died (who he could bring back to life effortlessly); in some sense a true condemnation of death as evil. Something even a god would weep over. I think about the future often too; the way immortality will finally be achieved. There’s so many complications when it comes to aging, and so much we don’t know about the human body, I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand. I think it’ll happen someday. But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now. I certainly hope it’s soon. Some days I feel like I’m at the edge of an eternal history.
- jacquesm 5y ago> But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now. You might want to add another zero there.
- Terry_Roll 5y agoIt cant be solved yet as there isnt enough resources to go round for everyone. https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/ https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do... https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/01/How_many_Earths_2022_EN_sm.jpg https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/01/How_man...
- 5y ago
- grishka 5y agoAs someone who follows life extension research closely: all the lifestyle stuff like "eating less" is useless. You can't rejuvenate an organism by changing the external inputs to its natural processes. It's half-measures at best.
- jdrc 5y agofasting does have something to do with longevity (in mice and other animals). Maybe not in humans but it's certainly a valid line of research
- grishka 5y agoWhat I'm saying is that it doesn't reverse aging, it merely slows it down, and not by much.
- avazhi 5y agoI don't think anybody's claimed that it reverses ageing, and if they have I think they would have clarified that they did mean 'slows' the ageing process. And there's no doubt that caloric restriction and IF both slow ageing relative to a normal caloric intake. I don't have the paper on me atm, but IIRC it was 30% longer lifespan in mice. Now whether you want to say ageing is slowed or that lifespan is increased, and I'm not denying that there's a legitimate difference, but either way caloric restriction is completely legitimate for both, and to the extent you said it's useless, I don't think that's fair at all. For anybody interested, the mTor pathway is really interesting in this regard, and in general the effects of AMPK on cellular metabolism. TLDR is that in the modern world most people never activate these pathways (since we're always in a fed state). Ostensibly there will be some breakthroughs when we finally learn why these starvation pathways are so beneficial. Inflammation seems a decent guess - eating increases it, and fasting decreases it, as a general rule.
- exhilaration 5y agoIsn't slowing down aging the goal of "longevity"? The word implies extending life, not necessarily renewing it.
- feviskus 5y agouse verteporfin in combination with wounding. it works, even for hair loss. thank me later.
- jacquesm 5y agoFrom your previous comment: " Feeling very depressed as a 23 year old with agressive hair loss. Tried (and still trying) everything there is, but nothing worked yet (1.5 years into min/dut)." I think I'm going to pass on medical advice from you.
- feviskus 5y agoYou can keep stigmatizing depression or balding, luckily Im no more in a position such that statements like yours would affect me adversely. It took 4 months and a bit of experimenting, but vert was able to change it, I just want to raise awareness. You can read up on "Verteporfin", the patent for cell regeneration (thru "controlled wounding") is already filed by Stanford, pending approval.
- jacquesm 5y agoI'm not stigmatizing anything.
- feviskus 5y agoThen please stop (mis)judging people just because they experienced a depressive episode in their life - this is exactly what that sentence meant, even if not your intent.
- jacquesm 5y agoDefinitely not my intent. I just think that if you are going to spread medical advice like that that maybe you should think twice about it, what works for you will not necessarily work for others and that is a caveat you did not add. 'thank me later' implies a guarantee that it will work.
- hwers 5y agoOnly tangentially relevant nitpick: shouldn't that first graph have a sigmoid shape since it represents chance of dying as a function of age. At age 130 is should top out at 100% but it shouldn't increase exponentially.
- mft_ 5y agoIt looks basically accurate, as it's showing your risk of dying at a particular point in time during your life. This risk increases as you get older: the you're more likely to die if you make it to 80 than at 70 or at 60, and so on. So it would seem accurate that the risk increases steadily with time. This table [0] shows the underlying data. If you plot age against death probability, you get a similarly-shaped curve to the article's. A sigmoid curve would seem to imply that your risk of dying decreases after a certain age, which isn't the case. I think what you're imaging is a curve that shows one's overall chance of dying at a particular age (rather than risk at a point in time)? Or am I missing your point? [0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
- jacquesm 5y agoI think it shows the risk of being dead by a particular age.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- keiferski 5y agoSorry for the academic terminology, but: longevity is basically the dream of eternal life recast for a modern disenchanted world. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend reading some books by Charles Taylor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age https://ubcgcu.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/taylor-and-immanent-frame.pdf https://ubcgcu.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/taylor-and-immane...
- ganzuul 5y agoYou don't need capital G God to live a spiritual life, which is the process of becoming fully human. Qualia that you experience are of a mind operating in non-dualistic reality which we are always a part of because of its transcendental nature.
- cyber_kinetist 5y agoAlso, recommend Baudrillard's Symbollic Exchange and Death for how this fantasy of immortality poses a devastating problem to Western society. Seeing that you've mentioned Taylor's A Secular Age, maybe I should start reading it (it's been on my reading list for some time, but this renewed my curiosity as his studies seem to be closely related to what thinkers like Bataille and Baudrillard has problematized in political economy)
- keiferski 5y agoThanks for the suggestion! I didn’t know Baudrillard wrote about this. > this fantasy of immortality poses a devastating problem to Western society. Absolutely. While I agree with the other commenter that basically no one is against life extension research in principle, the energy that leads to deifying it (which is the vibe I get from a lot of longevity materials) might be better served learning to understand and accept death as a natural phenomenon. I’ve found Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life to be an excellent work on this topic. Then again, one might characterize the technological successes of the West in the last ±500 years as deliberately ignoring cyclical time in favor of linear “Progress.” > Seeing that you've mentioned Taylor's A Secular Age, maybe I should start reading it I really do recommend it. It’s a bit dense but I’ve found the concepts he uses (the immanent frame and the Nova Effect to name a couple) to be extremely useful in understanding the modern world.
- dombesz 5y agoWhenever we talk about longevity we cannot not mention David Sinclair, who is a leading researcher in longevity. His recent podcast is the most popular on the topic of longevity. https://podcasts.apple.com/ro/podcast/lifespan-with-dr-david-sinclair/id1601709306?i=1000551979439 https://podcasts.apple.com/ro/podcast/lifespan-with-dr-david...
- ericmcer 5y agoI am glad this dude is like 20 years older than me, it gives me a safe buffer to decide if I should hop on his train or not. If he still seems healthy in his 70s it will be very interesting.
- dombesz 5y agoHis dad is a better example, at his 80's he's traveling the world and hiking everywhere.
- HellsMaddy 5y agoIt’s worth noting that there has been a lot of controversy around Sinclair and his work. > Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. was a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, MA that developed therapies for type 2 diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. Conceived in 2004 by Harvard University biologist David Sinclair and serial entrepreneur Andrew Perlman, and founded that year by Sinclair and Perlman, along with Christoph Westphal, Richard Aldrich, Richard Pops, and Paul Schimmel, the company was focused on developing Sinclair's research into activators of sirtuins, work that began in the laboratory of Leonard P. Guarente where Sinclair worked as a post-doc before starting his own lab. > Sirtris went public in 2007 and was subsequently purchased and made a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline in 2008 for $720 million. GSK paid $22.50/share, when Sirtris's stock was trading at $12/share, down 45% from its highest price of the previous year. > Studies published in 2009 and early 2010 by scientists from Amgen and Pfizer cast doubt on whether SIRT1 was directly activated by resveratrol and showed that the apparent activity was actually due to a fluorescent reagent used in the experiments. > GSK/Sirtris terminated development of SRT501 in late 2010. GSK said it was terminating SRT501 due to side effects of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea it caused, and because the compound's activity wasn't specific to SIRT1, at some doses it actually inhibited SIRT1, and the compound itself wasn't patentable. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirtris_Pharmaceuticals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirtris_Pharmaceuticals > In February 2022, Sinclair raised widespread controversy in the longevity research community by rejecting to communicate in an academic debate in which his resveratrol research was criticized after months of mounting evidence against reseveratrol as a longevity intervention. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Sinclair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Sinclair
- netfortius 5y agoI hate it when this type of info does not have a date attached to the main article, right in the beginning. I could assume some years, by looking at the references and some mentioned inside (2016?!? A little after?!?), but in today's accelerated scientific progress, especially in the light of recent developments of successful applications, post-COVID appearance, it is hard to determine how authoritative this info is.
- ypeterholmes 5y agoThat would make for a good Chrome plugin- a super simple display of the published date and author and some other basic info.
- snvzz 5y agoI am surprised there's no mention of SENS[0]. I find their repairing the damage approach quite sound. [0]: https://www.sens.org/intro-to-sens-research/ https://www.sens.org/intro-to-sens-research/
- steve76 5y ago
- ypeterholmes 5y agoThis essay overlooks the most likely path to life extension, which is our ability to snapshot the brain's electrical/chemical storage. Always back up your data! The speed of progress in computing is fast outpacing medical research, and at the end of the day, the human brain is just a computer of sorts. Historically it's been orders of magnitude too complex to understand, but the gap is closing fast. Obviously this raises a million different questions, such as what to do exactly with the data, and whether it can exist outside it's biological substrates. But the concept of life as data is worth noting in any conversation about the human lifespan.
- teslaberri 5y agolongevity research is 30 years of total garbage. healthspan research is clear. 1) inflammation is a natural process that results in wear on your body 2) lower inflammation 3) doing so is different for everyone. behavior is at the core of this process. including eating, sleeping, living a life of non-excessive stress, avoiding and treating major disease, maintaining healthy mouth, and moderate exercise. so in a word---a lot , but not all , of chinese and eastern medical philosophy has been epidimilogically confirmed. all the new crap about 'caffiene' 'metformin' and other bullshit being good for you is just that, garbage. what isn't , is that sometimes some people do have deficiencies of insulin sentitvity, or vitamin D, or other things---like they used to have scurvy ( vitmain C defficiency) -----so these things have been figured out and in no way relate to logevity only healthspan. the annoying stupid thing about longevity idiots is that if a set of practices and health observation and treatments coudl guarantee living a life of perfect healthy until 100 years old----(assuming any rich person coudl afford this) ---this would yield a total revolution in human affairs for the rest of civilizations existence. longevity is the dream of fools guaranteed healthspan is the dream of realists. no one on hackernews is over 60 yet, and this is why all you idiots think with your brains, instead of your hearts. you dont' talk to 80 and 90 year olds, and if you do you dont' empathize with the path towards aging sickness and death. but you will if you don't die healthy and young, because that is what happens to you . guaranteed. and you will only realize how stupid the idea of living forever is, when you eventually get sick and just want to live healthy one more year. you will realize that feels like forever when it's you. but it's only one more year. virtually no one lives past 110. focussing on pushing that limit is stupid and longevity research has yielded very little interesting results applicable to other areas. suspended animation and metabolism research , are , however , intereseting and they are fundamental biological areas of exploration and not 'goal oriented' towards the philsopher's bone. cause that's what it is. a skull bone.
- Cassandrasikora 5y ago
- Cassandrasikora 5y ago
- Cassandrasikora 5y ago