5 ms·

Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling

Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer. You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision. Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though. If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
  - imtringued 1y ago
    Bill Gates has enough money for effective longevity research. Longevity research isn't even particularly expensive. The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      Not necessarily. We already have drugs that can hit "genetic disease" targets in adults, and we can modify adult genomes to a minor degree. Sure, it would be nigh impossible to do something like cram "genetic resistance to cancer" into a grown adult with current day tech, but there are other surfaces to attack in longevity.
  - sigmoid10 1y ago
    Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(23)00182-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      That's consistent with what I said, yes. Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich. It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're lucky that at least some neglected fields get billionaire attention like this. But we can't rely on that happening.
      - sigmoid10 1y ago
        The point is if anti-aging didn't have this edgy image in billionaire circles, there would be more than enough money to go around. If everyone agrees that we should get on this like we do certain other diseases, we could certainly tap into a lot of resources.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        I don't think there would be "enough money" just from that, but I agree that it would sure help. It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably. It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.
imtringued 1y ago
This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime. The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely. Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains. Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
sdeframond 1y ago
I wonder if I would really like to pour billions of taxpayer money into aging when we are not even able to live a basic healthy lifestyle. Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we? It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.
- HeadsUpHigh 1y ago
  >Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we? Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
  - sdeframond 1y ago
    I would say it gives you +25 years of healthy lifespan. Compare it to being obese, wich can happen very young and is in part determined by how you are fed when you are a baby/child.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    > Those will give you at best another marginal decade. Those will give you an entire life. Living while being healthy is an entirely different life than surviving while being unhealthy.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Doesn't scale. If you could put "sleeping well, eating well and exercising" into a $0.25 once a week pill and make that available to everyone, it would work. As is, it doesn't. We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
  - sdeframond 1y ago
    Why not? What is not scalable about it, specifically ? I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business. But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.
Kinrany 1y ago
Aging itself is not a disease, it's just stuff falling into disrepair over time. Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Cancer is "stuff falling into disrepair over time" too. Get enough faulty cells with DNA damage and one of them is going to make itself a problem. The only way to avoid cancer is to have something else kill you before you get it. That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results. Aging should get the same treatment.
  - vladms 1y ago
    Solving any of the existing diseases, will not result in significant upheaval of society. I am not against trying to "solve aging", but I don't think we should think of it as just a disease, and there should be more plans on how to deal with the sudden "infinite" number of humans. While I may want to live forever, I would definitely not enjoy that in all circumstances.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      Do you think that there's a single "aging" master switch that could be flipped to "off", resulting in zero aging and immortality for everyone forever? That's beyond optimistic. What's more likely to happen is, we'll uncover some major pathways for aging and find a way to target them to slow aging down somewhat, at first. People who get anti-aging treatments would live for longer, and would be healthier while they do. The adoption would be gradual, and it'll take a while for them to come down in price and proliferate worldwide - and it would still be up to people to decide whether they want them, although most doctors would recommend they do. The first generations of anti-aging treatments would allow people to live to the age of 100 fairly reliably, and remain healthier and more active while they do. Future generations would improve on that. There will be no "sudden infinite number of humans" to deal with. Even if we started out tomorrow (for example, if it was confirmed that Ozempic has broad anti-aging effects), it'll take decades for this effect to become noticeable. Humanity can adapt to something like that easily.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago

That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.

ACCount37 1y ago
Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer. You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision. Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though. If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
- imtringued 1y ago
  Bill Gates has enough money for effective longevity research. Longevity research isn't even particularly expensive. The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    Not necessarily. We already have drugs that can hit "genetic disease" targets in adults, and we can modify adult genomes to a minor degree. Sure, it would be nigh impossible to do something like cram "genetic resistance to cancer" into a grown adult with current day tech, but there are other surfaces to attack in longevity.
- sigmoid10 1y ago
  Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(23)00182-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    That's consistent with what I said, yes. Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich. It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're lucky that at least some neglected fields get billionaire attention like this. But we can't rely on that happening.
    - sigmoid10 1y ago
      The point is if anti-aging didn't have this edgy image in billionaire circles, there would be more than enough money to go around. If everyone agrees that we should get on this like we do certain other diseases, we could certainly tap into a lot of resources.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        I don't think there would be "enough money" just from that, but I agree that it would sure help. It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably. It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.

imtringued 1y ago

This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime. The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely. Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.

ACCount37 1y ago
I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains. Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.

sdeframond 1y ago

I wonder if I would really like to pour billions of taxpayer money into aging when we are not even able to live a basic healthy lifestyle. Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we? It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.

HeadsUpHigh 1y ago
>Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we? Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
- sdeframond 1y ago
  I would say it gives you +25 years of healthy lifespan. Compare it to being obese, wich can happen very young and is in part determined by how you are fed when you are a baby/child.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  > Those will give you at best another marginal decade. Those will give you an entire life. Living while being healthy is an entirely different life than surviving while being unhealthy.
ACCount37 1y ago
Doesn't scale. If you could put "sleeping well, eating well and exercising" into a $0.25 once a week pill and make that available to everyone, it would work. As is, it doesn't. We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
- sdeframond 1y ago
  Why not? What is not scalable about it, specifically ? I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business. But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.

Kinrany 1y ago

Aging itself is not a disease, it's just stuff falling into disrepair over time. Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.

ACCount37 1y ago
Cancer is "stuff falling into disrepair over time" too. Get enough faulty cells with DNA damage and one of them is going to make itself a problem. The only way to avoid cancer is to have something else kill you before you get it. That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results. Aging should get the same treatment.
- vladms 1y ago
  Solving any of the existing diseases, will not result in significant upheaval of society. I am not against trying to "solve aging", but I don't think we should think of it as just a disease, and there should be more plans on how to deal with the sudden "infinite" number of humans. While I may want to live forever, I would definitely not enjoy that in all circumstances.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    Do you think that there's a single "aging" master switch that could be flipped to "off", resulting in zero aging and immortality for everyone forever? That's beyond optimistic. What's more likely to happen is, we'll uncover some major pathways for aging and find a way to target them to slow aging down somewhat, at first. People who get anti-aging treatments would live for longer, and would be healthier while they do. The adoption would be gradual, and it'll take a while for them to come down in price and proliferate worldwide - and it would still be up to people to decide whether they want them, although most doctors would recommend they do. The first generations of anti-aging treatments would allow people to live to the age of 100 fairly reliably, and remain healthier and more active while they do. Future generations would improve on that. There will be no "sudden infinite number of humans" to deal with. Even if we started out tomorrow (for example, if it was confirmed that Ozempic has broad anti-aging effects), it'll take decades for this effect to become noticeable. Humanity can adapt to something like that easily.