7 ms·

Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age. The addition of this compound led to

by pvnick 13y ago

Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age. The addition of this compound led to the radical reversal in the ageing of the mice. While this is pretty cool, it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), meaning more energy "currency" for the body's machinery to work with [1] [2] (someone please comment if my understanding is incomplete). Used as a general lifestyle drug †, grandma isn't suddenly going to look like a sorority girl, but she may feel like one - a scary thought indeed! Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions; although, that doesn't quite seem to be the case in this specific instance since this compound will probably just improve the quality of the last couple decades of a person's life rather than drastically extend it. What's the difference between curing disease/prolonging natural life vs unnatural "anti-aging" technologies? At what point do we start grappling with the issues of immortality? Personally, I believe that the mentally-deteriorating effects of everyday life, including what one may call "sin," will be too much for the modern human to retain his/her sanity after a certain point. I for one would rather face death. [1] http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?C00003 http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?C00003 [2] http://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00190+C00003 http://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00190+C00003 † I say "lifestyle drug" here to denote elective treatment, although the effects of natural aging and death dying probably do not fit in the technical definition, which is to treat "non-life threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, impotence, wrinkles, erectile dysfunction, or acne"

_random_ 13y ago
Ageing is a genetic disease. It has to be cured. We evolved to adapt to specific environment. Now that we are changing this environment we must change ourselves as well. Everyone should be given an option to die but it should be just one of a few options.
- dvanduzer 13y ago
  Indeed! Options like Death by My Little Pony: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-caelum-est-conterrens http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jotm 13y ago
  Not as long as religious fanatics, anti gay (shame on you, Uganda), anti abortion and other zealots, dumbasses who have 10 kids and nothing to feed them with and other kinds of people still exist. Then again, I'm all for it if we can colonize space sooner...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rtfeldman 13y ago
Anti-aging has nothing more to do with immortality than does, say, curing a particular disease. Aging is only one of many causes of death; if we solve that one, there's still heart disease, stroke, getting hit by a bus...
- xuhu 13y ago
  There were 2.5M deaths in US in 2010: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm If you take other leading causes out (accidents 120k, diabetes 70k, influenza 50k, suicide 40k), it still leaves about 2M deaths related to ageing: heart, cancer, chronic respiratory, stroke, alzheimers.
  - YokoZar 13y ago
    And this particular anti-aging therapy, if it works, will only treat a subset of those age-related diseases. There are many different mechanisms of aging, and each therapy we develop will only incrementally improve things. In that light, philosophical discussions about anti-aging therapies are somewhat doomed to only have a specific context such as "what's wrong with curing alzheimer's?"
  - VLM 13y ago
    Cancer is a big treatment problem. Well here I am a tired old 95 year old cancer cell, too tired and sore to start reproducing madly and my hosts blood chemistry is too F'ed up anyway for me to grow, so I'll just sit here in my lung cell sized recliner and watch Fox News with my host... Ah I see now after some treatment I feel I'm in the body of a healthy 25 year old and I'm absolutely bursting with energy... lets get fissioning boys, there's a new sheriff in town and we're takin' this here place over.
    - rquantz 13y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this were an accurate metaphor, wouldn't cancer incidence decrease with age, rather than increase?
rictic 13y ago
This post fills me with questions. Foremost: What makes anti-aging technology unnatural compared to other medical treatments? To take one example, the smallpox vaccine was initially considered unnatural, and an affront to God[1]. [1] http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html
- wpietri 13y ago
  I think it's fair to call most medical treatments unnatural. That doesn't make them bad, but it should make us thoughtful and careful. Natural systems are often, thanks to evolution and adaptation, complicated and delicately balanced. I think reflexive appeals to tradition and novelty are both kind of dumb. But if people are going to err, I'd rather they erred on the side of tradition: at least that shit has been demonstrated to work in one fashion or another. I always try to keep in mind examples like Eben Byers [1], the THERAC 25 [2], and rabbits in Australia [3]. All sorts of stupid ideas look appealing at first. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers [2] http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Effects_on_Australia.27s_ecology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Effects_on...
  - 31reasons 13y ago
    With your attitude I don't think we would ever invent or discover any medicine or treatment. Agreed, natural systems are complicated and delicately balanced, but we have Physics, Math, Chemistry and Computer Science to help us understand those delicately balanced and complicated systems. Please give some credit to Human Intelligence that itself is a product of millions of years of evolution. I often hear people saying "X can't be done because evolution perfected it". I call it bullshit. Evolutionary systems are not perfect and can be improved with right tools and we do have the tools.
    - wpietri 13y ago
      You seem to be arguing with a bunch of things I didn't say, while ignoring the things I did. I'm a giant fan of technology, and there are many amazing advances in medical tech. But I'm not a fan of thoughtless adoption of something just because it a) sounds good and b) is shiny and new.
jseliger 13y ago
Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions Charles C. Mann (of 1491 and 1493 fame) wrote extensively about this in The Atlantic Magazine (which is distinct from their website) in 2005: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/05/the-coming-death-shortage/304105/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/05/the-comi... .
vilhelm_s 13y ago
“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden
- gaius 13y ago
  It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it. The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - baudehlo 13y ago
    The flip side to that argument is that right now life is short, and so I try and fit as many wonderful experiences into it as I can. If life were long I could put everything off until tomorrow. And that doesn't sound good to me.
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
      - tesseractive 13y ago
VLM 13y ago
One "philosophical question" which we already know the answer to, is at least in the short term and as a rare tool its not going to change much of anything. For example according to key metrics blah blah my grandmother's bypass surgery restored her circulation to that of a young woman blah blah but it hardly turned her into a sorority girl or whatever sociological blather. Ditto my grandfathers gallbladder removal. To some extent an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about is just going to be an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about. You'll get to hear more Fox News talking points instead of medical symptoms.
socillion 13y ago
> it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) This study goes way over my head, but if the goal is to boost ATP isn't creatine monohydrate supplementation a cheap and effective way to do so currently?
XorNot 13y ago
Inhibiting or preventing dementia isn't a "lifestyle drug". It would solve a very serious issue we have with aging populations, or indeed any population, where we have a huge number of people who are very much alive but incapable of managing basic life functions.
yxhuvud 13y ago
Why do you believe that improving the quality of the decades that are now the last won't prolong peoples lives? Personally, I'd expect the result to be pretty drastic.
onetwofiveten 13y ago
You may have a strong attachment to mortality, but I personally don't. I strongly believe I would be able to cope with immortality, and I think it would very much be worth it for a chance to see more of the universe and the future of humanity. Please keep that in mind when you consider the morality of these issues. Although you personally would rather face death, I personally would not - and I don't think anyone else has the right to determine whether someone else should die. On a side note, I think it's quite sad that you think every day life is mentally deteriorating, especially because of "sin". Personally I'm pretty much at peace, and doing my best to live a good life and change to be a better person.

by pvnick 13y ago

_random_ 13y ago

Ageing is a genetic disease. It has to be cured. We evolved to adapt to specific environment. Now that we are changing this environment we must change ourselves as well. Everyone should be given an option to die but it should be just one of a few options.

dvanduzer 13y ago
Indeed! Options like Death by My Little Pony: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-caelum-est-conterrens http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jotm 13y ago
Not as long as religious fanatics, anti gay (shame on you, Uganda), anti abortion and other zealots, dumbasses who have 10 kids and nothing to feed them with and other kinds of people still exist. Then again, I'm all for it if we can colonize space sooner...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rtfeldman 13y ago

Anti-aging has nothing more to do with immortality than does, say, curing a particular disease. Aging is only one of many causes of death; if we solve that one, there's still heart disease, stroke, getting hit by a bus...

xuhu 13y ago
There were 2.5M deaths in US in 2010: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm If you take other leading causes out (accidents 120k, diabetes 70k, influenza 50k, suicide 40k), it still leaves about 2M deaths related to ageing: heart, cancer, chronic respiratory, stroke, alzheimers.
- YokoZar 13y ago
  And this particular anti-aging therapy, if it works, will only treat a subset of those age-related diseases. There are many different mechanisms of aging, and each therapy we develop will only incrementally improve things. In that light, philosophical discussions about anti-aging therapies are somewhat doomed to only have a specific context such as "what's wrong with curing alzheimer's?"
- VLM 13y ago
  Cancer is a big treatment problem. Well here I am a tired old 95 year old cancer cell, too tired and sore to start reproducing madly and my hosts blood chemistry is too F'ed up anyway for me to grow, so I'll just sit here in my lung cell sized recliner and watch Fox News with my host... Ah I see now after some treatment I feel I'm in the body of a healthy 25 year old and I'm absolutely bursting with energy... lets get fissioning boys, there's a new sheriff in town and we're takin' this here place over.
  - rquantz 13y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this were an accurate metaphor, wouldn't cancer incidence decrease with age, rather than increase?

rictic 13y ago

This post fills me with questions. Foremost: What makes anti-aging technology unnatural compared to other medical treatments? To take one example, the smallpox vaccine was initially considered unnatural, and an affront to God[1]. [1] http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html

wpietri 13y ago
I think it's fair to call most medical treatments unnatural. That doesn't make them bad, but it should make us thoughtful and careful. Natural systems are often, thanks to evolution and adaptation, complicated and delicately balanced. I think reflexive appeals to tradition and novelty are both kind of dumb. But if people are going to err, I'd rather they erred on the side of tradition: at least that shit has been demonstrated to work in one fashion or another. I always try to keep in mind examples like Eben Byers [1], the THERAC 25 [2], and rabbits in Australia [3]. All sorts of stupid ideas look appealing at first. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers [2] http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Effects_on_Australia.27s_ecology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia#Effects_on...
- 31reasons 13y ago
  With your attitude I don't think we would ever invent or discover any medicine or treatment. Agreed, natural systems are complicated and delicately balanced, but we have Physics, Math, Chemistry and Computer Science to help us understand those delicately balanced and complicated systems. Please give some credit to Human Intelligence that itself is a product of millions of years of evolution. I often hear people saying "X can't be done because evolution perfected it". I call it bullshit. Evolutionary systems are not perfect and can be improved with right tools and we do have the tools.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    You seem to be arguing with a bunch of things I didn't say, while ignoring the things I did. I'm a giant fan of technology, and there are many amazing advances in medical tech. But I'm not a fan of thoughtless adoption of something just because it a) sounds good and b) is shiny and new.

jseliger 13y ago

Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions Charles C. Mann (of 1491 and 1493 fame) wrote extensively about this in The Atlantic Magazine (which is distinct from their website) in 2005: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/05/the-coming-death-shortage/304105/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/05/the-comi... .

vilhelm_s 13y ago

“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden

gaius 13y ago
It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it. The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- baudehlo 13y ago
  The flip side to that argument is that right now life is short, and so I try and fit as many wonderful experiences into it as I can. If life were long I could put everything off until tomorrow. And that doesn't sound good to me.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
    - tesseractive 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

One "philosophical question" which we already know the answer to, is at least in the short term and as a rare tool its not going to change much of anything. For example according to key metrics blah blah my grandmother's bypass surgery restored her circulation to that of a young woman blah blah but it hardly turned her into a sorority girl or whatever sociological blather. Ditto my grandfathers gallbladder removal. To some extent an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about is just going to be an old dude with no medical conditions to complain about. You'll get to hear more Fox News talking points instead of medical symptoms.

socillion 13y ago

> it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) This study goes way over my head, but if the goal is to boost ATP isn't creatine monohydrate supplementation a cheap and effective way to do so currently?

XorNot 13y ago

Inhibiting or preventing dementia isn't a "lifestyle drug". It would solve a very serious issue we have with aging populations, or indeed any population, where we have a huge number of people who are very much alive but incapable of managing basic life functions.

yxhuvud 13y ago

Why do you believe that improving the quality of the decades that are now the last won't prolong peoples lives? Personally, I'd expect the result to be pretty drastic.

onetwofiveten 13y ago

You may have a strong attachment to mortality, but I personally don't. I strongly believe I would be able to cope with immortality, and I think it would very much be worth it for a chance to see more of the universe and the future of humanity. Please keep that in mind when you consider the morality of these issues. Although you personally would rather face death, I personally would not - and I don't think anyone else has the right to determine whether someone else should die. On a side note, I think it's quite sad that you think every day life is mentally deteriorating, especially because of "sin". Personally I'm pretty much at peace, and doing my best to live a good life and change to be a better person.