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Many people believe that medical control over aging will be stunningly expensive, and thus indefinite extension of healthy life will only be available to a weal

Many people believe that medical control over aging will be stunningly expensive, and thus indefinite extension of healthy life will only be available to a wealthy elite. This is far from the case. If you look at the SENS approach to repair therapies [1], treatments when realized will be mass-produced infusions of cells, proteins, and drugs. Everyone will get the same treatments because everyone ages due to the same underlying cellular and molecular damage. You'll need one round of treatments every ten to twenty years, and they will be given by a bored clinical assistant. No great attention will be needed by highly trained and expensive medical staff, as all of the complexity will be baked into the manufacturing process. Today's closest analogs are the comparatively new mass-produced biologics used to treat autoimmune conditions [2], and even in the wildly dysfunctional US medical system these cost less than ten thousand dollars for a treatment. Rejuvenation won't cost millions, or even hundreds of thousands. It will likely cost less than many people spend on overpriced coffee over the course of two decades of life, and should fall far below that level. When the entire population is the marketplace for competing developers, costs will eventually plummet to those seen for decades-old generic drugs and similar items produced in factory settings: just a handful of dollars per dose. The poorest half of the world will gain access at that point, just as today they have access to drugs that were far beyond their reach when initially developed. Nonetheless, many people believe that longevity enhancing therapies will only be available for the wealthy, and that this will be an important dynamic in the future. Inequality is something of a cultural fixation at the moment, and it is manufactured as a fantasy where it doesn't exist in reality. This is just another facet of the truth that most people don't really understand economics, either in the sense of predicting likely future changes, or in the sense of what is actually taking place in the world today. [1]: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research [2]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616818/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616818/

themgt 12y ago
Are you Aubrey de Grey?
neilk 12y ago
A complex system with millions of nodes and trillions of potential interactions with external and internal factors, working perfectly with no oversight and no unexpected outages. Do you live in this century? P.S. I'm not saying that this is impossible, or even unlikely, but it's probably going to be something that requires constant and possibly very expensive maintenance.
- reasonattlm 12y ago
  Your body performs that maintenance when you are young. The damage repair approach to treating aging suggests that if we remove the fundamental differences between old and young tissue, then the body will continue to maintain itself as it does when it is young. There are not all that many types of fundamental damage. So this doesn't require maintaining the whole system; it requires removing the spanners in the works. These spanners are well known and well characterized. For example, cross-links in the extracellular matrix that degrade blood vessel elasticity, that causes hypertension, cardiac remodeling, and microstrokes, and so on. Break down the cross-links with designed drugs (and deal a few other items that also contribute to stiffening) before the point of serious remodeling and all of that goes away, because it is the stiffening that drives this dsyfunction. There are a number of other items that have similar roles, but not so many that it is unfeasible to think of producing effective therapies on a time scale of the next two decades. Think of damage of this sort as rust in a fantastically complex metal sculpture. You don't have to understand the sculpture, just how to rust-proof it, and how to remove the existing rust. Rust is simple, and the complexity of the sculpture doesn't much matter when it comes to how you approach rust-proofing and removal.
  - p1esk 12y ago
    Cancer is simpler than aging. We understand cancer better than aging. Yet after many billions of dollars and billions of hours of research, we still cannot "cure" cancer. A huge number of people die from it every year.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>Nonetheless, many people believe that longevity enhancing therapies will only be available for the wealthy, and that this will be an important dynamic in the future. Inequality is something of a cultural fixation at the moment, and it is manufactured as a fantasy where it doesn't exist in reality. This is just another facet of the truth that most people don't really understand economics, either in the sense of predicting likely future changes, or in the sense of what is actually taking place in the world today. Social elites sometimes value their inequality and eliteism more than they value economic productivity. (Actually, this is a pretty fair explanation of the logic behind the whole neoliberal era, in which inequality has been radically widened while productivity growth has stagnated.)

themgt 12y ago

Are you Aubrey de Grey?

neilk 12y ago

A complex system with millions of nodes and trillions of potential interactions with external and internal factors, working perfectly with no oversight and no unexpected outages. Do you live in this century? P.S. I'm not saying that this is impossible, or even unlikely, but it's probably going to be something that requires constant and possibly very expensive maintenance.

reasonattlm 12y ago
Your body performs that maintenance when you are young. The damage repair approach to treating aging suggests that if we remove the fundamental differences between old and young tissue, then the body will continue to maintain itself as it does when it is young. There are not all that many types of fundamental damage. So this doesn't require maintaining the whole system; it requires removing the spanners in the works. These spanners are well known and well characterized. For example, cross-links in the extracellular matrix that degrade blood vessel elasticity, that causes hypertension, cardiac remodeling, and microstrokes, and so on. Break down the cross-links with designed drugs (and deal a few other items that also contribute to stiffening) before the point of serious remodeling and all of that goes away, because it is the stiffening that drives this dsyfunction. There are a number of other items that have similar roles, but not so many that it is unfeasible to think of producing effective therapies on a time scale of the next two decades. Think of damage of this sort as rust in a fantastically complex metal sculpture. You don't have to understand the sculpture, just how to rust-proof it, and how to remove the existing rust. Rust is simple, and the complexity of the sculpture doesn't much matter when it comes to how you approach rust-proofing and removal.
- p1esk 12y ago
  Cancer is simpler than aging. We understand cancer better than aging. Yet after many billions of dollars and billions of hours of research, we still cannot "cure" cancer. A huge number of people die from it every year.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

>Nonetheless, many people believe that longevity enhancing therapies will only be available for the wealthy, and that this will be an important dynamic in the future. Inequality is something of a cultural fixation at the moment, and it is manufactured as a fantasy where it doesn't exist in reality. This is just another facet of the truth that most people don't really understand economics, either in the sense of predicting likely future changes, or in the sense of what is actually taking place in the world today. Social elites sometimes value their inequality and eliteism more than they value economic productivity. (Actually, this is a pretty fair explanation of the logic behind the whole neoliberal era, in which inequality has been radically widened while productivity growth has stagnated.)