> Journals that publish work without proper peer review and which charge scholars sometimes huge fees to submit should not be allowed to share space with legitimate journals and publishers, whether open access or not. These journals and publishers cheapen intellectual work by misleading scholars, preying particularly early career researchers trying to gain an edge. The credibility of scholars duped into publishing in these journals can be seriously damaged by doing so. It is important that as a scholarly community we help to protect each other from being taken advantage of in this way.
Seems to me that there should be a browser extension or something to bring things like this to a person's attention. Maybe a uBlock Origin list?
I wish the site explained _why_ this particular journal was predatory. Right now it seems to easy to convince the site to add $rival_journal to the junk journal list.
Pardon my skepticism but this reads like a fairy tale where the author was promised a lot of money to conduct a study that does not need sources because all their strange conclusions are on the abstract and therefore are the hypothesis (and conveniently does not require sources).
Amazing, you found the fountain of youth and you just need 1 million dollars to conduct the experiment and it will take <insert my average maximum lifespan here> years? Sign me up, I'm sure it will never run late after all my life depends on it!
> Leading demographers claim that human lifespan is fixed at a natural limit around 122 years. However, there is no fixed limit in animals.
Not only do the (unknown) experts are all certain of something that requires proof, they also write it in invisible ink! Damn!
> In animals, anti-aging interventions (dietary restrictions, rapamycin, genetic manipulations) postpone age-related diseases and thus automatically extend maximum lifespan.
So you are saying that animals anti-aging interventions are:
Sorry, this article and this "implicit" conclusion that we can live forever are what people laugh as crazy conspiracy theorists and some of them are flat earthers so they sure as fuck know what they are talking about. Proof first, speech later.
\rant
Not to sound too irrationally angry but this is as foundationless as a floating city.
I think you make some good points, but I also think it's useful that this article was published. It's important to get the idea out there that human lifespan can be extended, so more funding can be directed to that.
Which animals? Octopus have a glitch where their digestive tract shuts upon reaching sexual maturity, so they starve to death yet keep passing that gene on, just a few years into their lifespan. F for Failure (At least we dont have to compete on this planet with older smarter octopi)
I heard, years ago, that even if we ended death from aging then our life expectancy would be about 1000 yrs, that is we'd never die from old age, but instead everyone would eventually die from trauma like getting hit by a bus.
The source of this potentially was aubrey de grey talking on the matter, perhaps in a youtube video? I'm sorry i cannot provide a better source.
.. from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, for those unaware.
In the game he was born in 2005, and the game has a mandatory "retirement age" of 2600 at the lower difficulty settings and 2500 at the higher difficulties, so I'm guessing "Even five hundred" was not picked at random.
I think it would help if Nwabudike lived in a massive ice palace so that their only interaction with the universe was the occasional neutrino and OMG particle instead of the dna scrambling cosmic rays that we all deal with.
Age-related diseases and dying from old age is the tip of the iceberg. A much more important part is how the behavior/personality changes with age. We start out foolish and energetic, trying things out, making mistakes and creating new neural connections at the peak rate. Towards the 30s, we slow down, rely more on experience, most of newly learned things are recombinations and abstractions on top of the things learned earlier. Once we approach the end of the life, we become much more risk-averse, hesitant to wander off known paths, and grasping fundamentally new concepts becomes nearly impossible. Remember making fun of all those pensioners still using dial-up?
It is likely related to the limited capacity of the human brain and I doubt it could be easily worked around. Generational change and the limitless supply of the generation Z, willing to break things and learn from their mistakes, is what propelled humanity out of the caves and made civilization possible. I don't think killing it off in the name of abstract longevity would be a wise idea...
> It is likely related to the limited capacity of the human brain
I really doubt this. It is likely limited to, "why change when what I did got me here so far".
That and the belief that they'll die sooner than later anyway so why bother. Once you took away the idea that people will die and remain healthy in all ways - I think you'll see folks be much more open to adopting change at later stages in life. I see this with many people I know who are in their 60s. They're like, "Eh, it's too late. Gonna die sooner than later anyway." It's only the ones who think they're gonna live at least another 10 years (and realize how long that is) actually are open to changing.
> Leading demographers claim that human lifespan is fixed at a natural limit around 122 years.
According to 2019 book "Lifespan: Why We Age And Why We Don't Have To"[1][2] by David A. Sinclair, the science does not know anyone who lived until 120.
Scientists studied centenarians (people who lived to be 100 years old) and supercentenarians (110) from around the world to see what made them tick longer. To my knowledge, there is no *centenarian word for 120 years old person yet.
> CONFLICTS OF INTEREST The author has no conflicts of interest to declare
Right, who wants to live forever?
There are so many conversations about living longer and they lead in so many different directions:
- How does the world move on from bad influences
- At what point is it ok to choose when we can die
- Will over-population become a serious issue
- How do we support a larger aged population?
- Do we expect to also extend "working years" ... and then why?
- Does extending life cheapen our perception of it?
... etc
The amount of time we have on this planet is a huge unknown to most of us. When any of us learn about a shorter finite time (eg: medical diagnoses), it often inspires us to make drastic changes, sometimes for the better. By finding ways of blanket-extending our life spans, we necessarily change societal expectations. Hopefully this doesn't become yet another area where we have a widening wealth-gap.
I think to remember having read that the telomeres aren't really an issue. That that they get shorter is a consequence, not a reason - they are not needed because death of the cell occurs earlier. I also think to remember there actually is a mechanism (a protein) to extend them, it's just that in places where it wasn't needed it is not used and evolution therefore removed it, because it had no consequence.
I think it was form one of the books of (biochemist) Nick Lane. Myself, I only took the basic bio-chem course so I never got to such advanced specialized topics.
> 1. Do telomere biology and telomerase activity determine aging?
> The first aspect to this question is whether differences in aging rates among mammalian species are caused in whole or in part by species-specific differences in telomerase/telomere biology. A very brief consideration of this question will show that this is unlikely.
> There is little evidence that commonly observed changes in older individuals, such as anemia and impaired wound healing, result from impaired cellular proliferation, which would be the anticipated consequence of shortened telomeres
Genesis 6:3 (KJV): And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
.. just listening to the audio book. It supports the articles headline with substantial insights. I can recommend it.
Earlier discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24984800
People entering this post may enjoy Larry Niven's short SF story 'Grendel' in which, if I remember correctly, the protagonist solves a murder partially by realizing that a female antagonist was actually much older than she appeared, due to using an immortality drug, and that the need for novelty was a driver for such people.
Metformin is the pharmaceutical version of Berberine [1] You can get Berberine without a prescription. Metformin has been used in the US for about 40 years and Berberine in Asia for about 3000 years, initially used to treat gut infections.
A couple things to note if you take either of those is that they put a heavy load on the liver and also deplete vitamin B12. It may be worth keeping an eye on liver enzymes if using either. Hydration is also important. I should also add that if you start doing either to stay near a restroom for the first few weeks.
Metformin may delay the onset of some chronic metabolic diseases but it won't extend maximum lifespan and there are significant negative side effects. It's certainly not a fountain of youth. Proper diet and exercise can deliver most of the same benefits with no medical drawbacks.
The double contrast is a huge smell for writing. Consider the general form:
Proposition A
However, Proposition B
In Contrast (or any other contradictory linking phrase), Proposition C
Have you considered it? Now answer two questions:
- Do you think Proposition C is in contrast to A or B? or neither?
- Have you ever seen this general form in _good_ writing?
This is the main problem I've always had with the evidence-based scientific approach. Just because all of your data points show the same thing, doesn't make that thing true. This just goes counter to all logic.
How is 122 ANYTHING other than a random number?
Oh, your set is all human lives ever recorded? Meh... Doesn't mean a thing. Your set is too small.
To me, it is self-evident that there is no natural limit to human lifespan. If anything, the existence of a natural limit should require proof, not the lack of it. But more importantly, spending time on proving something so random seems utterly useless to me, especially compared to the alternative of embracing the (far more natural) assumption that no such limit exists and working from there.
(But yea, with all this said, the article is a bit of a dud.)
It is a random number. They could have lived to 122. But 0 have been shown to live to 150, and we're most certain 0 lived to 200 or 500.
There being a natural limit doesn't mean that "largest age found" is the limit. It just means that there's a natural (e.g. cell based) process that kills people with increasing certainty as they age, with a measured cap around 120 years or so.
Whether that can tomorrow or historically been found to be 130 or 150 in some random human that gets/got to be ultra-old doesn't mean it's not statistically more than appplicable to the 99.99% percentile of humans, or that there's no "increasing natural death certainty" with a limit towards 100% as people age.
>Just because all of your data points show the same thing, doesn't make that thing true.
It surely makes the thing statistically true (this is what happens most commonly), and points to processes and factors making it so.
>Oh, your set is all human lives ever recorded? Meh... Doesn't mean a thing. Your set is too small.
Huh? "Too small" compared to what? One that would include humans in prehistory or pre-modern-registries that might have lived more? (And we do know that they lived less too, even if they're not recorded, from the bodies/bones/etc. records we have).
Rather, the dataset is huge, and (after 20th century or so, where globally registry records are kept) close to exhaustive. Statistically if anything it's much more than required.
>To me, it is self-evident that there is no natural limit to human lifespan.
Sounds more like a wish than a self-evident truth.
>If anything, the existence of a natural limit should require proof, not the lack of it.
People die, lifetimes of billions have been shown to be capped, both in nature (pre-historical living) and civilization (modern life, diet, etc).
That points to a natural limit. And there are similar numbers/caps for all primates and mammals anyway. That's the very definition to a natural limit.
That doesn't mean an absolute limit, or a specific hard number (like "122") just a limit based on current evolution. E.g. if we modify humans genetically or whatever we might be able to overcome it. But as it is, there absolutely are natural processes towards limiting life span at play and there is a clear cap measured. That's not even contestable.
No. Some take a verse from the story of Noah to mean man is limited to 120 years but that verse actually meant the flood would happen 120 years later.
Additionally, the ages and years in Genesis are wrong. They were mistranslated from Sumerian. If you translate them back and re-translate them properly, people in the Bible all lived normal ages. For example, instead of living 930 years, Adam lived 81 years.
Methuselah appears to have died in the flood but there are additional manipulations of the ages. This is apparent if you compare the ages in the Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint texts. Methuselah's age was reduced by some scribe when they noticed his age would have meant he survived the flood, and they couldn't have that.
Has anyone translated some long living people's 'years' into Quality-adjusted life years?
It feels like that's the more important metric and there must be a bunch of low hanging fruit like "get vaccinated" that score highly without needing sci-fi breakthroughs. Or is it all so boringly predictable that no one bothers?
[+] [-] gzer0|4 years ago|reply
https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/
Please stop spreading these scam journals.
[+] [-] KronisLV|4 years ago|reply
> Journals that publish work without proper peer review and which charge scholars sometimes huge fees to submit should not be allowed to share space with legitimate journals and publishers, whether open access or not. These journals and publishers cheapen intellectual work by misleading scholars, preying particularly early career researchers trying to gain an edge. The credibility of scholars duped into publishing in these journals can be seriously damaged by doing so. It is important that as a scholarly community we help to protect each other from being taken advantage of in this way.
Seems to me that there should be a browser extension or something to bring things like this to a person's attention. Maybe a uBlock Origin list?
[+] [-] mFixman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwwwewwww|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravyness|4 years ago|reply
Amazing, you found the fountain of youth and you just need 1 million dollars to conduct the experiment and it will take <insert my average maximum lifespan here> years? Sign me up, I'm sure it will never run late after all my life depends on it!
> Leading demographers claim that human lifespan is fixed at a natural limit around 122 years. However, there is no fixed limit in animals.
Not only do the (unknown) experts are all certain of something that requires proof, they also write it in invisible ink! Damn!
> In animals, anti-aging interventions (dietary restrictions, rapamycin, genetic manipulations) postpone age-related diseases and thus automatically extend maximum lifespan.
So you are saying that animals anti-aging interventions are:
- Dietary restrictions - Rapamycin* - Genetic manipulations
> In humans, anti-aging interventions have not been yet implemented
What an innovative idea! Have you ever heard of this thing called Rapamycin*? it is already approved for use in human patients since 2010: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.2009001...
Sorry, this article and this "implicit" conclusion that we can live forever are what people laugh as crazy conspiracy theorists and some of them are flat earthers so they sure as fuck know what they are talking about. Proof first, speech later.
\rant
Not to sound too irrationally angry but this is as foundationless as a floating city.
[+] [-] epicureanideal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|4 years ago|reply
Laputa was a wonder of the world!
[+] [-] trylfthsk|4 years ago|reply
Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
--CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview "
[+] [-] maerF0x0|4 years ago|reply
The source of this potentially was aubrey de grey talking on the matter, perhaps in a youtube video? I'm sorry i cannot provide a better source.
[+] [-] henry_bone|4 years ago|reply
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
[+] [-] vidarh|4 years ago|reply
In the game he was born in 2005, and the game has a mandatory "retirement age" of 2600 at the lower difficulty settings and 2500 at the higher difficulties, so I'm guessing "Even five hundred" was not picked at random.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john_moscow|4 years ago|reply
It is likely related to the limited capacity of the human brain and I doubt it could be easily worked around. Generational change and the limitless supply of the generation Z, willing to break things and learn from their mistakes, is what propelled humanity out of the caves and made civilization possible. I don't think killing it off in the name of abstract longevity would be a wise idea...
[+] [-] bradlys|4 years ago|reply
I really doubt this. It is likely limited to, "why change when what I did got me here so far".
That and the belief that they'll die sooner than later anyway so why bother. Once you took away the idea that people will die and remain healthy in all ways - I think you'll see folks be much more open to adopting change at later stages in life. I see this with many people I know who are in their 60s. They're like, "Eh, it's too late. Gonna die sooner than later anyway." It's only the ones who think they're gonna live at least another 10 years (and realize how long that is) actually are open to changing.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
If people dont have to “act older” which includes relying on experiencs and having those experiences to begin with, they wont at the same distribution
We already see this in play generationally and cities where there are options
[+] [-] hericium|4 years ago|reply
According to 2019 book "Lifespan: Why We Age And Why We Don't Have To"[1][2] by David A. Sinclair, the science does not know anyone who lived until 120.
Scientists studied centenarians (people who lived to be 100 years old) and supercentenarians (110) from around the world to see what made them tick longer. To my knowledge, there is no *centenarian word for 120 years old person yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43723901-lifespan
[+] [-] imoverclocked|4 years ago|reply
Right, who wants to live forever?
There are so many conversations about living longer and they lead in so many different directions:
- How does the world move on from bad influences
- At what point is it ok to choose when we can die
- Will over-population become a serious issue
- How do we support a larger aged population?
- Do we expect to also extend "working years" ... and then why?
- Does extending life cheapen our perception of it?
... etc
The amount of time we have on this planet is a huge unknown to most of us. When any of us learn about a shorter finite time (eg: medical diagnoses), it often inspires us to make drastic changes, sometimes for the better. By finding ways of blanket-extending our life spans, we necessarily change societal expectations. Hopefully this doesn't become yet another area where we have a widening wealth-gap.
[+] [-] usrbinbash|4 years ago|reply
I would like to have 3 questions answered:
1. How can the telomere shortening be reversed in an adult without inducing abberant cell growth?
2. How do we stop stem cell populations from reaching senescence?
3. How do we deal with the fact that continued mitosis leads to an accumulation of copy-errors in aforementioned cell populations?
[+] [-] nosianu|4 years ago|reply
I need an expert to confirm or deny:
I think to remember having read that the telomeres aren't really an issue. That that they get shorter is a consequence, not a reason - they are not needed because death of the cell occurs earlier. I also think to remember there actually is a mechanism (a protein) to extend them, it's just that in places where it wasn't needed it is not used and evolution therefore removed it, because it had no consequence.
I think it was form one of the books of (biochemist) Nick Lane. Myself, I only took the basic bio-chem course so I never got to such advanced specialized topics.
EDIT: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1933587/
> 1. Do telomere biology and telomerase activity determine aging?
> The first aspect to this question is whether differences in aging rates among mammalian species are caused in whole or in part by species-specific differences in telomerase/telomere biology. A very brief consideration of this question will show that this is unlikely.
> There is little evidence that commonly observed changes in older individuals, such as anemia and impaired wound healing, result from impaired cellular proliferation, which would be the anticipated consequence of shortened telomeres
(ofc there is a lot more details to consider)
[+] [-] qaq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben_w|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projektfu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henry_bone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchook|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masterbit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlkr|4 years ago|reply
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/23/metformin-for-cancer-prevent...
[+] [-] LinuxBender|4 years ago|reply
A couple things to note if you take either of those is that they put a heavy load on the liver and also deplete vitamin B12. It may be worth keeping an eye on liver enzymes if using either. Hydration is also important. I should also add that if you start doing either to stay near a restroom for the first few weeks.
[1] - https://examine.com/supplements/berberine/
[+] [-] nradov|4 years ago|reply
https://peterattiamd.com/joanmannick-nirbarzilai/
[+] [-] trentgreene|4 years ago|reply
Proposition A
However, Proposition B
In Contrast (or any other contradictory linking phrase), Proposition C
Have you considered it? Now answer two questions: - Do you think Proposition C is in contrast to A or B? or neither? - Have you ever seen this general form in _good_ writing?
[+] [-] jd115|4 years ago|reply
How is 122 ANYTHING other than a random number?
Oh, your set is all human lives ever recorded? Meh... Doesn't mean a thing. Your set is too small.
To me, it is self-evident that there is no natural limit to human lifespan. If anything, the existence of a natural limit should require proof, not the lack of it. But more importantly, spending time on proving something so random seems utterly useless to me, especially compared to the alternative of embracing the (far more natural) assumption that no such limit exists and working from there.
(But yea, with all this said, the article is a bit of a dud.)
[+] [-] ReaLNero|4 years ago|reply
There is no hard limit, but clearly the age distribution drops suddenly (for developed countries) at 70.
There are a bunch of single points of failure in our body -- the heart, the liver, the spine, the major blood vessels, the trachea, etc.
There's only so many 9's that those components are built to last for, and they ALL have to work!
FYI: I agree that "Leading demographers ... 122 years" is an incorrect statement.
[+] [-] coldtea|4 years ago|reply
It is a random number. They could have lived to 122. But 0 have been shown to live to 150, and we're most certain 0 lived to 200 or 500.
There being a natural limit doesn't mean that "largest age found" is the limit. It just means that there's a natural (e.g. cell based) process that kills people with increasing certainty as they age, with a measured cap around 120 years or so.
Whether that can tomorrow or historically been found to be 130 or 150 in some random human that gets/got to be ultra-old doesn't mean it's not statistically more than appplicable to the 99.99% percentile of humans, or that there's no "increasing natural death certainty" with a limit towards 100% as people age.
>Just because all of your data points show the same thing, doesn't make that thing true.
It surely makes the thing statistically true (this is what happens most commonly), and points to processes and factors making it so.
>Oh, your set is all human lives ever recorded? Meh... Doesn't mean a thing. Your set is too small.
Huh? "Too small" compared to what? One that would include humans in prehistory or pre-modern-registries that might have lived more? (And we do know that they lived less too, even if they're not recorded, from the bodies/bones/etc. records we have).
Rather, the dataset is huge, and (after 20th century or so, where globally registry records are kept) close to exhaustive. Statistically if anything it's much more than required.
>To me, it is self-evident that there is no natural limit to human lifespan.
Sounds more like a wish than a self-evident truth.
>If anything, the existence of a natural limit should require proof, not the lack of it.
People die, lifetimes of billions have been shown to be capped, both in nature (pre-historical living) and civilization (modern life, diet, etc).
That points to a natural limit. And there are similar numbers/caps for all primates and mammals anyway. That's the very definition to a natural limit.
That doesn't mean an absolute limit, or a specific hard number (like "122") just a limit based on current evolution. E.g. if we modify humans genetically or whatever we might be able to overcome it. But as it is, there absolutely are natural processes towards limiting life span at play and there is a clear cap measured. That's not even contestable.
[+] [-] maxlamb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vixen99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flashfaffe2|4 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism#:~:text=Darwinism%....
[+] [-] czzr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbphprubyjsgo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmdulaney|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|4 years ago|reply
Additionally, the ages and years in Genesis are wrong. They were mistranslated from Sumerian. If you translate them back and re-translate them properly, people in the Bible all lived normal ages. For example, instead of living 930 years, Adam lived 81 years.
Methuselah appears to have died in the flood but there are additional manipulations of the ages. This is apparent if you compare the ages in the Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint texts. Methuselah's age was reduced by some scribe when they noticed his age would have meant he survived the flood, and they couldn't have that.
[+] [-] RichardHeart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
It feels like that's the more important metric and there must be a bunch of low hanging fruit like "get vaccinated" that score highly without needing sci-fi breakthroughs. Or is it all so boringly predictable that no one bothers?