Short answer is it’s not all that big a deal in biomedical terms. It’s a great discovery in terms of understanding mitochondria, and it provides a new way to rejuvenate mito function, but it doesn’t tell us that rejuvenating mito function in isolation in an otherwise still-old animal is a good idea -- and there have for many years been other ways to rejuvenate mito function which have not led to longer lifespan in rodents, notably acetyl-L-carnitine combined with alpha-lipoic acid (which has been marketed as Juvenon).
Aubrey De Grey is younger than I am, but he looks old and haggard, much older than I look (and much older than my younger sister who is almost exactly his age looks). I don't know why people take anti-aging advice from Aubrey De Grey. His advice has meager uptake or support in reliable sources on human medicine.
AFTER EDIT: I see the first reaction to this comment was a silent downvote, which evokes my desire to learn. Now that we've established that you disagree with me, would it be all right for me to ask what facts I should consider to change my opinion that Aubrey De Grey's anti-aging advice is not correct? What positive rationale can you provide for taking his writings on his favorite topic seriously? What evidence can you provide that he is on to something that the National Institute of Aging[1] isn't researching adequately already without him?
ONE MORE EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think the most helpful to me was
As far as I know, Aubrey has not claimed to have invented any working anti-aging treatments so far
because I've been curious for a long time why Aubrey De Grey receives so much mention here on Hacker News whenever research on aging comes up, but so little mention in any of the extensive medical literature I read. So he is one guy with some interesting ideas (interesting to people here, at least) but perhaps just one guy among thousands working on anti-aging ideas. I wish anyone well who is devoting time and attention to reducing the harm of aging processes in human beings, but I try to cast my net searching for information more in the waters of medical reports than among people with a famous online presence as such. Thanks for the follow-up, and for letting me know what you really think about the unedited version of my comment, which still appears at the top here.
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.
† 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"
“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
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].
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> "with scientists set to look at how the theory of age reversal can be used to treat diseases such as cancer, dementia and diabetes."
Alzheimer's medications can generally improve cognition. Age-reversal medications might work even better if used at an early age.
I always see articles, media, and papers focusing on how something new can be used to treat some existing disease. But what I'm always thinking is "can I use this if I don't have a disease?"
It's a strange disconnect. I know everyone is thinking what I'm thinking, but you never see this in the articles. Is it some kind of taboo?
I don't think it's a taboo subject, it's just not really good journalistic form to employ relatively baseless speculation for more than a few sentences.
Basically, as a matter of principal they report on what the researchers are doing, and the researchers are (quite reasonably) going to try to beat Alzheimer's in patients who actually have it before they try to apply it to everyone. No sense in worrying about, Can this be globally administered, like a vaccine? before they even know for sure how to beat it.
The same is true of artificial intelligence. For example, articles always mention that brain simulation would help us understand brain diseases (alzheimer, schizophrenia, etc.) better and barely mention the much bigger implications of strong AI (like that it might be the last thing humans ever need to invent).
The medical estabilishment is hung up on 'above all, do no harm'. This means that if you don't have a disease, you generally don't 'deserve' a cure, since any cure or procedure tends to have some risk element in it, and if you don't have a disease then the risk is considered unacceptable.
There are a bunch of substances that likely do improve things for healthy adults, but they won't get allowed to be marketed as such before they are proven safe&effective; and they won't get proven safe&effective because you can't do proper clinical trials to measure the effects on healthy people because of the possible downsides, etc. You can make and market 'dietary supplements' to the extent that they provably don't do anything significantly different and more effective than dietary choices; if it works really well, then it's a drug with a whole different regulation.
You can make, test, verify and sell a medicine to improve cognitive function in people with a specific mental deficiency. You aren't really allowed (legally and ethically) to do proper medical tests on how some drug does/doesn't improve the same cognitive function in healthy adults and market & distribute it to them.
You can make, test, verify and sell a medicine to fix erectile dysfunction. You aren't really allowed (legally and ethically) to do proper medical tests if some powerful drug changes sex to be more enjoyable for healthy adults, although it's quite likely that such drugs do exist.
Anecdotally, yes. A a friend of mine works under a neuroscience researcher. They are studying the effectiveness of a substance at restoring ideal brain function to those who suffer from a disorder. When they asked the researcher why they don't study the substance as a way to improve cognition in already healthy people, they were told that doing so would violate medical ethics.
I have no idea if that's representative of the beliefs of other researchers.
> It's a strange disconnect. I know everyone is thinking what I'm thinking, but you never see this in the articles. Is it some kind of taboo?
Sure. It's ridiculously selfish.
As you age, you realize your success in all things eventually boils down to experience and ability to execute. Ability to execute wanes with age, as experience is accumulated, so it balances out. Now imagine a spry 20 year old with 60 years of experience? Not exactly fair to those actually 20 years old.
EDIT: To the old farts responding below me, regardless of how well you take care of yourself, you wither with age. By removing that, you are messing with the balance that has existed for millions of years. It has nothing to do with fair competition, it has everything to do with using technology to get ahead of the competition, in the same way that some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, and we as a society frown on that too.
There has been a fair amount of research into the effects of manipulating hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) in lower animals, mostly nematode worms I believe. Interestingly this is one of the few manipulations in which either reducing or increasing levels of the protein in question can increase longevity. This is a sign that there is probably significant complexity involved in this outcome, such as in relationships with other mechanisms or that the effects of changes are tied to specific tissues in the body or locations within cells.
So this is, I think, an overhyping of otherwise interesting new research into a way to manipulate HIF-1 via NAD levels that is apparently an offshoot of past and ongoing research into sirtuins and aging. When considering the source of the wor - the Sinclair lab - the overhyping is perhaps less of a surprise than it might otherwise be: this is a group with a very large sunk cost behind them and little to show for it. Deep pockets nonetheless still back continued efforts, and they have a lot of experience with the press. This is a formula that leads to breathless press materials touting rejuvenation. The people who are really, actually working on rejuvenation are more restrained these days.
So I disagree with the tone of the publicity for this work; it's a great example of the mindless attention machine being manipulating into seizing on something that has little relevance compared to other far more deserving work.
I think that (a) these researchers have found an interesting set of interactions to help explain why manipulation of HIF-1 can affect longevity, and (b) the changing levels of that and various related proteins with advancing age are responses to accumulated cellular damage. Perhaps the most relevant damage is mitochondrial, given that cycling of NAD is involved in the chain of unpleasant results that unfold when mitochondrial DNA becomes damaged, or perhaps it is something else.
So to my eyes what they focus on isn't a cause, it's a consequence. The fastest way to see what causes what at this point is to work on repairing the known forms of damage rather than tracing back all of the myriad complexity of relationships and feedback loops in the cell - a task that would take substantially longer than just building means of biological repair for our cells and other small-scale structures.
You can get NADH (which is interchangeable with NAD) pills pretty easily on amazon for like $30. My question is what is the difference between those pills and the $50K substance/solution they came up with?
How is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) synthesized, such that their estimates for cost are "about $50,000 a day for a human."?
I would expect that any such estimates on cost would be based on the predicted cost at scale and not the cost to produce it one off for lab experiments. Is this a PR ploy to start staking a high price, so that people view it as a bargain when it is released at some absurd price like $1000/day.
The article reports, "Turner said a 'magic pill' that reverses ageing is several years away, partially due to the cost of the compound, which would be about $50,000 a day for a human."
That suggests several things. The clinical trials will be small in the beginning, and thus the small-n studies will not have much statistical power. There will be some kind of patent scramble related to any patentable technology that can reduce the cost of producing the chemical in a dosage form appropriate for human medicine. And (if and only if this preliminary finding in mice translates into a safe and effective human medicine) there will be immense political pressure for a public subsidy to make treatment like this available to more patients.
The HN participant who kindly submitted this interesting story found a news source with a nuanced headline, "Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice." That doesn't overpromise, and tells what stage the research is in. The news report mentions that the researchers have a peer-reviewed journal publication in Cell
on their findings, and I suppose many scientists will be looking at that publication and thinking about their study findings. That too is better than the usual submission to HN. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.
The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[3] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.
If nothing else, I think this is emblematic of where we are in both the news cycle and the scientific cycle with regards to anti-aging research. After decades of small progress in anti-aging research, we're at this neat convergence of increasing public interest in anti-aging research combined with promising early results and vastly increased funding in the area.
No one should be holding their breath in anticipation. Billions of dollars in research funds worldwide are wasted on "splashy findings" based on fraud and bad science[1]. In fact, most published research findings are likely false[2] :
This seems to be a pretty big deal, but the article gives off the impression that mithocondrial aging is the only reason that we age. In fact there are many other aging factors that have not been linked to mithocondrial aging (and have, agruably, no relationship).
Some other factors I recall studying are
- gradual DNA damage, which is quite inevitable
- collagen degradation, which affects the eyes and all cartilaginous tissues.
“Whether that means we’ll all live to 150, I don’t know, but the important part is that we don’t spend the last 20 to 30 years of our lives in bad health.”
Imagine a process that makes you feel like you are 25 right up until you body gives up at a physical age of 100 or something. Do you end up doing riskier things because you don't "feel" old? And if you did would you die sooner? Its an interesting question for me. I'm not sure how that would work.
(and of course if they are successful (which I hope they are) then we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?)
if they are successful (which I hope they are) then we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?
Which I would be totally OK with. Imagine how much more scientific progress we could make if we had 70-year veterans of their field with the sharp mind of a 27-year-old!
What confuses me is that they seem to be making the assumption that if they are able to give good health in the later years, that the person will die at the same age they would have. Which seems unlikely.
Seems to me if they are in good health, they won't die (healthy people don't tend to). Eventually, though, they will be in bad health enough to die. In which case, it IS about longer life spans, since we'll still have the same problems, just at a later age.
I'm all for longer life (and I imagine they are too), but it seems to me that they are just trying to be politically correct by saying things like the above.
I'd rather have the choice. I have no choice with ageing. The same is true of "immortality". What immortality really means is that you kind of have a choice of not disappearing forever (well unless a car runs you down or something, but in the future that can probably be fixed, too, by "backing ourselves up").
> we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?
This is the first thing I thought about when reading the article. It sounds like the dream of countries like Japan where retirement is costing a lot of money.
I'd love to read the comment of an economist (or a sociologist) on this.
>researchers confident that side-effects will be minimal due to the fact the compound is naturally occurring.
There are a lot of naturally occurring poisons too. I'm curious, how does the substance being naturally occurring have anything to do with the side-effects?
I wonder why the study has nothing to say about the longevity of the treated mice compared to controls. Maybe it costs too much for experimenting with extended effects and maybe they want something for their next paper.
The biggest problem of course is sociological with only the top tiny% able to afford it. The psychological divide between have and have not will grow in ways completely unacceptable to the (100-tiny)% and could stimulate revolutionary tendencies among the masses to even things out. The top tiny% really should be considering pouring lots of their money into making the treatment cheap enough to not create a divide so intolerable that it will perish under its own weight.
Some seriously interesting comments here, on a very interesting piece of research!
If any of you wanted your comments to be a part of the post-publication review record for the paper (either as reviews or as discussion points), you can head over to the Publons website at https://publons.com/p/3318/ to leave them!
Disclaimer - yep, I currently help out at Publons :)
Hmm... As I'm new here I'm a little confused. I posted the same article yesterday but this one posted by Mizza got picked up quite heavily. Does the poster's "karma" have something to do with it? Or is it just a coincidence?
It's interesting, even if we halted aging so that people could theoretically live forever, we would as a culture have to embrace a sort of 'death by probability.'
[+] [-] KVFinn|12 years ago|reply
Short answer is it’s not all that big a deal in biomedical terms. It’s a great discovery in terms of understanding mitochondria, and it provides a new way to rejuvenate mito function, but it doesn’t tell us that rejuvenating mito function in isolation in an otherwise still-old animal is a good idea -- and there have for many years been other ways to rejuvenate mito function which have not led to longer lifespan in rodents, notably acetyl-L-carnitine combined with alpha-lipoic acid (which has been marketed as Juvenon).
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
AFTER EDIT: I see the first reaction to this comment was a silent downvote, which evokes my desire to learn. Now that we've established that you disagree with me, would it be all right for me to ask what facts I should consider to change my opinion that Aubrey De Grey's anti-aging advice is not correct? What positive rationale can you provide for taking his writings on his favorite topic seriously? What evidence can you provide that he is on to something that the National Institute of Aging[1] isn't researching adequately already without him?
[1] http://www.nia.nih.gov/
ONE MORE EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think the most helpful to me was
As far as I know, Aubrey has not claimed to have invented any working anti-aging treatments so far
because I've been curious for a long time why Aubrey De Grey receives so much mention here on Hacker News whenever research on aging comes up, but so little mention in any of the extensive medical literature I read. So he is one guy with some interesting ideas (interesting to people here, at least) but perhaps just one guy among thousands working on anti-aging ideas. I wish anyone well who is devoting time and attention to reducing the harm of aging processes in human beings, but I try to cast my net searching for information more in the waters of medical reports than among people with a famous online presence as such. Thanks for the follow-up, and for letting me know what you really think about the unedited version of my comment, which still appears at the top here.
[+] [-] Mizza|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvnick|12 years ago|reply
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
[2] 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"
[+] [-] vilhelm_s|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rictic|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/whitem10.html
[+] [-] _random_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rtfeldman|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] onetwofiveten|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] socillion|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jseliger|12 years ago|reply
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-comi... .
[+] [-] yxhuvud|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derekja|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relaxman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fragsworth|12 years ago|reply
Alzheimer's medications can generally improve cognition. Age-reversal medications might work even better if used at an early age.
I always see articles, media, and papers focusing on how something new can be used to treat some existing disease. But what I'm always thinking is "can I use this if I don't have a disease?"
It's a strange disconnect. I know everyone is thinking what I'm thinking, but you never see this in the articles. Is it some kind of taboo?
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
Basically, as a matter of principal they report on what the researchers are doing, and the researchers are (quite reasonably) going to try to beat Alzheimer's in patients who actually have it before they try to apply it to everyone. No sense in worrying about, Can this be globally administered, like a vaccine? before they even know for sure how to beat it.
[+] [-] olalonde|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|12 years ago|reply
There are a bunch of substances that likely do improve things for healthy adults, but they won't get allowed to be marketed as such before they are proven safe&effective; and they won't get proven safe&effective because you can't do proper clinical trials to measure the effects on healthy people because of the possible downsides, etc. You can make and market 'dietary supplements' to the extent that they provably don't do anything significantly different and more effective than dietary choices; if it works really well, then it's a drug with a whole different regulation.
You can make, test, verify and sell a medicine to improve cognitive function in people with a specific mental deficiency. You aren't really allowed (legally and ethically) to do proper medical tests on how some drug does/doesn't improve the same cognitive function in healthy adults and market & distribute it to them.
You can make, test, verify and sell a medicine to fix erectile dysfunction. You aren't really allowed (legally and ethically) to do proper medical tests if some powerful drug changes sex to be more enjoyable for healthy adults, although it's quite likely that such drugs do exist.
[+] [-] deskglass|12 years ago|reply
I have no idea if that's representative of the beliefs of other researchers.
[+] [-] jaibot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maratd|12 years ago|reply
Sure. It's ridiculously selfish.
As you age, you realize your success in all things eventually boils down to experience and ability to execute. Ability to execute wanes with age, as experience is accumulated, so it balances out. Now imagine a spry 20 year old with 60 years of experience? Not exactly fair to those actually 20 years old.
EDIT: To the old farts responding below me, regardless of how well you take care of yourself, you wither with age. By removing that, you are messing with the balance that has existed for millions of years. It has nothing to do with fair competition, it has everything to do with using technology to get ahead of the competition, in the same way that some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, and we as a society frown on that too.
[+] [-] exratione|12 years ago|reply
So this is, I think, an overhyping of otherwise interesting new research into a way to manipulate HIF-1 via NAD levels that is apparently an offshoot of past and ongoing research into sirtuins and aging. When considering the source of the wor - the Sinclair lab - the overhyping is perhaps less of a surprise than it might otherwise be: this is a group with a very large sunk cost behind them and little to show for it. Deep pockets nonetheless still back continued efforts, and they have a lot of experience with the press. This is a formula that leads to breathless press materials touting rejuvenation. The people who are really, actually working on rejuvenation are more restrained these days.
So I disagree with the tone of the publicity for this work; it's a great example of the mindless attention machine being manipulating into seizing on something that has little relevance compared to other far more deserving work.
I think that (a) these researchers have found an interesting set of interactions to help explain why manipulation of HIF-1 can affect longevity, and (b) the changing levels of that and various related proteins with advancing age are responses to accumulated cellular damage. Perhaps the most relevant damage is mitochondrial, given that cycling of NAD is involved in the chain of unpleasant results that unfold when mitochondrial DNA becomes damaged, or perhaps it is something else.
So to my eyes what they focus on isn't a cause, it's a consequence. The fastest way to see what causes what at this point is to work on repairing the known forms of damage rather than tracing back all of the myriad complexity of relationships and feedback loops in the cell - a task that would take substantially longer than just building means of biological repair for our cells and other small-scale structures.
[+] [-] espadagroup|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malandrew|12 years ago|reply
I would expect that any such estimates on cost would be based on the predicted cost at scale and not the cost to produce it one off for lab experiments. Is this a PR ploy to start staking a high price, so that people view it as a bargain when it is released at some absurd price like $1000/day.
[+] [-] fragsworth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
That suggests several things. The clinical trials will be small in the beginning, and thus the small-n studies will not have much statistical power. There will be some kind of patent scramble related to any patentable technology that can reduce the cost of producing the chemical in a dosage form appropriate for human medicine. And (if and only if this preliminary finding in mice translates into a safe and effective human medicine) there will be immense political pressure for a public subsidy to make treatment like this available to more patients.
The HN participant who kindly submitted this interesting story found a news source with a nuanced headline, "Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice." That doesn't overpromise, and tells what stage the research is in. The news report mentions that the researchers have a peer-reviewed journal publication in Cell
http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213?cc=y
on their findings, and I suppose many scientists will be looking at that publication and thinking about their study findings. That too is better than the usual submission to HN. Many, many submissions to HN are based at bottom on press releases, and press releases are well known for spinning preliminary research findings beyond all recognition. This has been commented on in the PhD comic "The Science News Cycle,"[1] which only exaggerates the process a very little. More serious commentary in the edited group blog post "Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"[2] points to the same danger of taking press releases (and news aggregator website articles based solely on press releases) too seriously. Press releases are usually misleading.
The most sure and certain finding of any preliminary study will be that more research is needed. All too often, preliminary findings don't lead to further useful discoveries in science, because the preliminary findings are flawed. The obligatory link for any discussion of a report on a research result like the one kindly submitted here is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"[3] by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.
[1] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
[2] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...
[3] http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
[+] [-] rms|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contextual|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/27/business/la-fi-hiltz...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
[+] [-] Mizza|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darsham|12 years ago|reply
Some other factors I recall studying are
- gradual DNA damage, which is quite inevitable
- collagen degradation, which affects the eyes and all cartilaginous tissues.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
“Whether that means we’ll all live to 150, I don’t know, but the important part is that we don’t spend the last 20 to 30 years of our lives in bad health.”
Imagine a process that makes you feel like you are 25 right up until you body gives up at a physical age of 100 or something. Do you end up doing riskier things because you don't "feel" old? And if you did would you die sooner? Its an interesting question for me. I'm not sure how that would work.
(and of course if they are successful (which I hope they are) then we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?)
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
Which I would be totally OK with. Imagine how much more scientific progress we could make if we had 70-year veterans of their field with the sharp mind of a 27-year-old!
[+] [-] robbrown451|12 years ago|reply
Seems to me if they are in good health, they won't die (healthy people don't tend to). Eventually, though, they will be in bad health enough to die. In which case, it IS about longer life spans, since we'll still have the same problems, just at a later age.
I'm all for longer life (and I imagine they are too), but it seems to me that they are just trying to be politically correct by saying things like the above.
[+] [-] salient|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uniclaude|12 years ago|reply
This is the first thing I thought about when reading the article. It sounds like the dream of countries like Japan where retirement is costing a lot of money.
I'd love to read the comment of an economist (or a sociologist) on this.
[+] [-] kps|12 years ago|reply
Tick... tick... tick....
[+] [-] roadster72|12 years ago|reply
There are a lot of naturally occurring poisons too. I'm curious, how does the substance being naturally occurring have anything to do with the side-effects?
[+] [-] DennisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonGateley|12 years ago|reply
The biggest problem of course is sociological with only the top tiny% able to afford it. The psychological divide between have and have not will grow in ways completely unacceptable to the (100-tiny)% and could stimulate revolutionary tendencies among the masses to even things out. The top tiny% really should be considering pouring lots of their money into making the treatment cheap enough to not create a divide so intolerable that it will perish under its own weight.
[+] [-] teh_aimee|12 years ago|reply
If any of you wanted your comments to be a part of the post-publication review record for the paper (either as reviews or as discussion points), you can head over to the Publons website at https://publons.com/p/3318/ to leave them!
Disclaimer - yep, I currently help out at Publons :)
[+] [-] mrfusion|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.mprize.org/
[+] [-] codex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattsfrey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tycho|12 years ago|reply