“The aging process we discovered is like a married couple—when they are young, they communicate well, but over time, living in close quarters for many years, communication breaks down,” said Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics David Sinclair"
- Totally off topic though but I think he's describing a couple heading to divorce. Nearly all successful marriages move in the exact opposite direction.
I think it was a case of bad paraphrasing. Another source doesn't make Sinclair sound as odd: "Much like a married couple talks to each other when they're newly married but then they stop communicating after about 20 years, at least in some cases."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-20/scientists-develop-ant...
I think, it's not really that communication breaks down, it is more that you don't need to communicate at all because you know the other person so well by now. Then divorce happens because you don't like what you know or you realize your spouse isn't what you wanted, or the marriage becomes stronger because you anticipate your partners needs/actions without having to communicate. So yeah, the analogy is not really right.
I'd take all this with a grain of salt, though. The biology of aging is incredibly complex. Seemingly certain answers to the question of what causes or mediates aging (e.g. free radicals) have turned out to be less conclusive and all-explaining than researchers originally thought.
There are seven distinct mechanisms for cellular and intracellular damage resulting from aging. Improving the regulation of mitochondria could completely fix one and slow down the rate of accumulation of a few other types of damage, but that's it.
Its a promising result, but a lot of mice experiments don't have the same effects on people. It would be ironic if this technique failed on humans subjected to a lot of exposure to botox :-) The fear is that suddenly not only would the rich get richer, but they would never die. That leads to some fairly depressing scenarios.
Don't bother with those immortality consequences scenarios until you see a real general working treatment for cancer (something way more than "it cures 80% of the cancers in 80% of the cases"). If you live long enough, you will get cancer - basic molecular biology and probability and thermodynamics will take care of this. Also, the side effects of most regenerative treatments are increases in the risk of cancer.
Also, don't bother with "the super-rich becoming super-genetically-enhanced" scenarios - all known genetic therapy technologies have as side effects increasing the risk of cancer.
Basically, cancer is the mythical dragon guarding the tree of eternal-life and super-gene-therapy, so while it's still alive, being super rich and having access to all regenerative medicine and anti-aging therapies will make a difference, but not such a big one, so don't worry :)
(And yeah, finding a "general" solution to the cancer problem is truly hard, maybe even impossible for the absolutely general case - ie, you'll still have rare forms of cancer that don't respond to any know therapies, and as you live longer and longer the probability of bumping into one such form will approach certainty. And getting a better and better treatment for each type of cancer doesn't seem to go much faster until we get a specific set of breakthroughs in nanotechnology that could be applied to this specific problem.)
I'm pretty sure if possible, serious anti-aging technogy will drop in price due to incredible market demand. It's highly unlikely the compound relies on resources that are extremely rare.
Even if that were the case, someone would quickly find a way to replicate the procedure without the rare resources.
Likely the things in the way would be governments and corporations trying to profit through IP.
In that case, black market tech would be developed and you could likely go to an unregulated / 3rd world country to get the procedure done.
The political consequences will be interesting. One of the consolations if living under a tyrant is that they will, eventually die. I wonder if having Robert Mugabe around for another 40 years would excite Zimbabweans. The flip-side is that citizens could get more politically active if they couldn't rely on death to prevent gerontocracies.
On a serious note, this could be charming, but still, most people die, not because they were too old., in fact a very few people hit their biological age limit which i guess is 100 ~ 130. They are still many challenges such as diseases, road accidents which are the No. 1 cause for death.
Anti-aging divide? I'm all for anti-aging, I was obsessed by it since my teens and got a degree in molecular biology thinking I want to dedicate my life to it, I even own dontage.com.
However, I'm concerned about implications of potentially high-price anti-aging treatments. Till now, death has been the great equalizer. Life is inherently unfair. If you are born in poverty there is high chances you'll stay there, but at least you always count on everyone dying at the end.
With high-price anti-aging treatments people who have wealth can live longer (maybe one day indefinitely) and accumulate more wealth and those without money will just dye twice or three times as fast with no way out of the cycle. You can argue historically we always had this type of divides, for example in early stages of invention of antibiotics or vaccines or ability to buy them in black market in areas where they were scarce. However, we're moving from preventing premature deaths to extending life beyond its natural extension and that brings a whole new set of issues.
Will there be enough retirement funds? If we do democratize anti-aging treatments, lets say increasing the average life span to 100 or 120. Will there be enough funding? As is, the social security is feeling the pressures of increased average life-span. So if we are able to make a 60 year olds be 20 (in some aspects of aging) or 90 year old to 30 and as the article alluded to, decrease the risk of cancers (perhaps). Then, who will pay to cover the retirement funding gap?
We're heading toward a world were you can choose to live longer and have the wealth to support your life for extended time, and those who will only live 1/2 or 1/3 as much just because they were born in a different household.
Among all the technological breakthroughs, anti-aging will probably have the biggest social impact and as a society we're not even thinking about it or are even preparing for it yet. But then again, if you have the money, why should you care.
There are many downsides to curing aging, but none of them are as bad as the current situation: 100,000 deaths every day. It's worse than you can imagine; those 100,000 people experienced decades of mental and physical decline before they died.
I think you are confused about the economics of the situation. Who will pay for retirement benefits? Aging is why we retire. If we never got old, we could work as long as we wanted.
Even if anti-aging treatments remain expensive for decades after they're invented, it will still be economically worthwhile to treat everyone. This is because age-related diseases are more expensive. Alzheimer's. Cancer. Heart disease. Dementia. COPD. These diseases slowly kill their victims, causing immense suffering. Treatments for most of them are ineffectual and cost millions for each patient. When it comes to cost, rejuvenation therapies have a low bar to get over.
My grandmother died this month. She had a form of rheumatoid arthritis that slowly turned her lungs into scar tissue. My only consolation is that her mind didn't go before she died. If only rich people could avoid her fate, I wouldn't mind a bit. The fewer people who suffer as she did, the better.
Were scientists from the past worried about this when they worked to improve medicines and public health that has increased the global average lifespan from 31 years to 70 years in the past century?
No one knows the answers to your questions, but I think there will be solutions to those problems. Birth rates are averaging out and hopefully starting to go down. Automation of work is going up. The reach of education has increased.
Also even if everyone was immune to death by aging, some actuaries showed that humans will still be limited to 400 years due to accidental death.
I think that people in different parts of the world today have life spans that are 1/2 to 1/3rd of other countries. Maybe if we're not losing all our most experienced and knowledgeable people to senility, old age, and death, we may come up with solutions more quickly.
Everyone says this when the subject comes up and it's ridiculous. Many countries have government subsidized healthcare. Additionally patents only last for 20 years or so. And there is no reason to think it would inherently cost a lot. Do only rich people have iphones?
And anyways, who cares? Better that some people live longer than none do.
You're assumption that people want to retire is wrong. People are retiring because the aren't capable of full work hours. With right medicine people would work more, maybe in the future there won't be such thing as "retirement funds".
You're missing the point. Sure suffer in the minutiae of all the implications / implementation. End of story its a single question: Do we want to have this "problem" ? Yes.
To phrase differently: Lets NOT have planes because they might burst into flames once in a while. Do you see the absurdity ?
Want to know a good way to pull yourself out of squalor? Fix aging.
One thing I'd really like to understand re: ageing is why a newborn is essentially 'reset' from an ageing perspective. I appreciate that egg cells aren't constantly dividing during a mothers life but they are still a product of division and contain DNA that can suffer from time based mutations. So if aging is due to mistakes accumulated during either divisions or time then why are children born young? I don't think this is as simple as non-viable embryos are miscarried, there must be something different in the formation of embryos that means they don't carry the aging of their parents...and what clue does that give to cure aging?
The organism is a vessel to propagate the genes. Germ cells such as embryos usually have additional defenses and repair mechanisms, such as for DNA damage, that the somatic cells lack. Since the soma are merely there to help the replication of the germ line, they receive less investment.
No creature we know of has successfully evolved the capability to permanently stave off aging. Besides the inevitable issues with fighting entropy in a complex system, how would an ageless organism compete in the shifting landscape of an ecosystem as other creatures evolve around it? How would a non-aging organism adapt? It seems likely that continually creating new generations is the best strategy for genetic replication.
Now we are at the amusing point that genes may have unwittingly experienced their own skynet event. Modern science has given us the ability to not only gaze upon our creators, but manipulate them to do the bidding of ideas.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a geneticist, but the logical reason for this sounds as simple as enriching the baby's DNA with that from the mother and father. Also only cells, which are our main building blocks, suffer from death. The death as we know it, is only affecting "bodily" species incl. single-celled life forms. DNA doesn't die, ever (given good conditions). That's why scientists can still extract DNA from animals which have been died thousands or millions of years ago.
Many of the problems surrounding funding of meaningful efforts to treat aging, eliminate age-related disease, and extend healthy life come about because the people with the biggest megaphones are also doing the least useful work.
This is true outside the scientific community, in the "anti-aging" marketplace that tries to convince people they should take supplements rather than support research.
This is true inside the scientific community, where the Sinclair labs and their work on sirtuins - which is about as useless as supplements based on the last ten years of work - get far more attention than anything that is actually likely to produce meaningful results.
This article is an example of high-road hype and nonsense. More than a decade of work on sirtuins have failed to reliably produce even a tiny fraction of the gains to health and life provided by calorie restriction or exercise. This is just one tiny slice of the broader mainstream scientific approach of attempting to alter the operation of metabolism in order to provide benefits. This is vastly complex, and will take a very, very long time to get anywhere. When scientists speak of not seeing any real progress towards human longevity in the near future, this is the approach they are talking about: take this thing, the interaction space of metabolism with aging, which is vast, and about which nowhere near enough is understood, and then try to make a better version of it.
Sure, it's possible in the long term. But we'll all be old before anyone even makes a good first pass through this enormous complexity.
Yet there is a much better path forward towards treatment of aging. This is to identify the differences between old and young tissues, something that has already been done and agreed upon by the scientific community, more or less settled for the past 20 years, and then fix them all. You don't need to delve into the interaction space to understand why or how or process or progress. You just fix it. It is the difference between repainting a wall versus understanding the deep molecular interactions of wall, paint, and weather so that you can build a better lasting paint. One of those choices is evidently much more efficient than the other.
When it's a wall, who cares? Let the paint scientists get on with it. But in the case of aging, tens of millions of lives are lost every year that passes while the mainstream screws around with metabolism to slow aging rather than building the means to repair the identified causes of aging.
Even better, while the metabolic engineers have no clear plan to produce a good end state, just a bunch of plans that have not yet panned out as expected despite great expense, the "just fix it" approach to aging has clear paths to the development of repair therapies for each identified difference between young and old tissues. So they are only limited in progress by funding.
Why does this situation exist? I blame regulation. If your work doesn't result in something that looks like a drug, sounds like a drug, and walks like a drug it isn't going to be approved. Further, treating aging is not a result recognized by the FDA - so whatever you do has to be sidelined to treat some disease of aging. In other words only applied after it's too late to prevent things from going awry. So we see marginal unambitious work on marginal unambitious treatments, the continuing random walk through the natural world's pharmacology in search of chemicals that can be crudely administered to do slightly more good than harm, because that's the only way to have even a slight chance of getting to market. Highly regulated systems perpetuate their current state at all expense, and treat change as a threat.
The treatments for aging that might actually do some good in the future are radically different from today's pharmacology. These are the repair strategies: mitochondrial gene therapy, adapted bacterial enzymes let loose in the body, targeted destruction of stem cells and immune cells run wild, that sort of thing. You can find them described if you look up SENS, the strategies for engineered negligible senescence, but there are other similar lists put forward by different research groups. The repair approach is the disruptive newcomer to the field, barely ten years old, but gathering support. We should hope that it soon wins over the mainstream, and relegates the era of paying billions for sirtuin research and other dead-ends to the dustbin of history.
Spoken like a pragmatist and not a scientist. Your argument is the equivalent of arguing no one should bother with low level programming knowledge or understanding how functions work in Ruby/Python/etc.
You're also talking like someone who has no experience with life sciences research at all and is an armchair expert. As someone who has dedicated a significant portion of my life and time to research in medical sciences it's not as easy as "fix them all." How do you 'fix' changes in protein expression without causing unintended side effects? It's hard enough to get something to work in cell culture let alone in a complex organism where compensatory mechanisms kick in whenever you do anything. We can't even get mild pain relief to work without side effects and you're talking about complex tissue engineering.
SENS is controversial at best (and utter bullshit in the eyes of many), I wouldn't go around touting it as the future of anti-aging research. Additionally caloric restriction has recently been shown to not work in humans and the early gains reported haven't translated well at all. Exercise is really the only potentially viable strategy you have mentioned.
While academia, especially at top tier institutions and mega-labs, is flawed, I would caution you to avoid jumping to conclusions because the pace of research is not to your liking. This isn't, as you so eloquently put it, painting a wall, it's a very complicated (and new) field that we still know very little about and are discovering new pitfalls every day.
Why does this situation exist? I blame regulation.
It exists because you are dealing with humans. Genuinely new ideas tend to not get adopted until the old guard literally dies. They have turf to protect and it is an active disincentive to adopt new ideas, especially new ideas where you can fix things relatively cheaply and easily. There is money to be made in keeping problems alive. And people who don't understand how to fix it themselves tend to look to experts and trust their word rather than being skeptical that maybe the experts have a conflict of interest.
There is a lot that can be done currently and more simply than even your post suggests. A lot of it is "basic common sense." Studies often back up things like just eating right and exercising regularly -- which, really, people mostly don't want to do. They want a magic bullet that lets them do whatever they feel like and then magically fix the problems it creates. But Hollywood stars often already look 20 years younger than they really are and a lot of that is due to diet and exercise because their income depends in large part on their looks.
Another aspect of that is that people tend to discount damage that never occurred. So Hollywood actors and actresses who have successfully slowed the aging process instead of dramatically reversing the aging process are dismissed as not counting somehow. People tend to have a very hard time mentally counting something that was averted. It's just a very hard concept to even explain to most people. So we try to find more fuel efficient cars instead of promoting walking and public transit in part because it is easier to quantify the fuel savings and the difference in how the environment is impacted etc than if we just don't drive in the first place.
The factors involved are complex and do not boil down to regulation.
For the biologically inclined, I sincerely recommend reading this paper in full. It has a number of extremely groundbreaking hypothesis, which bring together the common elements of cancer, caloric restriction, and aging.
I find it interesting that this finding suggests that free radical/reactive-oxygen-species theories of aging were close, but just off the mark. It appears that the cell can cope quite well with chemical damage of this type, but has a harder time regulating mtDNA expression, which leads to the same result: reduced mitochondria function with age.
Mr Stoyte broke the silence. 'How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?' he said in a slow, hesitating voice. 'I mean, it wouldn't happen at once ... there'd be a long time while a person ... well, you know; while he wouldn't change any. And once you get over the first shock - well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don't you think so, Obispo?' he insisted.
- Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
...But I am sure this news makes banks, bureaucracies and big pharma mega-ecstatic.
Dunno why the submission was changed, I suspect the admin didn't actually read the article, which contains original journalism work (article writer got in touch with David Sinclair again for an additional quote).
Without being an expert in the area, but having some detailed knowledge in the field, it honestly sounds like hype. The statement that it wasn't mentioned anywhere, before is bogus. Take a look at the source [1] that describes how NAD actually has an effect on telomeres.
They really suggest using regular supplements on that url, which I'd call bullshit! I can't tell, if it's the editors fault, a missunderstandin, or if they really mean that. That's because I've no access to the real paper.
I just googled and dailymail appeared at the top. Not sure if that was the article i read a few weeks ago.
Also please note that I don't want to stiffle innovation in this area in any way. I think it's awesome research.
But I also find it interesting to explore other "applications" of this technology.
I suspect that given the technology to halt aging, the technology to alter personality and behavior (rehabilitation) won't be far behind (and may even arrive first). The interesting questions to me are whether personalities will be criminalized along with behaviors and to what precision or degree of subtlety personality/behavior changes can be made. Too big a change and it's effectively the same as killing the person.
[+] [-] jusben1369|12 years ago|reply
- Totally off topic though but I think he's describing a couple heading to divorce. Nearly all successful marriages move in the exact opposite direction.
[+] [-] rquantz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkop|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timmyelliot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tommoor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grok2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edj|12 years ago|reply
Original is behind a paywall.
---
I'd take all this with a grain of salt, though. The biology of aging is incredibly complex. Seemingly certain answers to the question of what causes or mediates aging (e.g. free radicals) have turned out to be less conclusive and all-explaining than researchers originally thought.
[+] [-] stcredzero|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negli...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnq|12 years ago|reply
Also, don't bother with "the super-rich becoming super-genetically-enhanced" scenarios - all known genetic therapy technologies have as side effects increasing the risk of cancer.
Basically, cancer is the mythical dragon guarding the tree of eternal-life and super-gene-therapy, so while it's still alive, being super rich and having access to all regenerative medicine and anti-aging therapies will make a difference, but not such a big one, so don't worry :)
(And yeah, finding a "general" solution to the cancer problem is truly hard, maybe even impossible for the absolutely general case - ie, you'll still have rare forms of cancer that don't respond to any know therapies, and as you live longer and longer the probability of bumping into one such form will approach certainty. And getting a better and better treatment for each type of cancer doesn't seem to go much faster until we get a specific set of breakthroughs in nanotechnology that could be applied to this specific problem.)
[+] [-] argumentum|12 years ago|reply
Even if that were the case, someone would quickly find a way to replicate the procedure without the rare resources.
Likely the things in the way would be governments and corporations trying to profit through IP.
In that case, black market tech would be developed and you could likely go to an unregulated / 3rd world country to get the procedure done.
[+] [-] buyx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jseliger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] straws|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frade33|12 years ago|reply
Challenge Accepted. God. /s
On a serious note, this could be charming, but still, most people die, not because they were too old., in fact a very few people hit their biological age limit which i guess is 100 ~ 130. They are still many challenges such as diseases, road accidents which are the No. 1 cause for death.
[+] [-] ashray|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunky1994|12 years ago|reply
And the actual paper (the full paper is behind a paywall): http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(13)01521-3
[+] [-] jarradhope|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naterator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
Less hype, more technical detail.
[+] [-] salimmadjd|12 years ago|reply
However, I'm concerned about implications of potentially high-price anti-aging treatments. Till now, death has been the great equalizer. Life is inherently unfair. If you are born in poverty there is high chances you'll stay there, but at least you always count on everyone dying at the end.
With high-price anti-aging treatments people who have wealth can live longer (maybe one day indefinitely) and accumulate more wealth and those without money will just dye twice or three times as fast with no way out of the cycle. You can argue historically we always had this type of divides, for example in early stages of invention of antibiotics or vaccines or ability to buy them in black market in areas where they were scarce. However, we're moving from preventing premature deaths to extending life beyond its natural extension and that brings a whole new set of issues.
Will there be enough retirement funds? If we do democratize anti-aging treatments, lets say increasing the average life span to 100 or 120. Will there be enough funding? As is, the social security is feeling the pressures of increased average life-span. So if we are able to make a 60 year olds be 20 (in some aspects of aging) or 90 year old to 30 and as the article alluded to, decrease the risk of cancers (perhaps). Then, who will pay to cover the retirement funding gap?
We're heading toward a world were you can choose to live longer and have the wealth to support your life for extended time, and those who will only live 1/2 or 1/3 as much just because they were born in a different household.
Among all the technological breakthroughs, anti-aging will probably have the biggest social impact and as a society we're not even thinking about it or are even preparing for it yet. But then again, if you have the money, why should you care.
[+] [-] ggreer|12 years ago|reply
I think you are confused about the economics of the situation. Who will pay for retirement benefits? Aging is why we retire. If we never got old, we could work as long as we wanted.
Even if anti-aging treatments remain expensive for decades after they're invented, it will still be economically worthwhile to treat everyone. This is because age-related diseases are more expensive. Alzheimer's. Cancer. Heart disease. Dementia. COPD. These diseases slowly kill their victims, causing immense suffering. Treatments for most of them are ineffectual and cost millions for each patient. When it comes to cost, rejuvenation therapies have a low bar to get over.
My grandmother died this month. She had a form of rheumatoid arthritis that slowly turned her lungs into scar tissue. My only consolation is that her mind didn't go before she died. If only rich people could avoid her fate, I wouldn't mind a bit. The fewer people who suffer as she did, the better.
[+] [-] garg|12 years ago|reply
No one knows the answers to your questions, but I think there will be solutions to those problems. Birth rates are averaging out and hopefully starting to go down. Automation of work is going up. The reach of education has increased.
Also even if everyone was immune to death by aging, some actuaries showed that humans will still be limited to 400 years due to accidental death.
I think that people in different parts of the world today have life spans that are 1/2 to 1/3rd of other countries. Maybe if we're not losing all our most experienced and knowledgeable people to senility, old age, and death, we may come up with solutions more quickly.
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
And anyways, who cares? Better that some people live longer than none do.
[+] [-] lcnmrn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delinquentme|12 years ago|reply
To phrase differently: Lets NOT have planes because they might burst into flames once in a while. Do you see the absurdity ?
Want to know a good way to pull yourself out of squalor? Fix aging.
[+] [-] simonsquiff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hughlomas|12 years ago|reply
No creature we know of has successfully evolved the capability to permanently stave off aging. Besides the inevitable issues with fighting entropy in a complex system, how would an ageless organism compete in the shifting landscape of an ecosystem as other creatures evolve around it? How would a non-aging organism adapt? It seems likely that continually creating new generations is the best strategy for genetic replication.
Now we are at the amusing point that genes may have unwittingly experienced their own skynet event. Modern science has given us the ability to not only gaze upon our creators, but manipulate them to do the bidding of ideas.
[+] [-] X4|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WasimBhai|12 years ago|reply
[0] https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage/posts/Lh8SKC6sED1
[+] [-] exratione|12 years ago|reply
This is true outside the scientific community, in the "anti-aging" marketplace that tries to convince people they should take supplements rather than support research.
This is true inside the scientific community, where the Sinclair labs and their work on sirtuins - which is about as useless as supplements based on the last ten years of work - get far more attention than anything that is actually likely to produce meaningful results.
This article is an example of high-road hype and nonsense. More than a decade of work on sirtuins have failed to reliably produce even a tiny fraction of the gains to health and life provided by calorie restriction or exercise. This is just one tiny slice of the broader mainstream scientific approach of attempting to alter the operation of metabolism in order to provide benefits. This is vastly complex, and will take a very, very long time to get anywhere. When scientists speak of not seeing any real progress towards human longevity in the near future, this is the approach they are talking about: take this thing, the interaction space of metabolism with aging, which is vast, and about which nowhere near enough is understood, and then try to make a better version of it.
Sure, it's possible in the long term. But we'll all be old before anyone even makes a good first pass through this enormous complexity.
Yet there is a much better path forward towards treatment of aging. This is to identify the differences between old and young tissues, something that has already been done and agreed upon by the scientific community, more or less settled for the past 20 years, and then fix them all. You don't need to delve into the interaction space to understand why or how or process or progress. You just fix it. It is the difference between repainting a wall versus understanding the deep molecular interactions of wall, paint, and weather so that you can build a better lasting paint. One of those choices is evidently much more efficient than the other.
When it's a wall, who cares? Let the paint scientists get on with it. But in the case of aging, tens of millions of lives are lost every year that passes while the mainstream screws around with metabolism to slow aging rather than building the means to repair the identified causes of aging.
Even better, while the metabolic engineers have no clear plan to produce a good end state, just a bunch of plans that have not yet panned out as expected despite great expense, the "just fix it" approach to aging has clear paths to the development of repair therapies for each identified difference between young and old tissues. So they are only limited in progress by funding.
Why does this situation exist? I blame regulation. If your work doesn't result in something that looks like a drug, sounds like a drug, and walks like a drug it isn't going to be approved. Further, treating aging is not a result recognized by the FDA - so whatever you do has to be sidelined to treat some disease of aging. In other words only applied after it's too late to prevent things from going awry. So we see marginal unambitious work on marginal unambitious treatments, the continuing random walk through the natural world's pharmacology in search of chemicals that can be crudely administered to do slightly more good than harm, because that's the only way to have even a slight chance of getting to market. Highly regulated systems perpetuate their current state at all expense, and treat change as a threat.
The treatments for aging that might actually do some good in the future are radically different from today's pharmacology. These are the repair strategies: mitochondrial gene therapy, adapted bacterial enzymes let loose in the body, targeted destruction of stem cells and immune cells run wild, that sort of thing. You can find them described if you look up SENS, the strategies for engineered negligible senescence, but there are other similar lists put forward by different research groups. The repair approach is the disruptive newcomer to the field, barely ten years old, but gathering support. We should hope that it soon wins over the mainstream, and relegates the era of paying billions for sirtuin research and other dead-ends to the dustbin of history.
[+] [-] haldujai|12 years ago|reply
You're also talking like someone who has no experience with life sciences research at all and is an armchair expert. As someone who has dedicated a significant portion of my life and time to research in medical sciences it's not as easy as "fix them all." How do you 'fix' changes in protein expression without causing unintended side effects? It's hard enough to get something to work in cell culture let alone in a complex organism where compensatory mechanisms kick in whenever you do anything. We can't even get mild pain relief to work without side effects and you're talking about complex tissue engineering.
SENS is controversial at best (and utter bullshit in the eyes of many), I wouldn't go around touting it as the future of anti-aging research. Additionally caloric restriction has recently been shown to not work in humans and the early gains reported haven't translated well at all. Exercise is really the only potentially viable strategy you have mentioned.
While academia, especially at top tier institutions and mega-labs, is flawed, I would caution you to avoid jumping to conclusions because the pace of research is not to your liking. This isn't, as you so eloquently put it, painting a wall, it's a very complicated (and new) field that we still know very little about and are discovering new pitfalls every day.
Edit: Grammar
[+] [-] Mz|12 years ago|reply
It exists because you are dealing with humans. Genuinely new ideas tend to not get adopted until the old guard literally dies. They have turf to protect and it is an active disincentive to adopt new ideas, especially new ideas where you can fix things relatively cheaply and easily. There is money to be made in keeping problems alive. And people who don't understand how to fix it themselves tend to look to experts and trust their word rather than being skeptical that maybe the experts have a conflict of interest.
There is a lot that can be done currently and more simply than even your post suggests. A lot of it is "basic common sense." Studies often back up things like just eating right and exercising regularly -- which, really, people mostly don't want to do. They want a magic bullet that lets them do whatever they feel like and then magically fix the problems it creates. But Hollywood stars often already look 20 years younger than they really are and a lot of that is due to diet and exercise because their income depends in large part on their looks.
Another aspect of that is that people tend to discount damage that never occurred. So Hollywood actors and actresses who have successfully slowed the aging process instead of dramatically reversing the aging process are dismissed as not counting somehow. People tend to have a very hard time mentally counting something that was averted. It's just a very hard concept to even explain to most people. So we try to find more fuel efficient cars instead of promoting walking and public transit in part because it is easier to quantify the fuel savings and the difference in how the environment is impacted etc than if we just don't drive in the first place.
The factors involved are complex and do not boil down to regulation.
But thank you for your thought provoking comment.
[+] [-] FD3SA|12 years ago|reply
I find it interesting that this finding suggests that free radical/reactive-oxygen-species theories of aging were close, but just off the mark. It appears that the cell can cope quite well with chemical damage of this type, but has a harder time regulating mtDNA expression, which leads to the same result: reduced mitochondria function with age.
[+] [-] etiam|12 years ago|reply
Apparently the video has "expired" so please refer to e.g. http://www.filedropper.com/researchersreversesymptomsofagein... for that (as an aside, I'd appreciate advice about less obtrusive file upload services)
[+] [-] BetterLateThan|12 years ago|reply
- Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
...But I am sure this news makes banks, bureaucracies and big pharma mega-ecstatic.
[+] [-] diminoten|12 years ago|reply
Dunno why the submission was changed, I suspect the admin didn't actually read the article, which contains original journalism work (article writer got in touch with David Sinclair again for an additional quote).
[+] [-] X4|12 years ago|reply
They really suggest using regular supplements on that url, which I'd call bullshit! I can't tell, if it's the editors fault, a missunderstandin, or if they really mean that. That's because I've no access to the real paper.
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleoti...
[+] [-] lettergram|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmollis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcarter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawl|12 years ago|reply
Could we condemn criminals to suffer for hundreds of years? Biotechnology could let us extend convicts' lives 'indefinitely'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2580828/Could...
Edit: Since people have some issues with the dailymail, feel free to pick any other article on this topic:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=prison+life+prolonging
I just googled and dailymail appeared at the top. Not sure if that was the article i read a few weeks ago.
Also please note that I don't want to stiffle innovation in this area in any way. I think it's awesome research. But I also find it interesting to explore other "applications" of this technology.
[+] [-] Jach|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwwit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tormeh|12 years ago|reply