19 replies to this topic

[reason]

Here are a few thoughts on the need for advocacy in longevity science from Rejuvenaction:

People don't think that ageing is a disease because they're used to thinking that it's just a stage of life. They will start to finally accept that this is not the case only when a sufficiently large number of other people in positions of authority, scientists and organizations, will come out and say it out loud. That's one sad truth: people accept things far more quickly than they understand them, and if, at some point, news from the anti-ageing world will frequently populate their TV screens, social media feeds, newspaper articles, and even casual discussions, they will stop ignoring the problem of ageing and cease to oppose its resolution. Nobody likes to advocate for an unpopular cause: it doesn't feel good to be the only person in a group to support a certain claim while being fiercely opposed by all the others, but it does feel nice to be on the winning side of an argument.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the SENS Research Foundation and a few others, researchers of the field are quite hesitant about their goals. I don't see anything wrong with looking for a "fountain of youth". Actually, I don't see how can you want to just "increase health span" without looking for a fountain of youth or eternal life. If they want to increase the current health span it's clearly because they think that the current one isn't enough. So they're not okay with getting sick of the diseases of old age at 80. Now just how much do they want to increase this health span? Till you're 100? 120? When is it okay to get age-related diseases? Unless you increase health-span indefinitely, at some point you are going to get age-related diseases, and they will kill you.

And say that one day they manage to extend health span so that you don't start experiencing age-related decay until you're 120. Then some other researchers come along and say that "they just want to extend health span" so that age-related diseases are delayed until you're 140. Are we saying no to that? Extending your health span up to when you're 120 is fine but up to when you're 140 is not? Why? This game is rather silly, particularly when you think about the obvious fact that unless you have a health problem of some sort, you do not die: yes, being shot, poisoned, electrocuted, eaten by a shark and whatever violent death you can think of counts too, because they all cause you health issues that eventually (rather fast, in fact) kill you. So, if you're not looking for eternal life, it means you're explicitly and intentionally leaving around some health problem of which people can die. In the case of age-related diseases, which ones should we leave around? Which age-related diseases are okay to die of? Alzheimer's? Cancer? Cardiovascular disease? Make your pick - I'm okay without any of those, thank you.

I'm willing to concede that, perhaps, the researchers are playing it safe: they know that if you dare saying that you want to get rid of biological ageing altogether then people will jump down your throat, and thus it's better to slowly get them used to anti-ageing research before making bolder claims. However, I disagree: curing ageing is an urgent humanitarian problem, and there's no time to fool around to please the masses. We need to educate people, get them understand that curing ageing and immortality aren't the same thing at all, that age-related diseases are an extremely serious and compelling problem that needs to be addressed right now, before it goes from bad to worse, and that all the objections to the defeat of ageing make no sense whatsoever.

Link: https://rejuvenactio...like-to-die-of/

View the full article at FightAging

[Florian Xavier]

not bad

[DonManley]

I think the conclusion is right: researchers are playing politics. There many religious people out there who feel cognitive dissonance thinking about immortality. Anytime you need mass support you have to put information in a form that they can digest. There are presidents who are closeted atheists. Unfortunately, in our current culture for a president to say that he is not religious is synonymous to not getting enough votes. And they don't want to educate the public, they want votes. Similarly, researches want funding. Religion is one aspect of it. But aging and immortality effects all aspects of life and is connected to all our beliefs in one way or another. For example, many people today won't get that opportunity. If you're in your 70-80s, there is little chance that you'll live indefinitely. If you're in your twenties, there is hope for you. It just shows how unequal we are when it comes to opportunities, how little control over our lives we really have and that people often get rewarded or punished by absolute randomness. Thinking that older humans you loved are dead or will probably die, but you might get an opportunity to live almost indefinitely is a bit of a brainfuck for many people. There is a lot of randomness now as well, but at least in the end everybody gets equally fucked by death. Furthermore, at least in the beginning, only privileged people will get opportunity to prolong their lives indefinitely. This makes the issue in some ways morally or psychologically incomprehensible for many people. The subject is very loaded. No matter what you say you'll piss many people. It is a minefield that many public people try to avoid.

[Florian Xavier]

Yes life is random, for the better or for the worse.

 

Unfortunaly, people are averse of randomness and evolution made us to see patterns where there is none, it is what we call meaning.

Edited by Florian Xavier, 03 July 2015 - 03:37 AM.

[Antonio2014]

If you're in your 70-80s, there is little chance that you'll live indefinitely.

 

Well, you have cryonics. I'm 41 and I think I'll probably need it before there are rejuvenation therapies.

[johnross47]

I'm not far off 70 so I hope your guess is wrong. I'm hoping that a little nudge here and there will carry me through till major improvements can be made. If I thought I had 40 more good healthy years, equal at least to my thirties and forties quality of life, I would go back to school and start again.

[DonManley]

I'm not far off 70 so I hope your guess is wrong. I'm hoping that a little nudge here and there will carry me through till major improvements can be made. If I thought I had 40 more good healthy years, equal at least to my thirties and forties quality of life, I would go back to school and start again.

 

Well, there is always a possibility that things will go faster. It's hard to predict the future.

 

In the last few years we made a lot of progress when it comes to AI. Aubrey De Grey and researchers not usually include the possibility of AGI in their calculations. Compared to the complexity of a human body AGI might be a simpler problem to solve. We already have AIs which can describe images quite articulately (like "A group of young people playing a game of frisbee.") We also already have AIs capable of doing science in one way or another, which were able to solve real problems in biology. Medicine is a popular field that gets attention from AI research as seen with Watson Health.

 

Also, AI research gets more funding and has very big companies which try push it to the next level. Google pretty much buys every worthy AI startup that it sees and tries to acquire as many AI talents as it can. They are building an army there, when it comes to AI researchers.

 

Google is also aware of the problem of aging, considering that they established a company named Calico, which purpose is to "combat aging and associated diseases". They lately recruited Cynthia Kenyan, "a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people. “Calico has the money to do almost anything it wants,” says Tom Johnson".

 

So, AGI will most likely be developed at Google and when it will, aging research will reap the benefits of the technology as well. If that happens, the research will be accelerated to an unimaginable degree.

 

Many people underestimate how AI can change the life around us, when it becomes more powerful. Here is the latest video of Google's DeepMind playing an Atari game just by looking at the screen (seeking raw pixels). It is brutally efficient when it is capable to learn the domain: https://youtu.be/rbsqaJwpu6A?t=10m31s

[corb]

 

If you're in your 70-80s, there is little chance that you'll live indefinitely.

 

Well, you have cryonics. I'm 41 and I think I'll probably need it before there are rejuvenation therapies.

 

 

I don't think the first round of rejuvenation tech is that far off, shouldn't take more than twenty years.
We need to start some sort of initiative to move to clinical human trials for the things we know work in some degree, ethical committees will probably try to blockade it but that's the battle we will have to fight in the future might as well start early.
 

[Florian Xavier]

They are so many compounds that extend life of mouses that people think aging is already solved.

[Antonio2014]

They are so many compounds that extend life of mouses that people think aging is already solved.

 

 

And they are most probably wrong. The only realistic therapies I know of are the SENS ones, and, in the 15 years elapsed since their discovery in 2000, progress has been slow (for lack of funding). Unless a billionaire suddenly likes the idea and injects lots of money in the field, I think there is a real possibility that we will have to wait at least half a century until these therapies reach the clinic. And even with proper funding, SRF says that we will have to wait around 25-30 years to have working therapies on mice, not humans. So I think I will probably need cryonics.

 

As for AI: We are applying computers to medical research for some decades now. Think for example on protein folding. What disease has protein folding software cured? Folding@Home has been computing for around 15 years now. They have (more or less) the fastest supercomputer in the world, and they haven't cured any single disease. Yeah, they publish papers, and so do other computing projects. But have they cured something? There are now 42 phase III trials for AD, and AFAIK none of them comes from a computer folding project. Computers can help, yes, but they aren't so powerful as some people think.

Edited by Antonio2014, 07 July 2015 - 07:47 AM.

[to age or not to age]

I think the conclusion is right: researchers are playing politics. There many religious people out there who feel cognitive dissonance thinking about immortality. Anytime you need mass support you have to put information in a form that they can digest. There are presidents who are closeted atheists. Unfortunately, in our current culture for a president to say that he is not religious is synonymous to not getting enough votes. And they don't want to educate the public, they want votes. Similarly, researches want funding. Religion is one aspect of it. But aging and immortality effects all aspects of life and is connected to all our beliefs in one way or another. For example, many people today won't get that opportunity. If you're in your 70-80s, there is little chance that you'll live indefinitely. If you're in your twenties, there is hope for you. It just shows how unequal we are when it comes to opportunities, how little control over our lives we really have and that people often get rewarded or punished by absolute randomness. Thinking that older humans you loved are dead or will probably die, but you might get an opportunity to live almost indefinitely is a bit of a brainfuck for many people. There is a lot of randomness now as well, but at least in the end everybody gets equally fucked by death. Furthermore, at least in the beginning, only privileged people will get opportunity to prolong their lives indefinitely. This makes the issue in some ways morally or psychologically incomprehensible for many people. The subject is very loaded. No matter what you say you'll piss many people. It is a minefield that many public people try to avoid.

You and Reason have accurately explained why I am making a filmed SERIES on aging.  I directed To Age Or Not To Age from 2007 - 2010, and over that time realized a couple of things:

The subject is a moving target. 

Most people's knee jerk reactions are full of misconceptions,

and by a wide margin, their initial responses are negative.

To me this means that we must educate, because Society

is part of the equation, and the tendency to retain the status quo 

is a huge hinderance to future advances. In fact, I suspect it mirrors

our biological systems - molecular pathways that go from friend to foe, seeking to keep

their former power.

The science is often circular, in that breakthroughs go in and out of fashion, are disproved

and then later revisited. So, our mission is vast.     

[niner]

 

They are so many compounds that extend life of mouses that people think aging is already solved.

 
And they are most probably wrong. The only realistic therapies I know of are the SENS ones, and, in the 15 years elapsed since their discovery in 2000, progress has been slow (for lack of funding). Unless a billionaire suddenly likes the idea and injects lots of money in the field, I think there is a real possibility that we will have to wait at least half a century until these therapies reach the clinic. And even with proper funding, SRF says that we will have to wait around 25-30 years to have working therapies on mice, not humans. So I think I will probably need cryonics.

 

They are indeed wrong, if they actually think the current mouse results mean aging is solved.  (I'm not convinced that's a widespread belief.)  It's much easier to extend life in mice than it is in humans.  Simpler organisms are easier still.  The various research projects of SENS are not therapies.  They are more like hypotheses at this point.  We don't yet know that they are going to work. 

 

As for AI: We are applying computers to medical research for some decades now. Think for example on protein folding. What disease has protein folding software cured? Folding@Home has been computing for around 15 years now. They have (more or less) the fastest supercomputer in the world, and they haven't cured any single disease. Yeah, they publish papers, and so do other computing projects. But have they cured something? There are now 42 phase III trials for AD, and AFAIK none of them comes from a computer folding project. Computers can help, yes, but they aren't so powerful as some people think.

Yes and no.  Speaking as a person who has been involved in a lot of computational chemistry, I'm happy to see someone pointing out that projects like FAH don't result in a lot of clinical benefit.  There's a lot of belief that faster computers are going to make a big difference, but there's not a hell of a lot of biology that desperately needs cycles.  What we need is smarter software.  Various kinds of computation regularly contribute to pharmaceutical discovery, but more compute speed isn't going to change that very much.  On the other hand, we are starting to see some really interesting new computational results that involve dealing with knowledge that is in the literature, but is too complicated for one person to adequately address.  I think this is an important development.  The researchers had to encode the knowledge themselves, and it was limited to one domain, albeit a complicated one.  The next level is getting machines to encode knowledge directly from the literature.

[corb]

Also, AI research gets more funding and has very big companies which try push it to the next level. Google pretty much buys every worthy AI startup that it sees and tries to acquire as many AI talents as it can. They are building an army there, when it comes to AI researchers.

 

I don't want to start this debate in this thread but, I just want to point out AI won't solve any of humanity's problems this century. It will take us at least 35 more years to build a basic AI and even at that point it would just be an analogue of a human at best. And we have thousands of humans - some of them quite brilliant with a very high IQ - working on these problems.

 

 

 

They are so many compounds that extend life of mouses that people think aging is already solved.

 
And they are most probably wrong. The only realistic therapies I know of are the SENS ones, and, in the 15 years elapsed since their discovery in 2000, progress has been slow (for lack of funding). Unless a billionaire suddenly likes the idea and injects lots of money in the field, I think there is a real possibility that we will have to wait at least half a century until these therapies reach the clinic. And even with proper funding, SRF says that we will have to wait around 25-30 years to have working therapies on mice, not humans. So I think I will probably need cryonics.

 

They are indeed wrong, if they actually think the current mouse results mean aging is solved.  (I'm not convinced that's a widespread belief.)  It's much easier to extend life in mice than it is in humans.  Simpler organisms are easier still.  The various research projects of SENS are not therapies.  They are more like hypotheses at this point.  We don't yet know that they are going to work.

 

I'd be surprised if anyone thinks that. Most of the mainstream researchers are skeptical we can even significantly affect aging still.

 

I'm hopeful the FDA and EMA (I think that's the EU agency dealing with this) finally look at aging as a disease because that means less mouse studies and more actual human trials. The only way forward for medicine is more human trials. Problem is it'd be very hard to summarize if a therapy works or not because our analytical tools when it comes to aging are very lacking and the lack of human trials for anti aging medicine has kept them lacking, because there is no need for them to be developed is what I suspect - not because it would be that hard for them to be developed. It's just a matter of statistics and since medical researches love doing statistics anyway I suspect that is the only reason these tools have not been developed properly yet.

[ceridwen]

Reversal of age related diseases would give a clear indication if the therapies work or not

[drew_ab]

Would human trials be problematic because the human life span is so long?

[Antonio2014]

I'm hopeful the FDA and EMA (I think that's the EU agency dealing with this) finally look at aging as a disease because that means less mouse studies and more actual human trials. The only way forward for medicine is more human trials. Problem is it'd be very hard to summarize if a therapy works or not because our analytical tools when it comes to aging are very lacking and the lack of human trials for anti aging medicine has kept them lacking, because there is no need for them to be developed is what I suspect - not because it would be that hard for them to be developed. It's just a matter of statistics and since medical researches love doing statistics anyway I suspect that is the only reason these tools have not been developed properly yet.

 

Are you talking about aging biomarkers? They haven't been found even in animals yet. Anyway, SENS doesn't depend on them. For each type of damage you can simply measure how that damage is reduced by a therapy (amyloid, lipofuscin or wathever). And thankfully, most of SENS damages are linked to a recognized disease, so you don't need to measure aging to get them approved.
 

Edited by Antonio2014, 08 July 2015 - 08:17 AM.

[corb]

Reversal of age related diseases would give a clear indication if the therapies work or not

 

Diseases rarely depend on a single factor.

Therapies have to be evaluated empirically.

It might be possible to get more insight into aging by trying to prevent the diseases from happening in middle aged people rather than trying to treat geriatrics which already have secondary symptoms which are much harder to treat.

Mainstream medicine has failed so far exactly because it allows people to get to the point when secondary symptoms develop and disease become an untraceable maze of defects.

The goal is to treat people of advanced age but that doesn't mean they are the best subjects for research.

 

Are you talking about aging biomarkers? They haven't been found even in animals yet. Anyway, SENS doesn't depend on them

 

All of the SENS therapies are based on (albeit hypothetical) biomarkers.

What I meant was we can't measure even those properly in vivo and a lot of the tests are expensive, meant for the lab not the clinic.

[Antonio2014]

All of the SENS therapies are based on (albeit hypothetical) biomarkers.

 

Nope. They aren't based on biomarkers of aging. They are based on forms of damage that contribute to aging. A biomarker of aging shows your biological age (there are several definitions of what that means, but basically they predict your remaining lifespan). Beta amyloid don't do that, nor the number of senescent cells, nor the number of disfunctional mithocondria, etc. Some people have, for example, more amyloid than others even if they die at the same age. Some people die from AD, others die at the same age but don't develop amyloid plaques, etc. There is no known biomarker of aging yet, but it's already known that amyloid plaques or Lewy bodies can kill you, etc.

 

Yes, some are difficult or expensive to measure, but there is progress on this independently of SENS (for example, florbetapir for beta-amyloid detection).

Edited by Antonio2014, 08 July 2015 - 10:00 PM.

[corb]

 

All of the SENS therapies are based on (albeit hypothetical) biomarkers.

 

Nope. They aren't based on biomarkers of aging. They are based on forms of damage that contribute to aging. A biomarker of aging shows your biological age (there are several definitions of what that means, but basically they predict your remaining lifespan). Beta amyloid don't do that, nor the number of senescent cells, nor the number of disfunctional mithocondria, etc. Some people have, for example, more amyloid than others even if they die at the same age. Some people die from AD, others die at the same age but don't develop amyloid plaques, etc. There is no known biomarker of aging yet, but it's already known that amyloid plaques or Lewy bodies can kill you, etc.

 

Yes, some are difficult or expensive to measure, but there is progress on this independently of SENS (for example, florbetapir for beta-amyloid detection).

 

 

Semantics.

 

 

In medicine, a biomarker is a measurable indicator of the severity or presence of some disease state. More generally a biomarker is anything that can be used as an indicator of a particular disease state or some other physiological state of an organism.

 

SENS listed a number of differences between a young and an old human organism, that is about as fitting in the definition of a biomarker as anything else if you look at aging as a disease.

 

Plaque accumulation is a good biomarker of aging even now, people with advanced atherosclerosis don't live extremely long with the condition. Abeta clumps aren't the only kind of plaques in your body.

[Antonio2014]

Let's cite your entire post.

 

 

Reversal of age related diseases would give a clear indication if the therapies work or not

 

Diseases rarely depend on a single factor.

Therapies have to be evaluated empirically.

It might be possible to get more insight into aging by trying to prevent the diseases from happening in middle aged people rather than trying to treat geriatrics which already have secondary symptoms which are much harder to treat.

Mainstream medicine has failed so far exactly because it allows people to get to the point when secondary symptoms develop and disease become an untraceable maze of defects.

The goal is to treat people of advanced age but that doesn't mean they are the best subjects for research.

 

Are you talking about aging biomarkers? They haven't been found even in animals yet. Anyway, SENS doesn't depend on them

 

All of the SENS therapies are based on (albeit hypothetical) biomarkers.

What I meant was we can't measure even those properly in vivo and a lot of the tests are expensive, meant for the lab not the clinic.

 

Clearly, we were talking about aging biomarkers, not disease biomarkers. They are very different things.