8 replies to this topic

[John Doe]

The more I ponder the philosophy of life extension, the more surprised I am that, not only do researchers fail to study life extension, but also continue to support disease treatments for nevertheless mortal people. Approximately, my logic is that whatever suffering disease treatment prevents and modest life extension benefits disease treatment causes, these must surely pale in comparison to the potential good of research into aging, as opposed to disease, treatment (although I would say that aging is also a disease, but the most urgent).

For example, consider the researcher who could put a quantity of effort A into research for (1) cancer treatment or (2) aging. Intuitively, if A is invested in 1 instead of 2, more people, who would have otherwise experienced radical life extension, will "miss the boat". Alternatively, if A is invested in 2 instead of 1, a few more people will experience more suffering from cancer (although this is controversial because life extension and cancer prevention are most surely not mutually exclusive and those who experience life extension also must surely have some resistance to cancer). So I would argue that the cost of "missing the boat", and missing all of the benefits of an extremely long life, is morally greater than the modest cost of increased cancer suffering, or that the benefit of radically extending one person's life is so much greater than the benefit of treating the cancer of a person who is going to die soon anyway. Thus, at least most medical researcher are morally obligated to spend at least most of their effort into life extension research.

Two important points to note:

1. There is a slippery slope. If one medical researcher should switch, most of them should, until the vast majority of medical research is dedicated to stopping the world's most urgent problem, the imminent destruction of billions of people.

2. This slippery slope may be offset by diminishing returns. We cannot simply "throw more researchers at the problem". Although I acknowledge the slippery slope, I are sure that "throwing more researchers" at the problem now would result in a huge benefit, or that the effect of diminishing returns would not become significant for a while.

Comments?

Edited by John Doe, 13 June 2003 - 09:20 PM.

[francois-arouet]

To my mind, disease treatment research supersedes aging research for a very simple reason:

Diseases are what most people die of, not old age. When old age becomes a significantly large cause of death, the research will shift.

Furthermore, I think it's not only logical but necessary for disease prevention to be mature before techniques of indefinate life extension come into play. After all, turtles and other lower life forms have no predefined life span, and yet they die quite regularly. Also, would you really want to live 1000 years if 930 of them are spent with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or senile dementia?

[John Doe]

To my mind, disease treatment research supersedes aging research for a very simple reason:

Diseases are what most people die of, not old age. When old age becomes a significantly large cause of death, the research will shift.

Furthermore, I think it's not only logical but necessary for disease prevention to be mature before techniques of indefinate life extension come into play. After all, turtles and other lower life forms have no predefined life span, and yet they die quite regularly. Also, would you really want to live 1000 years if 930 of them are spent with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or senile dementia?

You make many excellent points.

Perhaps aging should be classified as a disease itself?

Is there no sense in which curing a person, who is going to die in a few decades anyway, of a disease irrational or at least a result of mistaken priorities?

Edited by John Doe, 05 July 2003 - 12:47 PM.

[Lazarus Long]

Perhaps aging should be classified as a disease itself?

Is there no sense in which curing a person, who is going to die in a few decades anyway, of a disease irrational or at least a result of mistaken priorities?

This was precisely the argument being addressed by Caliban in the paper he (Sebastian Sethe) wrote and I referrenced in my presentation at the Yale conference. It is a point that was also raised independently by Aubrey de Grey and Rafal Smigrodski.

It is one argument we make that I noticed resonates very well with the opposition as the more rational ones tend to come from the humanist tradition of medical science.

We see the death as sort of a "generic disease", many pathways all leading to the same result. So as in the argument of "not treating the symptoms but the cause" we counter it is insufficient to hack away at just at the branches leading to death but better to undercut the "root" of the problem. I am paraphrasing Rafal's wonderful talk. So we are addressing this and categorically disagree with the implications of the above statement.

We are not talking about life in purgatory but life in prime condition. No one who has been a cargiver for the elderly and worked in geriatrics will come over to our position if we are not addressing qualitity of life issues as well. The substantive issues is that we are.

In fact the leading causes of death for younger people worldwide are divided into two general categories that can both be argued as self induced, STD's (sexually transmitted disease) including AIDs and destructive behaviors involving drugs and weapons. By drugs I include legal and illegal and by weapons cars may have to be included with guns.

But the counterpoint is that by only treating the "symptoms" of these diseased behaviors we get a plethora of inadequate law to attempt the micromanagment of individual choice yet at any point that the perpetrators of the self inflicted injury cease to harm themselves the problem dissipates.

I am only using the example to demonstrate the problem that while we might be able to address disease in a generic sense and define it by seeing all forms of disease as ending in the same result the classification of disease in categories also must be expanded to include pathologies of society, as well as psychology, not just biology.

[ocsrazor]

Hi Gang,

This is an idea that has been floating around for about 20 years - that aging is the core process that causes heart disease, cancer, COPD, Alzheimer's, etc. and there is a tremendous amount of data to back this up. These diseases ARE aging.

francois-arouet is 100% wrong in his statement that aging is not a disease that most people die of. In one form or another the majority of people over the age of 40 die of one form or another of biological degradation that is linked to senescence. As many animal experiments have shown, when you go after the core causes of aging, you get animals with both extended lifespans and reduced time of senility at the end of their lives, i.e. they stay fit longer, and then degrade quickly. (The idea of long periods of slow degradation at the end of life is a common misconception, but it is rather silly from a biological standpoint)

John Doe - I don't think most disease researchers should stop what they are doing, but there should be an effort for researchers to talk about mechanisms of disease on a more system level scale. The reductionist paradigm, investigating the molecular causes of disease, has brought us very far, but to complete the job we need to link all the causes into a global explanation. Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rose have come very far in providing these types of explanations (an example - http://www.legendary...om/chartbg.html ). It is not that more researchers are needed, it is just a change in thinking about research directions, funding, and clinical treatment strategies that is needed.

Laz - agreed, looking at systems globally as well as microscopically is necessary to truly understand them.

Best,
Peter

[Lazarus Long]

The political risk that must be sooner or later be addressed by us is that "war' as a social concern is an issue that results in massive death. More importantly it may be the one that collectively we are most likely to face in our lifetime, and the longer we live the more likely this to be the case.

So not just combat itself, but the actual causality of conflict must also be scrutinized through this new lens. It should be examined behaviorally as an evolutionary psychology derivative of ancient biological paradigms that do not adequately fit into the model of convergent-emergent accelerated evolution.

This is why I have long tried to switch the common socio-economic debate to one that treats the paradigm in Human versus Natural Selection terms that views resources and the distribution as them as the core concern.

We are talking about one species {us}, achieving total control AND responsibility over "global resources” and the effect this entails. It is silly to think EITHER exclusively as an individual OR a collective when obviously these two represent polar perspectives that resolve behaviorally in a pragmatic social reality almost entirely situated in a shifting political/economic tide in the middle of the spectrum.

I will refrain from arguing angels on the heads of pins but the point is the same that brought about the creation of "Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières" in the first place.

And here is the big-little subtle global tie in...

This may be the new essence of the Immortality Meme that we would like to manifest. You see war is “disease” too, a SOCIAL DISEASE. It is an example of aberrant runaway evolutionary psychology that humans can RATIONALLY overcome in the same manner we use to intentionally apply individual choice for overcoming instinct in general and treat death as a universal disease. This is the core of the evolution of the rule of law. This is where only the fearless can probably handle the mental paradigm shift but it may be comforting to usurp theology here because we aren't the first generation to identify this logical pathway.

Here is the global power-play Politics is about to have doctors balance the power of lawyers, priests, and soldiers.

Medics are going to have to be more than just unarmed buddies in battle, they are about to get "empowered" with alternative socio-economic weapons (new tools involving communications and healer tech) and become moderating partners in conflict. It is about time the healers get to do more than only patch the wounded, how about a conflict resolution corps as regional co command for field operatives representing the diplomacy side?

Move the research funding model we discussed that treats a "War" on Cancer or Drugs with a new paradigm that involves unilateral disarmament and a change in "how" we compete, as well as the implied and applied methodologies.

By now I can only smile as I envision those of you shaking your heads and rolling your eyes thinking: "how in the hell did he change the subject like that?" [?] [!]

You bet I am dreaming.. Is it such a bad dream?

That is how ideas become ideals and ideology mutates into sociology.

A Global view of specifics? [8)]

It's hard to dance with the crowd when looking down from orbit; hard but not impossible )

Applied Memetic Technologies (commonly understood as Social Engineering) has never been easier but how do we put the profit model to work in a product exchange paradigm that creates a win/win outcome?

I should probably apologize for making heads spin with this post as I am confident that it will make some of you think I am even crazier than I am in fact already but I think the extent of the crossover is too important to ignore and it doesn't fit into large scale current political schema well but it fits in a paradigmatic manner that has a considerable positive force possible.

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/

I don't want to force anyone to go where this logic leads but the logic however stretched does make the conceptual bridge real and timely. We Declare War on Death, unilaterally and universally. A Total War fought on any and every imaginable front against death, the merger of Art, Science, and Spirituality through applied Reason. [":)]

[Jay the Avenger]

Perhaps aging should be classified as a disease itself?

I once looked up 'disease' in the dictionary (www.vandale.nl, a Dutch dictionary) which stated that the definition of disease is: a disturbance in life-processes.

The agingprocess slowly but surely corrupts your very own life-code (DNA), causing total organ-failure, resulting in death. If this is not a disturbance of life-processes, I don't know what is.

By my knowledge, the agingprocess is by definition a disease. It is the epitome of all life-process-disturbing situations at that!

Edited by Jay the Avenger, 06 July 2003 - 05:45 PM.

[ocsrazor]

The problem Jay is that aging is not defined as a disease by the majority of physicians or by medical researchers. There is very active resistance against this definition.

I had a very telling experience when I was VP for MaxLife Foundation. We were trying to get a bunch of aging researchers to sign a statement defining aging as a disease for research funding purposes. I went to a set of seminars on molecular mechanisms aging and one of the most senior and well respected aging researchers in the world gave a talk where he made almost exactly the same statements we had put down on paper. I approached him after the talk and told him I was thrilled by what he said. I asked him if he would be willing to put his name to the statement. He absolutely refused - he would say aging is a disease to a small group of his fellow researchers, but he would not say it to the general public.

Best,
Peter

[francois-arouet]

But the counterpoint is that by only treating the "symptoms" of these diseased behaviors we get a plethora of inadequate law to attempt the micromanagment of individual choice yet at any point that the perpetrators of the self inflicted injury cease to harm themselves the problem dissipates.

I should hope I don't have to elaborate the inherent societal dangers of considering self-destructive behavior a disease to be treated. Hopefully I misinterpret the sense in which the phrase is used. I don't personally wish to live in Huxley's Brave New World.

francois-arouet is 100% wrong in his statement that aging is not a disease that most people die of. In one form or another the majority of people over the age of 40 die of one form or another of biological degradation that is linked to senescence. As many animal experiments have shown, when you go after the core causes of aging, you get animals with both extended lifespans and reduced time of senility at the end of their lives, i.e. they stay fit longer, and then degrade quickly. (The idea of long periods of slow degradation at the end of life is a common misconception, but it is rather silly from a biological standpoint)

I feel I need to clarify myself here. I never said that "aging is not a disease that most people die of". In fact, I don't consider aging to be a disease. But, again, that's not what I said. I said, to wit, "Diseases are what most people die of, not old age." The statement is factually verifiable, and I assure you that it is true. "Most people" does not mean "the majority of people over the age of 40", and my usage of "old age" does not mean "biological degradation that is linked to senescence". I consider "death by old age" to mean "apoptosis caused by telomeric shortening."

Arguably, all biological degradation of someone over the age of 40 can be linked to senescence. A person who dies at 45 cannot be said to have died of old age, however, because it is common knowledge that people can routinely live to be 100. This hypothetical person died of a specific disease whose onset was certainly accelerated by senescence, but was not a direct or necessary result of it. You miss my point entirely. Even if you ameliorate or abrogate senescence, you will still be at risk of heart disease or cancer. In fact, you will be at increased risk of cancer.

The fact that a statistically insignificant number of people ever end up living to be over 100 should be proof enough that disease research must supersede aging research. If people cannot live to their full lifespan now anyway, what's the use in increasing that lifespan?

I direct you, ocsrazor, to the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology 2001;22:150-154. An article entitled "The Forensic Pathology of Nonagenarians and Centenarians: Do They Die of Old Age?" To answer the question the title gives, the article concludes (to paraphrase): "Usually.... no."

This was a much longer post, but upon reflection, I've decided not to interject in most of what is being said. It would be futile, since I'd be trying to use logic and reason to attack what reads like a fanatic manifesto.

Jay the Avenger:

You need to understand that the word "disease", as used in medical science, is not the word for which you gave a definition. In medicine, "disease" is a technical term, quite apart from the common usage of the word. If the definition you give were the medical standard, then war, suicide, McDonald's food, gangs, and slipping on ice would all have to be considered medical diseases. This is what is known as a reductio ad absurdum.

If you consider aging to be a disease, you have to consider DNA to be the disease vector, and you have to consider evolution to be the process of infection. There are good evolutionary reasons why humans don't live forever, and to change that is to necessarily remove oneself from the process of evolution on this planet.

A good general definition of "disease" that satisfies both your and the medical usage of the word would be: "anything that interrupts or prevents the normal functioning of a system." By that definition, aging cannot be considered a disease, because it is part of the normal functioning of the system that is your body. If aging were a result of, say, the amount of argon in the air we breathe, then I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But, as it is, aging is a result of your genotype. It can only be stopped by interrupting or preventing the normal functioning of the system that is your body, and therefore an anti-aging treatment better qualifies as a disease than aging itself does. A person who cannot come to terms with this series of facts is welcome to define disease however they want, but they should not expect medical science to accomodate their arbitrary use of language. *Looks at ocsrazor*