Large-scale global collaboration is the only hope to achieve our intimidating goal.
I agree to some degree however human nature, ego, cyncism/suspicion of any organization and stories of heroic breakthroughs by individuals tend to drive people towards thinking that if they too apply their talents individually then they can be the one to find a magic solution to such a vast and problem. "Large scale collaboration" ends up being thousands of of scientists and others working alone or in small groups pursuing many small leaps forward across many frontiers with funding being doled out piecemeal. I don't think this is necessarily a bad model as there isn't just one single bullet to eliminating death by aging but probably dozens or perhaps even hundreds. Large scale collaboration requires either governmental coordination, MNC's coming together to invest in the progress for financial gain or independent organations of NGOs and loosely affiliated non-profits like this one here. In my opinion, none of these will be our savior in terms of mounting a massive campaign against the diseases of aging which leaves us with our heroes at the edges of the frontier whether they be spokespeople for the cause or determined scienetists working on one particular niche or study making making micro advancments across the board.
I still don't know anything. 4 years of full on study and I still feel like a layman
Disturbing. I've spent 6 weeks reading a few key academic texts, googled a few dozen topics I'm interested in and already feel like I can start making some contributions at the macro-level.
Progress yes, but still no adequate progress. Mortality and morbidity end-points are "by definition" what we're interested in, and even state of the art damage or biomarker endpoints do not always predict them very well in short-lived models (which could in part be because all known useful biomarkers are barely ever combined or weighed).
As I suspected. So in essence it's more likely that there are many disperate markers (or even specific behaviors) that in conjunction tend to indicate the age of a cell or tissue and I further suspect that these vary from cell type to cell type across all species. That's very depressing if true.
In humans, both mortality and morbidity end-points themselves and the ability of biomarkers to predict them are exceptionally hard to assess, because we are so long lived.
But we do know many of the, i dunno, i'll make up a word here "macro-markers" that ultimately kill the elderly. Just googled and found that of the top 10 killers of elderly, 80% die from one of these...
diseases of the heart
malignant neoplasms (cancer)
cerebrovascular disease
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
diabetes mellitus
atherosclerosis and nephritis
nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis
Obviously a long list but are there intermediary states or precursors to these? Hypothetical question to some degree as obviously there are many types of heart disease, cancer, etc and I'm sure each issue has it's own genesis but there must be some recognizable patterns in the degeneration of the processes at the cellular level.
So it seems that we will be working in the dark for a long while, after which we will either find ourselves alive or dead.
Ironically, this is the first state diagram I drew in my quest to model life
Live --> Dead
From there I went to...
Dying --> Dead
Things get really complex from there though