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Aubrey de Grey Comments on the “Hallmarks of Aging” Paper – Article by Reason

Aubrey de Grey Comments on the “Hallmarks of Aging” Paper – Article by Reason

The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
September 8, 2013
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The Hallmarks of Aging paper was published earlier this year. It is an outline by a group of noted researchers that divides up degenerative aging into what they believe are its fundamental causes, with extensive references to support their conclusions, and proposes research strategies aimed at building the means to address each of these causes. This is exactly what we want to see more of in the aging research community: deliberate, useful plans that follow the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) model of approaching aging.

Read through the Hallmarks of Aging and you’ll see that it is essentially a more mild-mannered and conservative restatement of the SENS approach to aging – written after more than ten years of advocacy and publication and persuasion within the scientific community by SENS supporters. To my eyes, the appearance of such things shows that SENS is winning the battle of ideas within the scientific community, and it is only a matter of time before it and similar repair-based efforts aimed at human rejuvenation dominate the field. Rightly so, too, and it can’t happen soon enough for my liking. SENS and SENS-like research is the only way we’re likely to see meaningful life extension technologies emerge before those of us in middle age now die, so the more of it taking place the better.

Aubrey de Grey, author of the original SENS proposals and now Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation that funds and guides rejuvenation research programs, is justifiably pleased by the existence of the Hallmarks of Aging. See this editorial in the latest Rejuvenation Research, for example:

A Divide-and-Conquer Assault on Aging: Mainstream at Last

Quote:

On June 6th, a review appeared concerning the state of aging research and the promising ways forward for the field. So far, so good. But this was not any old review. Here’s why: (a) it appeared in Cell, one of the most influential journals in biology; (b) it is huge by Cell’s standards – 24 pages, with well over 300 references; (c) all its five authors are exceptionally powerful opinion-formers – senior, hugely accomplished and respected scientists; (d) above all, it presents a dissection of aging into distinct (though inter-connected) processes and recommends a correspondingly multi-pronged (“divide and conquer”) approach to intervention.

It will not escape those familiar with SENS that this last feature is not precisely original, and it may arouse some consternation that no reference is made in the paper to that prior work. But do I care? Well, maybe a little – but really, hardly at all. SENS is not about me, nor even about SENS as currently formulated (though a depressing number of commentators in the field persist in presuming that it is). Rather, it is about challenging a profound, entrenched, and insidious dogma that has consumed biogerontology for the past 20 years, and which this new review finally – finally! – challenges (albeit somewhat diplomatically) with far more authority than I could ever muster.

Aging has been shown, over several decades, to consist of a multiplicity of loosely linked processes, implying that robust postponement of age-related ill-health requires a divide-and-conquer approach consisting of a panel of interventions. Because such an approach is really difficult to implement, gerontologists initially adopted a position of such extreme pessimism that all talk of intervention became unfashionable. The discovery of genetic and pharmacological ways to mimic [calorie restriction], after a brief period of confused disbelief, was so seductive as a way to raise the field’s profile that it was uncritically embraced as the fulcrum of translational gerontology for 20 years, but finally that particular emperor has been decisively shown to have no biomedically relevant clothes.

The publication of so authoritative a commentary adopting the “paleogerontological” position, that aging is indeed chaotic and complex and intervention will indeed require a panel of therapies, but now combined with evidence-based optimism as to the prospects for implementing such a panel, is a key step in the elevation of translational gerontology to a truly mature field.

In essence, as de Grey points out, work on aging has been following the wrong, slow, expensive, low-yield path for a couple of decades: the path of deciphering the mechanisms of calorie restriction and altering genes and metabolism to slightly slow down aging. This path cannot result in large gains in life expectancy and long-term health, and it cannot result in therapies that will greatly help people who are already old. What use is slowing down the accumulation of the damage of aging if you are already just a little more damage removed from death, and frail and suffering because of it, and the treatment will meaningfully alter none of that? If we want to add decades or more to our healthy life spans before we die, then rejuvenation and repair of damage are what is needed: ways to reverse frailty, remove suffering, and restore youthful function.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.  

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  It was originally published on FightAging.org.

Arguing by Induction for an Absence of Boredom in an Ageless, Greatly Extended Healthy Life – Article by Reason

Arguing by Induction for an Absence of Boredom in an Ageless, Greatly Extended Healthy Life – Article by Reason

The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
June 19, 2013
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Originally published on the Fight Aging! website.
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It is usually the case that the first knee-jerk reaction in opposition to increased human longevity is based on the mistaken belief that life-extension technologies would lead to people being ever more frail and decrepit for a very long time. This is far from the case, and it’s probably not even possible to cost-effectively engineer a society of long-lived frail people – even if that was the goal to hand. If you are frail and decrepit, then you have a high mortality rate due to the level of age-related cellular and molecular damage that is causing the failure and degeneration of your body and its organs. You won’t be around for long. No, the only way to engineer longer healthy life is to extend the period of youth and vitality, a time in which you have little age-related damage and your mortality rate is very low. Most present strategies are aimed to prolong that period of life, either by slowing the rate at which damage occurs (not so good) or finding ways to periodically repair the damage and thus rejuvenate the patient (much better).

Once people grasp that longevity science is the effort to make people younger for far longer, then the second knee-jerk objection arises. This is the belief that a very long-lived individual would become overwhelmed by boredom: they would run out of interest and novelty. This is by far the sillier objection, and there is absolutely no rational basis for it. Even a few moments of thought should convince you that there is far more to do and learn that you could achieve in a thousand life spans – and it’s a little early in the game to be objecting to enhanced longevity on the basis that you can’t think of what to do with life span number number 1001.

Considering boredom, futility, meaningless, and related matters, I noticed what appears to be an argument by induction in the article below. Mathematical induction is a tool used in formal proofs wherein if you can prove that something is generally true for n and n+1 (where n is a natural number), and then show that it is true for 1, then you can conclude it must be true for all natural numbers. If it is true for 1, then it must be true for 1+1 = 2, and true for 2+1 = 3, and so on.

Basics of an Induction Proof 

Life Extension Leads to Meaningless Days? NO! – by Extropia DaSilva

Person 1 lives a fulfilling and meaningful life for X number of years before that life is terminated by a sudden, massive heart attack. Now, imagine another person whom we shall label (not too creatively) ‘Person 2′. Person 2’s life follows the same general path as that of Person 1, with one exception: It is one day longer than Person 1’s was. Now ask yourself: Is there any reason to suppose that this day – let us assume it is a Tuesday – strikes Person 2 as being meaningless despite the fact that all Tuesdays (and, indeed, every other day in Person 2’s past) seemed worth living? Personally I cannot see any reason to suppose that this Tuesday should not be as worth living through as the previous day was. Person 2’s life was as meaningful as that of Person 1, and the extra day Person 2 lived to see did not negatively affect quality of life (it might have positively affected it, but that is another matter).

OK, so now imagine yet another person who goes by the label of… yes, you guessed it, Person 3. You can probably also guess that Person 3 lives one day longer than Person 2. Once again, I can think of no reason why, where we have two people who live meaningful lives but one lives one day longer, that extra day would not seem worth experiencing. Put another way: If possible, would Persons 2 and 1 rather not be dead on Wednesday (the last day for Person 3) when Monday and all preceding days were worth experiencing? So far as I can see, the answer to that question is, ‘yes’.

There seems to be no reason why this argument should not hold for any number of hypothetical people, each one of which lives one day longer than the last.

Unfortunately you can’t prove conjectures about aspects of human nature with induction (or not yet, at least). What you can do is use it, as above, to mount a more convincing argument. This one is somewhat akin to one of the standard lines in any debate between a person who is in favor of greatly extending healthy life versus someone who isn’t.

Advocate: So you are fine with aging and dying?

Deathist: Yes.

Advocate: So you are fine with dying right now, done and finished?

Deathist: Well, no.

Advocate: Why would you think any differently ten days, or a hundred days, or decades from now, if you still had your health and vigor?

Deathist: Um…

There seems to be a strange disconnect in many people’s minds, in which they are vigorously in favor of being alive right this instant or next week, but they nonetheless believe that their future self of years ahead will be of a different opinion and want to die. Now if you’re on the downhill slope of aging, in great pain, and your body is falling apart, desiring a stopping point is not unreasonable. (With the best of present options for those in that position being cryonics). But in a world of rejuvenation therapies, in which older life is just as healthy, low-risk, and full of possibility as younger life, what mysterious thing is going to make people want to die?

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.  

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  It was originally published on FightAging.org.

On Costs and Opportunity Costs of Aging – Article by Reason

On Costs and Opportunity Costs of Aging – Article by Reason

The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
April 7, 2013
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Originally published on the Fight Aging! website.

Few people seem terribly interested in noting the opportunity costs of aging, for all that a great deal of work goes into trying to build models for the direct costs. Insurers, government program administrators, and so forth, are all eager to put numbers to their potential future outlays – but they have fewer incentives to work on better numbers for the lost ability to earn that comes with advancing age. Here are some figures from a recent paper on dementia in the US, for example:

The estimated prevalence of dementia among persons older than 70 years of age in the United States in 2010 was 14.7%. The yearly monetary cost per person that was attributable to dementia was either $56,290 (95% confidence interval [CI], $42,746 to $69,834) or $41,689 (95% CI, $31,017 to $52,362), depending on the method used to value informal care. These individual costs suggest that the total monetary cost of dementia in 2010 was between $157 billion and $215 billion. Dementia represents a substantial financial burden on society, one that is similar to the financial burden of heart disease and cancer.

If you go digging around in US census data on income, or the quick summaries thereof, you’ll see that median income sits somewhere a little under $40,000/year in the prime earning years of life. It tapers off to a little more than half of that for surviving members of the 75 and older demographic. So while one of seven completely median older people incurs costs of roughly $40,000/year for dementia, all seven completely median older people suffer an opportunity cost of roughly $20,000/year as a result of becoming old. A range of income that might have been earned if still healthy and vigorous is no longer within reach.

These are very rough and ready comparisons, but you can see that even piling in a bunch of other direct medical costs for the rest of the population – cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and the other common foes – the opportunity costs of being old still look sizable in comparison. In another study that gives average medical costs over time for people in Japan aged between 40 and 80 followed over 13 years, the average yearly expenditure was in the ~$3,500 range, rising to more like ~$25,000 in the last year prior to death. The error bars for casual use of any of the numbers mentioned in this post are large – probably a factor of two, given all of the oddities and politics that goes into medical expenditures and recording of income, and especially when comparing data between different regions on the world. But you can still draw very rough conclusions about relative sizes.

Lastly, I should note that all of the above only considers the living. Once you get to the age 75 demographic in the US, half of the original population is dead, give or take. The dead accrue even higher opportunity costs than those mentioned above, as they have (for the most part) lost all ability to earn or contribute to building new things.

So aging causes a largely unseen cost to go along with what is seen, the cost of what might have been but for disability and death. As is often the case, the cost of research and development to build the means of rejuvenation is small in comparison to what is lost to aging – and also in comparison to what is spent in coping with the aftermath of loss rather than trying to prevent it.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.  

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  It was originally published on FightAging.org.

Announcements and October-November 2012 Update to Resources on Indefinite Life Extension

Announcements and October-November 2012 Update to Resources on Indefinite Life Extension

I expect be unavailable to publish The Rational Argumentator until circa November 22, 2012 – but, in the meantime, various new offerings have been posted for my readers.

In addition, I have recently been impressed by the significant contributions my computer has made to the World Community Grid Help Conquer Cancer distributed computing project. (You can see a presentation by one of the project’s lead scientists, Dr. Igor Jurisica, here.) About a month ago, the Help Conquer Cancer project was enhanced to allow computers’ Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to assist in the analysis of millions of experiments. My own recently enhanced computer has been participating heavily, which caused my worldwide ranking on World Community Grid to rise within a month from about 60,000th place to 26,744th place (updated every half-day) in terms of credits and 15,795th place in terms of results returned. In addition, for the totality of BOINC distributed computing projects, I have risen to the 98.2932nd percentile and a world rank of 42,446 in terms of total credits and the 99.5634th percentile and a world rank of 10,878 in terms of recent average credit. In the United States, I am ranked at 11,802nd place in terms of total BOINC credit earned.

I expect that my computer will continue to run at full capacity during the upcoming weeks, and indefinitely into the foreseeable future.

For your contemplation and enjoyment, I offer here the list of diverse and fascinating articles and videos that have been included in the Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE) page in October and early November of this year.

Articles

– “Nanoparticles Against Aging” – Science Daily and Asociación RUVID – October 3, 2012

– “Nanoparticles can deliver antiaging therapies” – Brian Wang – The Next Big Future – October 4, 2012

– “A Speculative Order of Arrival for Important Rejuvenation Therapies” – Reason – Fight Aging! – October 4, 2012

– “Therapy will use stem cells to heal heart” – Pauline Tam – October 4, 2012

– “Aubrey de Grey on Longevity Science” – Reason – Fight Aging! – October 5, 2012

– “Predicted sequence of Antiaging rejuvenation” – Brian Wang – The Next Big Future – October 5, 2012

– “Researchers use magnets to cause programmed cancer cell deaths” – Bob Yirka – October 8, 2012 

– “Lilly Alzheimer’s Drug Slows Mental Decline, Study Finds” – Shannon Pettypiece – October 8, 2012

– “Vitamin Variants Could Combat Cancer as Scientists Unravel B12 Secrets” – ScienceDaily and University of Kent – October 8, 2012

– “Human Immortality: Singularity Summit Looks Forward to the Day That Humans Can Live Forever” – Hamdan Azhar – Policymic – October 2012

– “Drug From Chinese ‘Thunder God Vine’ Slays Tumors in Mice” – Drew Armstrong – Bloomberg – October 17, 2012

– “82 Years of Technology Advances; but best yet to come” – Dick Pelletier – Transhumanity.net – October 25, 2012

– “New you by 2022: biotech enhancements will help you ‘grow young’” – Dick Pelletier – Positive Futurist – October 2012

– “Flu Vaccination May Increase Longevity” – Lyle J. Dennis, M.D. – Extreme Longevity – October 29, 2012

– “Dead as a Doornail?” – Peter Rothman – h+ Magazine – November 1, 2012

– “An Outcast Among Peers Gains Traction on Alzheimer’s Cure” – Jeanne Whalen – Wall Street Journal – November 9, 2012

 

Videos

Anthony Atala
Anthony Atala at TEDMED 2009
January 21, 2010

Ray Kurzweil

From Eliza Watson to Passing the Turing Test – Singularity Summit 2011

October 25, 2011

Nikola Danaylov

Ray Kurzweil on Singularity 1 on 1: Be Who You Would Like to Be – October 13, 2012