Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/11/-sp-live-forever-extend-life-calico-google-longevity

by forloop • 12 years ago

174 143 12 years ago

Please hurry up. I want to live for thousands of years.

You might be interested in joining the effort. Leaving a task to others is a failing strategy when everyone adopts the same strategy.

sadawi• 12 years ago

Of course, it's only a failing strategy if adopting that strategy causes everyone to adopt the same strategy, which is very unlikely for most people.

SwellJoe2• 12 years ago

As I get older (I'm about middle age if life expectancy is ~80), I think more about whether I'm really working on the most important thing I could be working on. I'm almost certainly not...but, I have the conflicting desires of making sure I have a reasonable income, decent savings for when I find myself unable to make a reasonable income, and taking big risks on wholly new things.

I have always spent a lot of my time on learning new things, but I find myself conflicted on whether I should be using what I know to maximize my impact in areas I am already an "expert" in, or self development in new areas where it could be years before I would be able to make any kind of impact but might be more important work.

In short: I'm not the person you're responding to, but I sympathize with both arguments. I think life extension (and disease prevention) is among the most important projects of humanity. But, and this is a big but, I have no background in the science behind it (except as someone that follows the field with interest via popular science channels). So, how would I join the effort? I've had my DNA "done" by 23andme, which probably contributes in some realistic, but small, way. But, getting involved in the actual science would take me years...years in which I still need to earn a living. Perhaps I should be looking into the data needs of this research. That's something I at least know a little bit about, having worked in scientific computing on the IT and data side.

arsalanb• 12 years ago

Good to see Peter Thiel on HN.

pjscott3• 12 years ago

Peter Thiel is spending big money on this. If anybody else would like to be able to say the same -- adjusted for the amount of money you have, of course -- then these guys are doing some very credible research, and they take donations:

http://www.sens.org/

slashnull5• 12 years ago

Fortunately, their approach seems to take into account the fact that most people's quality of life degrade very steeply after hitting, say, 70, and aim to augment this "quality" lifespan at the same time as the "total" lifespan.

Just ask Scott Adams if he would have wanted his father to live "well beyond 120".

chaostheory2• 12 years ago

Not counting things like physical pain, there seems to be degradation in brain function as well. e.g. Scammers like targeting the elderly

Retra5• 12 years ago

It is hard to know if that is due to brain function, technological advancement, or social factors (like, say, loneliness.)

slashnull5• 12 years ago

Another important point is that the relation between children, their parents and the society they live in would be changed in ways that are hard to predict.

See, the current assumption (or rather, the assumption that socially still stands but that is already shaken by the current lifespan augmentation) is that once a child is an adult, it won't be long before they will eventually see their parents either die (before modern medicine) or retire (the current paradigm), and have to replace them.

They will get hired fast, to get enough experience with their notional parents while those are still in the workforce, and then quickly be needed in a full-time, important gig.

It's also worth mentioning that the society, right now, is built on the idea that full-time stable jobs are widely available, on one hand, and a strict necessity for anyone to reach any kind of reasonable level of material comfort, social adjustment and general happiness. When not the only way to get basic human dignity.

That assumption is old as balls, and it's hard to see it surviving the current state of technology and medicine, let alone what's about to come.

So what will probably happen is that we'l keep telling people that working 40 hours a week in a job you had for the last, like, 5 years, is a basic necessity, yet that it's nearly impossible to get 'em, because old people are a) living forever b) holding on to those jobs because they're a strict requirement c) creating machines that do other people's 40hrs/week jobs.

So yeah, now that stable, full-time work has been overloaded with all that junk, the conditions that make this paradigm possible have to be saved whenever they're menaced. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only one here who thinks that the point of working is to make the world around me a better place, rather than a way to reach some kind of social status and incidentally keeping a relatively helpful system up and running.

With those prospects of limitless healthly lifespans, those limits would look like either

- capping the timespan people are allowed to work, so that they can't hog those precious, limited 40hrs/week stable jobs that young folks need to get some kind of implicit economic citizenship

- creating demand for those, by doing the old sorta-Keynesian thing and just creating jobs. This has worked great in the past, 'cause those jobs looked like building the Golden Gate, the Hoover dam, nailing down the basics of nuclear physics, getting jet engines to work, and then sending people on the freaking moon. But now it looks more like working as under-trained wannabe-SWAT police teams raiding teen's bedrooms for small-time weed deals, building the like five thousandth M1-A1 the USArmy doesn't need, and stuff like that.

My ideal, which I can't even seriously hold as I watch how most governments deal with their respective economic crises, is to strip that socioeconomic status away from stable employment.

I picture guaranteed basic income as the very first economic stepping stone of that project. See, I would gladly accept a basic living wage to stay home, cook for my family, take care of the house, and whatever, while dedicating exactly all, and not one second more, of my daily intellectually productive work timespan to something relevant, I don't know what. I think that, all things considered, I'd be more productive at my programming job working 3 hours per day than my current 8-ish.

But this is an socioeconomic rant I need to refine and turn into a set of attainable political measures, and then get off my butt and militate for them.

henrikschroder• 12 years ago

I can see a post-labour future, where automation has eaten so many jobs, and improved our quality of life so much, that noone really needs to work, you can have a job as a hobby if you want, but most people don't.

And as you point out, healthy elders won't retire. In a lot of countries there's talk of increasing the standard retirement age from 65, where it's been for many, many decades, which is a step in the completely wrong direction, since that just accelerates the job shortage. It's no coincidence that youth unemployment is higher than ever.

I can see the bright future, but I cannot see the way forward. Every political party is about keeping the status quo, keeping the 9-to-5-and-a-mortgage going, the left/right divide is about who owns the means of production, but both are firmly set on the notion that everyone should work. There are no incentives for existing power elites to change either. They will benefit immensely from the automation improvement, because the owners get all the profits, while the employees get less and less, since there's fewer and fewer of them.

It's interesting that the work week has been stuck at 8 hours for over a century, while worker productivity has increased magnitudes.

I don't know what to do, how to change this. What political steps need to be taken?

zo16• 12 years ago

Jobs are not a finite resource. More people = more jobs, and vice-versa. You make it seem like "jobs" just pop into existence, and then the labor force consumes however much of it it finds.

It's as if you can't conceive of the possibility that the two are intertwined and feed off one another in a constant feedback cycle. One method is "no job = no money = not a good idea to have kids = less workers". Another perhaps: "have job = have money = spend money = buy product = job needed to make said product". Or how about: "No job = try open a business"

msabalau• 12 years ago

We are already making progress on both quality as well as the length of life.

From the 2013 NBER working paper "Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the Elderly U.S. Population":

"For a typical person aged 65, life expectancy increased by 0.7 years between 1992 and 2005. Disability-free life expectancy increased by 1.6 years; disabled life expectancy fell by 0.9 years.

"The reduction in disabled life expectancy and increase in disability-free life expectancy is true for both genders and for non-whites as well as whites. Hence, morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death."

slashnull5• 12 years ago

Hell yeah!

kiteglue• 12 years ago

What about an invulnerable no form factor with beyond-time communications.

zw1234562• 12 years ago

I too would like to live forever, but one problem I see is that if you just extend peoples physical age but their minds become frozen in time, then all progress stops. It is well known that as people age their neural plasticity degrades and they loose the ability to learn anything new. I have observed this with my Dad who is 84. If people lived to be 1000 but their neural plasticity was gone by 120, we would still have slavery, women would not be able to vote and we would still be riding around in horse and buggy. There has been a lot of speculation that progress in technology or society or both has slowed are stopped. I think if true, it is likely due to an aging population. In addition to slowing the physical aging process, there would need to also be a way to somehow maintain peoples brain function, including neural plasticity.

andyrj• 12 years ago

Anything other than your speculation to back up your belief in individuals neural plasticity having anything to do with the social advances you mention? Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me. But everyone has a right to an opinion I suppose.

kcovia• 12 years ago

Check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for an argument for this in the science world:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R...

In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.

nitrogen• 12 years ago

Young people don't vote in part because they feel like there are too many old people voting for their votes to make a difference.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

"Anything other than your speculation to back up your belief in individuals neural plasticity having anything to do with the social advances you mention?"

You seem deeply confused. If those changes happened entirely because old people changed their minds, then individual neuroplasticity has a tremendous amount to do with the changes mentioned. On the flip side, in a world with no neuroplasticity at all, we would only see change when people are born with different views.

"Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me."

"Young people" and "old people" are not static sets. Imagine a world where young people change their mind frequently until 25, when they stop changing their mind and start voting. You would never see the mind of any individual over-25-year-old change, but the distribution of views in the over-25 population would still change as people enter and leave that population. If social change requires support of some proportion of that population, stopping people from leaving it will slow social change.

I have no strong opinion about just how much our world resembles that one, but your reasoning does not support your claim here. There is some evidence that neuroplasticity tends to decline as people age.

zo16• 12 years ago

Just like to add that voting isn't the only means to affecting change in this world.

anon42• 12 years ago

I don't think you can extrapolate like that. The computer revolution took place much faster than generation turnover did, for example. And if the young ever find themselves under the yoke of a bunch of really old people, with no prospects at all, you can bet the more violent ones will take it upon themselves to "even the scales". Adapt or perish will continue to hold, it might just not look quite like what you're used to.

chubot• 12 years ago

It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time (say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your personality and outlook is formed by age 30.

If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generations will tend to cluster together socially, to the exclusion of another. They will have come of age with the same events. You already hear people in their 30's talking about how they don't understand what teenagers are doing (Snapchat, etc.). Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would have to be an expert in history to even relate to people.

People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them. I mean it would be hard to imagine this NOT happening.

crdoconnor2• 12 years ago

People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible.

This generational warfare meme is pushed by, among others, Stan Druckenmiller:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene...

You'll note that they push both sides at once. Boomers are told that millenials are feckless and lazy. Millenials are told that Boomers screwed up the economy and are hogging all the wealth.

Divide and conquer.

It's working, too.

walterbell3• 12 years ago

... Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would have to be an expert in history to even relate to people.

This already exists, since history often repeats itself as cyclical philosophy/law overlaid on technology fashion. Social groups have varying technological and cultural capacity for intergenerational memory and finance.

As media technology for influence/advocacy/propaganda has become commoditized, what may appear as non-deterministic weather patterns of techno-socio-political fashion, could also be viewed as intergenerational economic warfare. Albert Brooks novel 2030 covers some of these themes in a future dystopia.

Imagine if 32 generations were concurrently using the same words, to represent very different questions, goals, values. Imagine if one generation was unknowingly influenced by 32 past generations, all advocating to be memetically reborn. Imagine if 32 possible-future generations were advocating for the opportunity to come into sequential or concurrent existence.

... You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them.

Historically, such fighting has been more physical than informational. The web, with sites like HN, move that balance towards the latter. If a corporation or foundation is immortal, how does the identity of that corporation change over time as constituent humans are gradually swapped out?

Here is a recent summary of policy advocacy using intergenerational financial capacity to influence single-generation humans, "..this book illuminates how elite consultants have adopted grassroots advocacy tactics for paying clients. Rather than being dismissed as mere 'astroturf', these consultants' campaigns should be seen as having real effects on political participation and policymaking", http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IO0E69E/

xefer• 12 years ago

I've always wondered if the average human lifespan is somehow implicitly factored into interest rates. If people lived to 1000+ years old, a small investment made early in life could potentially balloon into incredible wealth given even relatively conservative investments. Obviously political and financial stability could have huge impacts too. I have to imagine multi-century-long held accounts would have an impact

rdmcfee• 12 years ago

Does it not seem possible that many of the factors leading to this gender grouping are influenced by biological age? For example, research shows that our brains are hugely influenceable until our mid to late 20's. At that point major pathways have been established which influence our thinking for the rest of our lives.

What if we counter aging such that people never leave their peak physical condition? (25 years old?)

Will they still group by the generation in which they were born?

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25. Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved).

Aging is a phenomenally hard problem. I have no idea whether it will be "solved" in 25 years or 100 or 2500 or never... but I'd imagine that neural plasticity is but a small subproblem of it.

mistercow2• 12 years ago

Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25.

Is there documented evidence of this. Some people do better than others, obviously, but I find it hard to believe that anyone has literally as much plasticity at 90 as they did at 25.

Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved).

Probably should be more specific than "drugs", since most drugs have no effect on neuroplasticity, and some drugs appear to actually enhance it.

modeless• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone needs to worry about a hypothetical future where medical science has cured cancer, Alzheimer's, and every other disease, but somehow has failed to restore neuroplasticity. Restoring neuroplasticity is a tiny, easy task compared to all the other breakthroughs needed to reverse or stop aging.

reasonattlm6• 12 years ago

Absolutely. There is something about the defeat of degenerative aging as a topic that causes people to fall off the rails of simple logic and common sense that they'll apply to every other type of medical research currently in progress.

The goal in the research community is health assurance, so of course every aspect of aging that impacts health will be addressed. The goal of people who are in the market for health assurance technologies will also be for all aspects of aging that impact health and function to be addressed. So it seems rather unlikely outside of dystopian fiction that we'll run into a situation in which everything except aspect X gets fixed.

This is especially true because the hundreds of distinct manifestations of degenerative aging are caused at root by only a small handful of distinct types of damage [1] resulting from the normal operation of metabolism. Effective treatments will be those that repair the root cause damage, each damage repair approach (and especially in conjunction with the other approaches) being capable of treating and preventing whole swathes of age-related conditions. So it would be exceedingly implausible for any particular aspect of aging to stand alone and unaffected by repair strategies for aging.

[1] http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

cafebeen• 12 years ago

Any evidence to qualify the "tiny, easy task" claim? IIRC, plasticity likely involves interactions of many neurons and is not well understood...

mistercow2• 12 years ago

Fixing loss of brain plasticity is definitely part of the problem that needs to be solved, but I suspect we'll get there before we extend life expectancy to 120 regardless.

thangalin• 12 years ago

Valproate, valproic acid, and sodium butyrate affect histone deacetylase, which might help rejuvenate brain plasticity. See also:

* http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010....

* http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-r...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_of_intelligence

DanBC• 12 years ago

Valproate is used as an anti-epileptic and as a mood stabiliser. There are some risks of PCOS for women, but those risks have never been explained properly to me.

_greim_• 12 years ago

Let's assume that we did in fact solve every aspect of aging except somehow for neural plasticity, and that this did in fact cause social progress to freeze.

Would you be okay with killing fifty million people per year, perpetually, in order to achieve some ideal vision of social progress? Wouldn't that make you worse than all the evil dictators in history, combined?

I'd argue that this isn't a position we can seriously consider while maintaining our essential humanity.

iwince2• 12 years ago

Aging does not necessarily stop the ability to learn anything new. You cited your dad so I'll cite mine, he taught himself assembly programming for fun when he was in his late 60's. He lived to be 75 but always challenged himself to learn and do new things.

"There is solid evidence that neurogenesis (birth of brain cells) occurs in the adult, mammalian brain—and such changes can persist well into old age."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

Here's another case cited in the same article above, "His father’s story was firsthand evidence that a ‘late recovery’ could occur even with a massive lesion in an elderly person."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

reasonattlm6• 12 years ago

Nice to see more press on the Palo Alto Longevity Prize; the whole point of the exercise is to do what they are doing very loudly.

Establishing a research prize is a form of investment in progress only available in the philanthropic world. At the very high level it is easy to say that philanthropists pay people to work on specific tasks. This is simple enough for smaller amounts: transfer a few thousand dollars to a research group and you have bought a very small slice of the time and equipment needed to achieve any particular goal. When we start talking about much larger amounts of money, millions or tens of millions, then there are important secondary effects that occur when making such investments. In these amounts money has gravity, money makes people talk, and money changes behavior and expectations in a far larger demographic than just the recipients. This is well known, and thus investment activities, philanthropic and otherwise, become structured to best take advantage of this halo of effects. Most of the experience in doing this comes from the for-profit world: it doesn't take too long spent following the venture capital industry to see that investment is a lot more complicated than choosing a target and writing a check, and this is exactly because there are many secondary effects of a large investment that can be structured and harvested if investors go about it in the right way.

I theorize that the reason why research prizes remain comparatively rare is that firstly they are an investment strategy restricted to philanthropy, and thus people with the money to burn have little direct experience, and secondly the whole point of the exercise is not in fact paying people to do things directly, but rather creating a situation in which near all of the benefit is realized through the secondary effects generated by the highly publicized existence of a large sum of money. A research prize works by being a sort of extended publicity drive and networking event conducted over a span of years, a beacon to draw attention to teams laboring in obscurity, attract new teams, and raise their odds of obtaining funding. Connections are made and newly invigorated initiatives run beneath the light of a large sum of prize money, but at the end of the day that money becomes more or less irrelevant. It wasn't the important thing, it was merely the ignition point for a much greater blaze of investment and publicity. By the time a team wins, they are typically in a position to raise far more funding than the prize amount provides.

The ideal end result is that a field of science and technology is rejuvenated, taken from obscurity and thrust into the public eye, made attractive to investors, and numerous groups are given the attention and funding they need to carry on independently. This is how it worked for the Ansari X Prize for suborbital flight, and more quietly, for the Mprize for longevity science: in both cases the entire field changed as a result of the existence of the prize and the efforts of the prize organization to draw attention, change minds, and build new networks. But the award of money wasn't the transformative act, and in fact that award didn't really occur at all for the Mprize, but rather change was created through the sum of all of the surrounding effects.

So consider this: people who arrive at the state of being wealthy and wanting to change the world through philanthropy, often after decades of for-profit investment participation, don't have much in the way of comparable experience to guide them in the establishment and operation of research prizes. Thus creation of a research prize falls low in the list of strategies under consideration by high net worth philanthropists. Few people do it, and so there are few examples from which others can learn. It is the standard vicious circle of development, in which steady, grinding bootstrapping is the only way to create change.

Why care? Because research prizes work well. They work exceedingly well. Depending on how you care to plug numbers into equations, a well-run prize of $10 million will generate $150 to $500 million in investment in an industry, and that is just the easily measured result. Just as important is the following change and growth enabled by that initial burst of attention and funding. The Ansari X Prize spawned a number of other prizes in various industries, but I think it remains the case that medicine and biotechnology is poorly served in this respect. Outside of the efforts of the X Prize Foundation, the New Organ prizes, and other independent efforts such as the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, there is little going on. Given the proven utility of prizes there should be many more of them, and yet there are not.

stanmancan• 12 years ago

I've always wondered what are the implications of extending life span and curing certain diseases that kill millions every year. What happens when all the sudden everybody lives 20% longer and some of the major killers heart disease, cancer) aren't a problem. Things like over population, resources and such.

morbius• 12 years ago

In most industrialized countries, the population has actually been declining. Low survival rates of children in Middle Eastern and African states and the lack of easily accessible contraceptives (or cultural implications of using contraceptives) have led to a dramatic upshoot in population there. With more education and the eradication of disease, this won't be as big of a problem in the future as it currently is now.

reasonattlm6• 12 years ago

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/

"A common objection against starting a large-scale biomedical war on aging is the fear of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation). This fear is only exacerbated by the fact that no detailed demographic projections for radical life extension scenario have been conducted so far. This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging. A general conclusion of this study is that population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations."

eveningcoffee• 12 years ago

This has proven to not be a problem in Europe in general and in Asia in Japan.

In other continents, yes this would become a huge problem. Well, it actually is already today.

mikeash3• 12 years ago

Japan's looming demographic crunch is thought to be a massive challenge for the country in coming decades. To say they've proven not to have this problem is like saying that falling off a building isn't a problem, because this guy is halfway down and still doing fine.

kirse• 12 years ago

I always see anti-aging research as an expression of our inbuilt need for hope and significance (a desire to be known for eternity). It's far more philosophical than scientific. Many have concluded there is no meaningful eternity, and thus they seek to construct their own hope through anti-aging research.

So it's slightly ironic that the article mentions anti-aging research as needing to address a "root cause", when in reality there's a deeper spiritual need at work. And so the religion of science presses onward, simultaneously discarding all notions of spirituality while (quite obviously) answering the same fundamental philosophical questions and needs in it's own way.

mikeash3• 12 years ago

Because the desire to conquer aging couldn't possibly be a simple preference for living over dying.

Gatsky• 12 years ago

What kirse is talking about is a real thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

You could say the same thing about curing small pox or any disease. Aging is just a really widespread one.

JoshTriplett• 12 years ago

Forget about being known. Quoting Woody Allen: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

reasonattlm6• 12 years ago

One of the things that rarely makes it to the press is that all of these efforts are not equal in their likelihood of producing therapies that are useful for old people.

A good 95%+ of the funding and interest in aging at present still goes towards investigation only, no attempt or thought on therapies. The Ellison Medical Foundation fell into this category, as aging was only an incidental part of the Foundation's plan. The point was molecular biology, and aging just happened to be one of the better fields to exercise that goal. So the EMF simply expanded some of the NIA study programs and arguably did nothing meaningful to advance progress towards therapies for aging.

Then 95%+ of the sliver of funding and interest that does aim to extend life goes towards things that have absolutely no hope of meaningful results. They are generally focused on trying to understand metabolism sufficiently well to slow aging slightly. An over the top ambitious goal in this area is adding seven years to life spans over the next 20 years - that's the Longevity Dividend proposal. There is no concrete plan, nowhere near the level of understanding needed to even have a plan, and so people pick at proteins and mechanisms one by one that might be linked to calorie restriction or autophagy or other longevity-associated mechanisms. Look at the past fifteen years of very expensive and entirely fruitless sirtuin research to see how this will go over the next decade. The research community is gearing up to spend billions more on mTOR-related work, and the expectation of outcomes should be exactly the same: knowledge, but not therapies.

Genetics is another area of favor at the moment, but is just another facet of "let's mess with metabolism" to try to find ways to slow down the accumulation of damage in this vastly complex poorly understood system. There is an argument to say that all of this focus on things that won't really help much is in fact just a new way for researchers to draw in new funding to the established goal of mapping metabolism.

Since aging is damage, slowing damage is pretty useless for old people. They won't benefit from that approach at all. If we're going to wait around for the next few decades for treatments, I want to see rejuvenation at the end of the line instead of merely tinkering the system to damage itself more slowly. Rejuvenation means repair: if aging is damage, then rejuvenation is repairing that damage.

So the vast unknowns in aging are not related to the actual damage itself, but rather how the damage interacts and progresses in the highly complex apparatus of our biology. There is a very good catalog of the biochemical damage that causes aging, the direct results of the correct operation of metabolism, not caused by other forms of damage. This is the list of distinctive differences between old tissue and young tissue. That catalog was built over the past century and hasn't been expanded since the late 1980s, so it is reasonable to think that all the important stuff for now is captured.

We could bypass the vast complexity of the "mess with metabolism" approach to slowing aging and instead try to repair the damage. This is much better as there are concrete plans for doing so, and so much is known of the damage that there are numerous very detailed proposals for producing repair therapies. If you can repair the damage then you don't need to know how it progresses in detail from moment to moment, or which form is more important, or how exactly it causes age-related disease. Just fix it. The analogous situation is rust in an ornate, complex, load-bearing metal structure: rust is simple, the structure is complicated, so the results of rust over time will be very complicated. Do you build models and analyse the molecular progression of rust in ever more detail to figure out how to build better structures, or do you just paint the thing and rustproof it every now and again? One of those paths is clearly better than the other.

This is why I don't expect great things from Calico, as Calico is funding the same mainstream approach to aging (mess with metabolism, drug discovery, try to slow aging) that will do a lot for knowledge and next to nothing for practical outcomes to extend life and rejuvenate the old. They won't fund the right path, which is to say SENS and related repair-based approaches, until those approaches have completed their disruption of the aging research field and gathered sufficient support that no-one has to specify repair-based approaches as being their approach, because it is just assumed that that is what is meant by aging research.

xaa• 12 years ago

Well, if SENS has the answer, the TFA has a $1M incentive for them to prove it, since this prize isn't about mechanism at all.

I think the idea of focusing on understanding and slowing the accumulation of damage is partially based on the assumption, or hope, that the body can repair itself, or be stimulated to repair itself, if damage accumulation is slowed enough. In particular, if damage to the repair mechanisms themselves (e.g., stem cells) is slowed sufficiently.

If you have kept up with drug development news you will know that target-based approaches and other highly complex interventions have almost uniformly failed. To this day, we can't and don't design interventions based on the understanding of systems, we just see that a drug inhibits, say, gliomas, and find out the mechanism later, possibly after FDA approval. If we can't even do this for diseases that are simple compared to aging, how do you think a highly complex and interdependent set of interventions as proposed by de Grey is going to work out?

Many repair-based approaches are proposing we build a rocket to the moon when we can't even build airplanes.

angrybits• 12 years ago

This scares the hell out of me from a retirement planning perspective. If I outlive my savings, what then?

landryraccoon• 12 years ago

If people lived forever, why would they ever retire? I imagine you'd take a 5 year sabbatical every 20 years or so and you'd probably even head to school a bunch of times to change careers if you got bored of centuries of the same vocation.

jqm8• 12 years ago

Who is going to hire you? Try getting a job at 62 right now.

jmartinpetersen2• 12 years ago

This is where you consider buying a life annuity from a life insurance company if this really concerns you.

zaphoyd• 12 years ago

How would a dramatic breakthrough in longevity affect the solvency of life insurance/annuity companies?

VLM• 12 years ago

You could argue, fairly successfully, that the existing medical system is oriented around extracting all money from people before and shortly after their death. Its a very common problem at this time. So at least its not unknown ground.

eagsalazar22• 12 years ago

I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea. Of course I, selfishly, would love to live longer but doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster.

While we're at it why don't we just solve aging, provide infinite food supply, and eliminate predation for deer. That would be a great idea right? No way that would have any negative side effects, right?

Ilverin• 12 years ago

"doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster"

Over the past centuries, human life expectancy has increased greatly and yet we have a much higher quality of life. It's an extraordinary claim to suggest that the continuance of this already-existing trend is 'almost guaranteed to be a disaster'.

adrianlmm2• 12 years ago

we have a much higher quality

Who is we?

tmuir• 12 years ago

The decline of global pirate population has correlated strongly with the rise of global temperatures, too.

eagsalazar22• 12 years ago

Human longevity (and population) isn't just about us, it is about the impact on our environment which is turning out, already to be an unqualified disaster for our planet.

Also, if you count only people who reached adulthood and eliminate early deaths from injury which were common in adults between 25-45 yrs old, life expectancy and height are only now catching back up to the paleolithic.

jqm8• 12 years ago

well, to be fair, if not an outright disaster, we are creating a bit of mess with so many people at this standard of living...

radicalbyte• 12 years ago

Extending human life span to 200 years would be the single biggest thing you could do to combat global warming..

mikerichards• 12 years ago

I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea

I don't what comments you're reading, but as usual with topics of this nature on HN, the comments are sadly negative.

reasonattlm6• 12 years ago

Everyone who thinks that curing aging is a terrible idea should, in detail, outline the problems they foresee being worse than more than 100,000 painful, drawn-out deaths every day, along with a continuing population of hundreds of millions suffering continually from the most terrible and limiting conditions.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

"Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded from humankind a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed."

biomimic4• 12 years ago

You are essentially also saying "I do not want to make more money because I'll have to pay more taxes"

Birds are also the only ones that should be flying.

adrianlmm2• 12 years ago

This calls for a reform to the penitentiary system, someone condemned to life in prisson that can live 120 years will cost more to the state than someone that can live 80.

As always, goverment is to late to react.

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!

From HPMOR.

EGreg• 12 years ago

Well with the plunging birth rates in developed countries, I think this would be feasible. Robots and automation would solve the economic issues of having an inverted pyramid entering the workforce. We would in a sense become long-lived rich eloi.

However in pockets of the world which won't use contraception - such as religious states, or poor areas, there will be age-old issue of producing a lot of babies who go and consume the resources of the "1st world". These places still exist on earth and the lives produced there are just as valuable so the ethical question would be, how would the rich countries deny the life extending medicine and procedures to others? It almost has to be a function of population growth.

I wanted to write a novel one day about the year 2278 when a couple of married Elders finally decides to have children and therefore forfeits their access to prolonging their life more than 50 years. The idea is that it would become one or the other.

kaybe• 12 years ago

I guess there could be religious arguments for not using the life extending medicine, since god didn't make humans with that longer life-span. So if there are arguments against contraception, they could also be used against long life.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Blood transfusions are old and safe tech. I don't see any reason why you couldn't right now go into a nursing home and begin intensive transfusion therapy and see what happened. in fact, the weird thing here is that only Stanford is doing something like this.

Which leads me to believe that one of the real obstacles here is going to be the legalities and logistics of actually testing something and bringing it to market. If you have a cough and I give you a pill, either you stop coughing or you don't. We have a very tight feedback loop: in the order of hours or days. But if you're 50-years-old and want to live another ten years? We just can't wait around for 40-year feedback loops. It simply won't work.

So I'm convinced that some improvement is possible over the next decade: perhaps on the order of 10-20 extra years of life. But treatment is going to exist in a really weird grey area. You could either travel to a country with little or no drug oversight or you could try getting off-label or black market treatments. The drug approval system in the U.S. is simply not equipped to make serious decisions about medicines with these kinds of effects.

Sidebar: the interesting question is whether or not we're close to the point where increases in lifespan happen faster than aging itself: have we reached the 1000-year person point? I'm almost certain the answer is no, but I think we may be within 100 years of it. My intuition is that as we keep pushing the human biological machine, it will find new and unique ways of breaking down. The most obvious example is cancer. The longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer -- and we're a long ways from a cure for cancer. Still, this is a very fascinating field to watch.

gus_massa• 12 years ago

[Ignoring the moral/legal problem ...]

One problem is the unknown blood transmitted illness (something like AIDS, or Hepatitis C, some years ago before the blood tests were common). In the normal case, you are in an ER and your options are dying now or a blood transfusion with a low probability of an unknown illness. In this case, you are trying to live for a looong time, and receive a lot of transfusions. Each transfusion increase the probability of a problem, and the possibility that your life expectancy is reduced.

adaml_623• 12 years ago

[Ignoring the increasing moral problem ...]

If you know the source of your blood transfusions because you're paying someone for it then that problem can be removed

elorant• 12 years ago

I don’t want just to live longer, I want to live longer while in a relatively good shape. Because if we are to live 30 years more with the physique of a 90 year old man then what’s the point. If on the other hand I could have the physique of a 70 year old man while I’m 100+ that sounds like a good deal.

jqm8• 12 years ago

Agreed, although I'm holding out for 30 year old physique.

I would rather live 60 years in a 30 year old body/mind than 120 years in an 80 year old body/mind.

From my perspective, aging is a more serious problem to be solved then death.

mathgeek• 12 years ago

I would rather live 60 years in a 30 year old body/mind than 120 years in an 80 year old body/mind.

As someone who's lost both parents and all four grandparents before I turned 31, I take the experience of my grandfather in his late 80's to mind. He was often told that the surgeries that he could have done to relieve the pain of a body that was breaking down weren't worth it because he wouldn't likely live long enough to really benefit. I imagine that if, at age 90, you had another 20-30 years, science could do some amazing things to your body to keep you moving forward.

pjscott3• 12 years ago

Well then good news! The people mentioned in this article are generally trying to slow or reverse the effects of aging, including the weakening of skeletal muscles.

davesque• 12 years ago

I just hope such medical advances would be available to everyone and not just a privileged few who can afford it.

biomimic4• 12 years ago

It depends on the companies working on this like Google's Calico Labs http://calicolabs.com Berkeley Labs GenoPharmix http://genopharmix.com Genentech or Craig Ventors http://humanlongevity

reasonattlm6• 12 years ago

The most likely form of longevity assurance technologies will be infusions. Think about the cost of, say, TNF inhibitors today. It is a mass-produced biologic that a bored technician runs into you through an IV, and is $5-8K per procedure last time I looked.

The really expensive medicine today is either experimental (new technologies still in development) or requires the attention of a lot of highly trained staff for some time (surgeries, chemotherapies).

But the mature longevity assurance technologies of tomorrow will not be individualized, since everyone ages due to the same root causes. They will be mass produced infusions of nanoparticles, gene therapy vectors, drugs to break down metabolic byproducts, that sort of thing. Factories will make them in bulk, and clinical assistants will inject a program of these things into individual patients once every ten to twenty years. Since everyone will benefit, the individual cost will drop with the massive scale of sales and delivery.

mhb• 12 years ago

Yeah. Like the way the elite have kept big screen TVs and pocket computer/phones for only themselves.

pjscott3• 12 years ago

The target market is very, very large. That bodes well for prices, since the costs of R&D and red tape can be amortized across a huge number of people and long spans of time.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

This is a very well reported article and I'm grateful it was submitted here for discussion. The article definitely deserves a thoughtful read from beginning to end, as it raises a lot of issues that will have to be considered as research on human aging continues. The comments here posted before this one are interesting too.

Having read the article and the previous comments, I'll jump in with an observation that I've had so much occasion to make here on Hacker News that it is a FAQ block of text I keep off-line for posting here. What's really amazing about fighting human aging is that even with the haphazard approach of tackling one disease at a time, humankind has already made enormous progress in increasing healthy lifespan into old age. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[1] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[2]

An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[3] Provides some of the background.

Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[4]

You can look up websites that will take information you provide and report a personal life expectancy for you based on the information you provide.[5] You may be surprised by what you see. The online longevity calculators are based on historical cohort data and do not reflect any further progress in medicine, public health, or lifestyle improvement that may occur between now and your predicted age of death.

[1] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

[2] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[4] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

[5] Various life-expectancy calculators:

http://www.livingto100.com/

(My calculated life expectancy a year or two ago predicted I would outlive my mother's current age, and three of my four grandparents.)

http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html

(My life expectancy a year or two ago as calculated by this was lower than for the website above. This website is especially cool, because it shows a confidence interval around the estimate.)

tedsanders• 12 years ago

In 1850, the average 80 year old lived to be 86 years old.

In 2011, the average 80 year old lived to be 89 years old.

[1] http://ourworldindata.org/roser/presentation/online/Improvin... (press the right arrow key for the graph to pop up)

[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

Modern medicine has mostly benefited the young, not the old. The last 150 years of little progress makes me skeptical of claims about future life extension, though of course I'd love to be mistaken.

D-Coder• 12 years ago

Six more years vs nine more years is a 50% increase. Or looking at it another way, it's three solid years of life. That's pretty decent! Not even considering that for the first several decades after your starting point, medical technology hardly changed.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

And if you thought it was hard to get hired in tech at the age of 50, wait until you try at 100 :-)

On a more serious note, it is going to be a huge financial disaster if folks "suddenly" start living to 120. There are many many things which have nominal lifespans "baked in" and if that changes gradually the algorithm can be adjusted gradually but if it changes suddenly, that results in insufficient money collected to pay out promised payments.

When you get to a certain age (varies by individual) you start talking to or consulting retirement advisors. Those advisors will ask you something like "when do you want to retire?" and "what sort of net income do you want?" and they will take your expected lifetime (say 100) and tell you when you can stop working such that paying out at that rate will exhaust your savings when you hit 100. But if you roll with that plan and at 75 get a treatment that extends your life to 120, well that is something of a problem right?

zerocrates• 12 years ago

Individual financial planning is one thing, and then just think of pensions, or Social Security.

Blow up the actuarial tables by tacking so much onto the average lifespan and you'd really see some underfunded plans.

atallcostsky2• 12 years ago

This would be a problem of course, but I'm betting this is a problem most people would like to have. If my two options are: Die at 100, and not have to work for the last X years, or live an extra 20 years, with required working, I at least would prefer to live and work than to die and not work.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

Since I don't think changing the lifespan will change societal values much, and because of that I believe that statistically the likely outcome is 'want to work but can't find it.'

Being at the end of your life and unemployed is a markedly different experience than being at the beginning of your life and unemployed.

MrQuincle• 12 years ago

At some day it will be the case that we start living to 120. The retirement systems around the world, excuse me, the western world, already seem very brittle. I think the only lesson we can take from there is to improve the retirement system starting today. If we have to rely on managers at pension funds w.r.t. changes that are gonna happen, we won't be in a happy place when changes, inevitably, gonna happen. I think that many of the younger people already nowadays start to realize that much of these "promises" are void. If you are saving for yourself, but you trust "retirement advisors", you can just as well put it all in the big pot and cross your fingers.

biomimic4• 12 years ago

If we extend life to 120 it buys us more time to go for 150, then that buys us more time to go for 300 etc.

ChrisGranger• 12 years ago

Yes, this, exactly. I was trying to explain this to a friend the other day. We don't need to "cure death" all at once in order for humanity to achieve practical immortality. It will take significant effort, obviously, but I have no doubt we'll attain it as our understanding of biology gets ever more sophisticated. Whether or not we'll personally be around to see it is another matter.

Brakenshire• 12 years ago

A good parallel is an escape velocity.

But in practical terms in the here and now it is a nonsense. Life expectancy has been going up 1 year in every ten for a hundred years, and the pace of that increase has not increased.

jqm8• 12 years ago

There are so many inter-related factors involved with changing a system of this complexity. My fear is the creation of half living zombies that don't die, but who's brains have long since moved on. Zombies, who not incidentally, keep title to accumulated resources for very long periods of time and presumably hold office and vote.

This might sound bad... but as it sits right now, many people in their late 80's - 90's (not all I grant, but in my experience...) don't seem to be fully alive right now. They are often kind of half in and out of reality, and not at all the people they once were. They can't really contribute much (don't bother posting a link about a 90 year old who did such-and-such... it's a very glaring exception and we both know this). They take a lot of care. And, I can't imagine this is very pleasant state to be in either.

If the state of aging progresses, but somehow death is forestalled, I don't see this being any advance at all, but rather one of the nastiest things that could be done for the human race, both old and young. It seems like forestalling death without solving the problem of aging (likely a much harder problem) might be very doable soon. And it is not a good idea. There are many evolutionary reasons for death. It's not altogether a bad thing.

jeffreyrogers• 12 years ago

the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1%

It's probably significantly lower than that as well if you take out all the accidental deaths that occur in people's 20s.

On a more skeptical note, I'm very doubtful of any claims to predict timelines related to medical or technological advances. We've been trying for a long time and with much better funding to cure/treat things like AIDS and various cancers and only recently have we made significant progress on those fronts.

My general impression of modern medicine based on conversations with friends and family members in the medical field is that, while the cures are getting better, the best course of action is to take a conservative approach to life (avoid smoking, severely limit drinking, exercise and lift weights regularly, stay active, and keep using your brain), as this has much better odds of maintaining a high quality of life as you age than hoping modern medicine will be able to fix whatever's wrong with you.

spopejoy4• 12 years ago

Larry Ellison, co-founder of computer company Oracle, told his biographer Mark Wilson. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”

Succinct summary of the vapid naivete of zillionaires who can't incorporate death into their "but I've gotten everything else I want" mindset.

I applaud the research. But I don't mind a finite life. Death is part of the cycle that has nourished our planet from the beginning. There are definitely a host of unintended consequences we'll face when it's only poor folks who die "young".

Look at the bright side: future generations can enjoy a world without Larry!

zo16• 12 years ago

The world loses something when the sum of all a human's experiences are lost, forever. All that knowledge, experience, comprehension and interpretation of so many events and facts... Gone, in usually an instant.

It seems awfully wasteful, and I sincerely hope some day we overcome it. I believe we will all be better for it.

But sure, let's excuse the topic/problem by blaming it on the "naivete of zillionaires".

spopejoy4• 12 years ago

I don't see the logic in this.

We exist because other creatures pass away. They must so that we can eat them. Why is it a tragedy when the top predator dies, but not its prey?

It certainly isn't "wasteful". The earth's ecosystems are perfectly efficient in reusing every atom of a perished being.

Otherwise, it's just a fetish for the thoughts in our head, egocentricity. Yes, rich dummies are an easy target, it's likely everybody would sign on if it's available. That doesn't make it noble.

jqm8• 12 years ago

"Gone in an instant".

That's why we have books.

egsec• 12 years ago

Finally, we will be old enough to rent "ultraporn" (160+ years old). [1][2]

[1][http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Futurama] [2][http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Hubert_J._Farnsworth]

ludo150• 12 years ago

120 but to do what? Sometimes I think it's better to have a short but intense life than a long one and do nothing because you know your life will be long.

Retra5• 12 years ago

You don't know your life will be long. You can die at any time for any stupid reason, no matter what your life expectancy is.

Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

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