9 ms·

We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?

by Dev_2019 7y ago

LinuxBender 7y ago
Several companies and research groups are working on it. The challenge is a lack of priority, funding and even recognizing aging as a disease, at least in legal terms. Look up the Sens foundation (Dr. Aubrey De Grey), Dr. David Sinclair (Harvard .. Some are skeptical because he has started several companies) and Dr. Bruce Ames as starting points.
- Retric 7y ago
  I think the real challenge is mind boggling complexity of interactions. Suggesting it’s a question of funding etc is vastly understating the actual issues. Curing cancer for example is a vastly simpler problem.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    Don't get me wrong, it is a very complex set of complex issues depending on which pillar we attack. (Metabolism, Repair, Pathology). The latter is very expensive and too late in the game. That is what we attempt today with conventional medicine and it's just treating symptoms of aging. We barely understand human metabolism and the little bit we know is a auditorium wall sized flow chart. Repair is the new area and Aubrey is putting a lot of effort into that pillar. That is where funding would certainly help. Then there are legal and ethical issues we will eventually dive in to.
  - sasaf5 7y ago
    Not only simpler, curing cancer is also necessary for curing aging.
    - LinuxBender 7y ago
      Absolutely. There is already a great deal of work on the metabolic side, such as removing biofilms of cancer with AGE (aged garlic extract), slowing or stopping metastases with bio-availability enhanced Curcumin, up-regulating autophagy and cell apoptosis with the up-regulation of NRF2 via cycling Sulforaphane and Myrosinase, starving cancer cells by removing all glucose and processed carbs via Keto and intermittent fasting, 5 day FMD (fast mimicking diet). All of these things highly complement Chemo, increasing the effectiveness and mitigating much of the damage caused by Chemo Therapy. On the repair pillar, quite a bit of work is being done with CRISPR to attack cancer cells. There is also research on targeting specific cells using sound (11th harmonics) and destroying them. Sorry I don't have any links to share. I must get back to work. :-)
- iotadeltagamma 7y ago
  Why Bruce Ames? Bruce Ames is long retired, and his research was on the free radical theory of aging, which is largely seen as a dead-end for the past 15 years after it was realised that merely throwing different antioxidants into the works gummed up the normal function of reactive oxygen species and did nothing or worsened aging.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    Actually he still does a lot of work and is currently researching theories around "conservation". e.g. when the body is low on a particular micro-nutrient, it conserves delivery on particular pathways that are related to longevity. So while he may have "retired", I mean, he's 90, so it's about time, he most certainly still works full time in the lab.
musicale 7y ago
For some jellyfish at least.
jerf 7y ago
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest that it is easier to build a brain scanning machine and simulate you in a computer than to "solve aging". And don't think I underestimate the difficulty of that, either.
- kodachi 7y ago
  Simulating the micro-environment is the tricky part. Humans go great distances and interact a lot with the world, and that, plus time, is what aging is, isn't it? Can you simulate all the different ways DNA can mutate?
- sedeki 7y ago
  Wow. I understand that you are a layperson, but that’s a very strong statement in my view. What do you base it on? Or did you just pull it ”out of a hat”?
  - Andrex 7y ago
    As a layperson: Changing genetics seems to me a bit like changing an engine in-flight. Mappping the brain to a computer is more like building a plane from scratch in a hangar. In a computer, we build the materials but we also build the world around them. With biology, all we have to work with is are the real-life materials, which are harder to grok than their digital equivalents.
    - hndamien 7y ago
      Piece by piece migration/replacement into a computer/ artificial neurons seems more likely. Still a gargantuan task with the requirement of a gargantuan amount of neurons.
  - jerf 7y ago
    First, the goal I'm shooting for is the conquest of aging, effective biological immortality, not just living 150-200 years. When understanding a complicated existing system, like a program, with the intention of making changes to it or fixing it, I find there are characteristic phases to it. There's the part where you have no handle on it at all. At this point you think there maybe isn't that much to the system. Then you get a handle, and you view the whole system through that handle for a while, and everywhere you look you see new stuff. Every time you find something new, your estimate of the size of the task grows. Slowly, but surely, you begin to go more places and look at more things and you encounter stuff you've already seen before. Your estimate of how much work you have to do goes up, but the rate of change starts to decrease. You find more useful handles to understand more bits of the system as you encounter new subsystems and bunches of code. There's a long period of consolidation, where your understanding finally starts matching the complexity and you start getting to the point you know what you are doing, and the rate of surprises you encounter slopes off, perhaps never quite reaching zero, but certainly dropping off. You then have the long slog of actually doing the work, because now you understand it. In biology, you can argue about exactly where we are, but we are certainly not at the "long period of consolidation" yet, because we keep finding entirely new subsystems that we weren't even aware of. For the past several decades, it seems like every 5 or 10 years we keep finding new subsystems and the apparently complexity of what's going on keeps going up. The ratio of "things we know" over "things we know we don't know" has been steadily going down over the past decades, even as the "things we know" may be increasing in absolute terms. At this point I would have no confidence in anyone's claim that "no, this is the last complication we'll find, we're on our way now!" Trying to get into that mess and fix it for the long term may just be an unrealistic goal entirely. I suspect modern research into fixing senescence and this or that promising treatment option (oh, look, maybe if we supplement with this, oh, look, maybe if we supplement with that!) may be the equivalent of trying to fix an architectural issue in a large-scale code base armed with the equivalent of three letter "a"s you can insert into the code base, or trying to reassemble a supernova armed with a BB gun. Not that brain simulation is easy either. In fact, I'm not even convinced the simulating is the hard part. It's the reader I can't hardly imagine how we're going to build without some serious borderline-magic nanotech. You need to be able to read millions of neurons in parallel if you have any hope of finishing before the patient being scanned dies of old age. (And what does "reading" a neuron even mean? Can a "reader" fit into the space between neurons? If not you've got some serious scheduling problems with how to cover everything. And it's not like 'a neuron' is a point, either... one of their major purposes is to spread.) There's also a chance you'll have to be dynamically simulating the already-scanned parts as you go, since the system is changing as you scan it and it's basically the equivalent of a stroke if everything scanned is just dead afterwards, and who would want to be scanned that way? It's an insane machine to build. It's really hard to tell which is harder, because they are both insanely hard. Neither would particularly surprise me. It's like an ant trying to judge which Redwood is higher.
iotadeltagamma 7y ago
It's worth noting that there are a lot of active efforts towards tackling the different hallmarks of age related disease to extend healthspan. Some are in clinical trials already: https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/ https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/
rosybox 7y ago
I recommend reading "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande to get a good sense of how hopeless "curing aging" is. Although that's not the focus of the book it does a wonderful job describing the challenge. The way it reads to me as a lay person, the body just falls apart. Things go wrong. It's not one thing going wrong, it's a very long list of disparate problems that ultimately aren't survivable. Aging isn't a losing battle, it's a massacre. It's one damn thing after another. What struck me is how our veins go "crunchy" in old age from the build up of calcium and how an expert can tell the age of a person within a 5 year period from just a picture of their gums and teeth. I put the book down and couldn't sleep that night.
- sasaf5 7y ago
  For a more hopeful picture: Ending Aging, by Aubrey de Grey. He organizes that long list of disparate problems and propose a possible path for their solution. Doesn't make it sound any easier, but at least it is a hopeful reading.
- andreygrehov 7y ago
  I never read the book, but during the last couple years I became more attentive to things in life. Nothing special, but just the general flow of life so to speak. I started noticing an interesting pattern. There is pretty much always exists a single solution to any problem. A core solution. A polymorphism in programming could be an example of what I mean. Say you have a program with a bunch of similar entities and a ton of if/else statements handling the logic for various cases. Conditions keep growing with each new entity. The code becomes messy as you fight the language trying to "cure" your program. Then you introduce an interface and suddenly everything becomes more clear and things just _make sense_. Your conditionals slowly disappear, the logic gets simpler and the code is now flat. I keep noticing similar patterns pretty much everywhere in life and somewhat confident that the same core solution exists for aging as well.
  - achillesheels 7y ago
    Shot in the dark (coming from a MS in Biomedical Engineering): circadian control to stabilize the body’s metabolic activity to lessen the “wear and tear” of the body’s condition to intensely survive for but a cosmic microsecond. Once we can “hack” ourselves to de-couple the body away from its heliocentric regularity, we can “slow aging”. After all, ex vivo cellular immortality exists. I think it’s the hormones that ruin everything.
NeoBasilisk 7y ago
Probably not soon enough to be of much benefit to anyone alive today. I have no qualifications to say this, so I can only base it on the staggering lack of progress made on many other medical fronts in the last decades.
drchewbacca 7y ago
One nuance is that if you want to live forever you only need to hit longevity escape velocity where every year there is another discovery which buys you another year of healthy life. Of course it might lead to living to 800 and being confined to a wheelchair by 80.
skissane 7y ago
Define "curing". Is it giving some decent percentage of people an extra 10, 20, maybe even 30 years of reasonably healthy life, compared to what they have today? Or is it making people live forever? The first objective, as challenging as it is, sounds a lot more plausible than the second. If we ever achieve either, I'm sure the first will be reached long before the second is. By a literal definition of "curing", only the second is a "cure". But the first would still be an amazing achievement, and is probably a prerequisite to ever being able to achieve the second.
- hndamien 7y ago
  You might be able to cure dying without curing age related degeneration of the body. Migrating minds outside of the body might be possible. To me it seems quite likely.

We aren't curing aging any time soon are we :(?

Several companies and research groups are working on it. The challenge is a lack of priority, funding and even recognizing aging as a disease, at least in legal terms. Look up the Sens foundation (Dr. Aubrey De Grey), Dr. David Sinclair (Harvard .. Some are skeptical because he has started several companies) and Dr. Bruce Ames as starting points.

Retric 7y ago
I think the real challenge is mind boggling complexity of interactions. Suggesting it’s a question of funding etc is vastly understating the actual issues. Curing cancer for example is a vastly simpler problem.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Don't get me wrong, it is a very complex set of complex issues depending on which pillar we attack. (Metabolism, Repair, Pathology). The latter is very expensive and too late in the game. That is what we attempt today with conventional medicine and it's just treating symptoms of aging. We barely understand human metabolism and the little bit we know is a auditorium wall sized flow chart. Repair is the new area and Aubrey is putting a lot of effort into that pillar. That is where funding would certainly help. Then there are legal and ethical issues we will eventually dive in to.
- sasaf5 7y ago
  Not only simpler, curing cancer is also necessary for curing aging.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    Absolutely. There is already a great deal of work on the metabolic side, such as removing biofilms of cancer with AGE (aged garlic extract), slowing or stopping metastases with bio-availability enhanced Curcumin, up-regulating autophagy and cell apoptosis with the up-regulation of NRF2 via cycling Sulforaphane and Myrosinase, starving cancer cells by removing all glucose and processed carbs via Keto and intermittent fasting, 5 day FMD (fast mimicking diet). All of these things highly complement Chemo, increasing the effectiveness and mitigating much of the damage caused by Chemo Therapy. On the repair pillar, quite a bit of work is being done with CRISPR to attack cancer cells. There is also research on targeting specific cells using sound (11th harmonics) and destroying them. Sorry I don't have any links to share. I must get back to work. :-)
iotadeltagamma 7y ago
Why Bruce Ames? Bruce Ames is long retired, and his research was on the free radical theory of aging, which is largely seen as a dead-end for the past 15 years after it was realised that merely throwing different antioxidants into the works gummed up the normal function of reactive oxygen species and did nothing or worsened aging.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Actually he still does a lot of work and is currently researching theories around "conservation". e.g. when the body is low on a particular micro-nutrient, it conserves delivery on particular pathways that are related to longevity. So while he may have "retired", I mean, he's 90, so it's about time, he most certainly still works full time in the lab.

musicale 7y ago

For some jellyfish at least.

jerf 7y ago

I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest that it is easier to build a brain scanning machine and simulate you in a computer than to "solve aging". And don't think I underestimate the difficulty of that, either.

kodachi 7y ago
Simulating the micro-environment is the tricky part. Humans go great distances and interact a lot with the world, and that, plus time, is what aging is, isn't it? Can you simulate all the different ways DNA can mutate?
sedeki 7y ago
Wow. I understand that you are a layperson, but that’s a very strong statement in my view. What do you base it on? Or did you just pull it ”out of a hat”?
- Andrex 7y ago
  As a layperson: Changing genetics seems to me a bit like changing an engine in-flight. Mappping the brain to a computer is more like building a plane from scratch in a hangar. In a computer, we build the materials but we also build the world around them. With biology, all we have to work with is are the real-life materials, which are harder to grok than their digital equivalents.
  - hndamien 7y ago
    Piece by piece migration/replacement into a computer/ artificial neurons seems more likely. Still a gargantuan task with the requirement of a gargantuan amount of neurons.
- jerf 7y ago
  First, the goal I'm shooting for is the conquest of aging, effective biological immortality, not just living 150-200 years. When understanding a complicated existing system, like a program, with the intention of making changes to it or fixing it, I find there are characteristic phases to it. There's the part where you have no handle on it at all. At this point you think there maybe isn't that much to the system. Then you get a handle, and you view the whole system through that handle for a while, and everywhere you look you see new stuff. Every time you find something new, your estimate of the size of the task grows. Slowly, but surely, you begin to go more places and look at more things and you encounter stuff you've already seen before. Your estimate of how much work you have to do goes up, but the rate of change starts to decrease. You find more useful handles to understand more bits of the system as you encounter new subsystems and bunches of code. There's a long period of consolidation, where your understanding finally starts matching the complexity and you start getting to the point you know what you are doing, and the rate of surprises you encounter slopes off, perhaps never quite reaching zero, but certainly dropping off. You then have the long slog of actually doing the work, because now you understand it. In biology, you can argue about exactly where we are, but we are certainly not at the "long period of consolidation" yet, because we keep finding entirely new subsystems that we weren't even aware of. For the past several decades, it seems like every 5 or 10 years we keep finding new subsystems and the apparently complexity of what's going on keeps going up. The ratio of "things we know" over "things we know we don't know" has been steadily going down over the past decades, even as the "things we know" may be increasing in absolute terms. At this point I would have no confidence in anyone's claim that "no, this is the last complication we'll find, we're on our way now!" Trying to get into that mess and fix it for the long term may just be an unrealistic goal entirely. I suspect modern research into fixing senescence and this or that promising treatment option (oh, look, maybe if we supplement with this, oh, look, maybe if we supplement with that!) may be the equivalent of trying to fix an architectural issue in a large-scale code base armed with the equivalent of three letter "a"s you can insert into the code base, or trying to reassemble a supernova armed with a BB gun. Not that brain simulation is easy either. In fact, I'm not even convinced the simulating is the hard part. It's the reader I can't hardly imagine how we're going to build without some serious borderline-magic nanotech. You need to be able to read millions of neurons in parallel if you have any hope of finishing before the patient being scanned dies of old age. (And what does "reading" a neuron even mean? Can a "reader" fit into the space between neurons? If not you've got some serious scheduling problems with how to cover everything. And it's not like 'a neuron' is a point, either... one of their major purposes is to spread.) There's also a chance you'll have to be dynamically simulating the already-scanned parts as you go, since the system is changing as you scan it and it's basically the equivalent of a stroke if everything scanned is just dead afterwards, and who would want to be scanned that way? It's an insane machine to build. It's really hard to tell which is harder, because they are both insanely hard. Neither would particularly surprise me. It's like an ant trying to judge which Redwood is higher.

iotadeltagamma 7y ago

It's worth noting that there are a lot of active efforts towards tackling the different hallmarks of age related disease to extend healthspan. Some are in clinical trials already: https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/ https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/

rosybox 7y ago

I recommend reading "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande to get a good sense of how hopeless "curing aging" is. Although that's not the focus of the book it does a wonderful job describing the challenge. The way it reads to me as a lay person, the body just falls apart. Things go wrong. It's not one thing going wrong, it's a very long list of disparate problems that ultimately aren't survivable. Aging isn't a losing battle, it's a massacre. It's one damn thing after another. What struck me is how our veins go "crunchy" in old age from the build up of calcium and how an expert can tell the age of a person within a 5 year period from just a picture of their gums and teeth. I put the book down and couldn't sleep that night.

sasaf5 7y ago
For a more hopeful picture: Ending Aging, by Aubrey de Grey. He organizes that long list of disparate problems and propose a possible path for their solution. Doesn't make it sound any easier, but at least it is a hopeful reading.
andreygrehov 7y ago
I never read the book, but during the last couple years I became more attentive to things in life. Nothing special, but just the general flow of life so to speak. I started noticing an interesting pattern. There is pretty much always exists a single solution to any problem. A core solution. A polymorphism in programming could be an example of what I mean. Say you have a program with a bunch of similar entities and a ton of if/else statements handling the logic for various cases. Conditions keep growing with each new entity. The code becomes messy as you fight the language trying to "cure" your program. Then you introduce an interface and suddenly everything becomes more clear and things just _make sense_. Your conditionals slowly disappear, the logic gets simpler and the code is now flat. I keep noticing similar patterns pretty much everywhere in life and somewhat confident that the same core solution exists for aging as well.
- achillesheels 7y ago
  Shot in the dark (coming from a MS in Biomedical Engineering): circadian control to stabilize the body’s metabolic activity to lessen the “wear and tear” of the body’s condition to intensely survive for but a cosmic microsecond. Once we can “hack” ourselves to de-couple the body away from its heliocentric regularity, we can “slow aging”. After all, ex vivo cellular immortality exists. I think it’s the hormones that ruin everything.

NeoBasilisk 7y ago

Probably not soon enough to be of much benefit to anyone alive today. I have no qualifications to say this, so I can only base it on the staggering lack of progress made on many other medical fronts in the last decades.

drchewbacca 7y ago

One nuance is that if you want to live forever you only need to hit longevity escape velocity where every year there is another discovery which buys you another year of healthy life. Of course it might lead to living to 800 and being confined to a wheelchair by 80.

skissane 7y ago

Define "curing". Is it giving some decent percentage of people an extra 10, 20, maybe even 30 years of reasonably healthy life, compared to what they have today? Or is it making people live forever? The first objective, as challenging as it is, sounds a lot more plausible than the second. If we ever achieve either, I'm sure the first will be reached long before the second is. By a literal definition of "curing", only the second is a "cure". But the first would still be an amazing achievement, and is probably a prerequisite to ever being able to achieve the second.

hndamien 7y ago
You might be able to cure dying without curing age related degeneration of the body. Migrating minds outside of the body might be possible. To me it seems quite likely.