14 ms·

I don't quite understand the premise of longevity research. Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology? Infinite, cancer-free lives sounds ju

by code51 3y ago

I don't quite understand the premise of longevity research. Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology? Infinite, cancer-free lives sounds just too good to be true. Something sounds off about that.

jjallen 3y ago
"Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology?" Is there? Is this a widely accepted scientific fact? What does this even mean? That you can't get a benefit without a cost? I thought that this phrase comes from economics. I think you're thinking of economics which is... not human biology. "Infinite, cancer-free lives sounds just too good to be true. Something sounds off about that." So just accept the fact that we all die and not learn about our bodies? I mean I don't know; some of us value being alive and prefer to stay that way if possible. Do you not also see dying as a problem? If you were to know that you were going to die tomorrow you wouldn't see that as a problem? Or is it only not a problem if you die at the sort of average full human lifespan age of ~70-80? Why is dying then ok and not tomorrow?
- code51 3y ago
  You see I'm also a human being such as you who values life and people. It's a bit harsh to comment about my world view sarcastically like that. I was just voicing something about the process: biology is a complex thing and longevity is not attacking things from a metabolic, complex-system viewpoint. As we see here, we are after single pills or single gene activations to carry us to a healthy state. I doubt infinite health unlocks in such form. Another point is, if you transform yourself to this new state that's immortal but lose most of the biology that makes your body human, what does it mean? (reference to Leto Atreides II here maybe) Why do people suddenly make it unethical to view death as most-probably-inevitable for human beings?
  - aydyn 3y ago
    Ignore that response, theyre just being a jerk. There are other mammals who live much longer than humans. Evolution optimized for continuation of the species, not longevity of the individual. So there is absolutely optimization room for increasing human lifespan.
    - rcoveson 3y ago
      > There are other mammals who live much longer than humans. This didn't ring true to me so I did a bit of reading. AFAICT there's one[0] species of mammal that can live much longer than us. We're at least tied for second-longest lifespan of all mammals. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale
      - scotty79 3y ago
        I think you should look at it in terms of lifetime calories burned per unit of body mass. Most mammals have very similar lifespan measured in this manner. With the exception of bats. Because they really needed to burn way more calories, so they figured it out how to do it without accumulating damage to their bodies that eventually leads to death at the same lousy rate that all other mammals can get away with.
      - aydyn 3y ago
        Therr are multiple whale species that live 100+. Also take into account that human lifespan in the wild without medical tech is ~40
  - jjallen 3y ago
    There’s a big difference between being immortal and not having to die at some preprogrammed time that is purely a byproduct of our evolutionary history. It’s a spectrum. We don’t know what it will take to make us healthier/love longer. All we are doing is trying to understand our bodies. All cancer and heart healthier research is also trying to effectively increase human lifespan. So are anti smoking campaigns and seat belts. No one would comment the way you did for these. We just take these for granted as a good thing. But trying to understand the genetic basis of aging is however you put it.
google234123 3y ago
The fact that these naked mole rats live 30x longer than other rodants suggest life spam can obviously be controlled. Anyway, I can imagine increased life spam as just costing something (not free) - e.g. you spend more energy on error correction and detection.
- jjallen 3y ago
  the fact that each species tends to live its own lifespan and each lifespan is somewhat unique (like not all species tend to live 10 years, for example) suggests that lifespan is genetically programmed. There are some good, obvious reasons to not have parents and grandparents around forever in limited resource environments.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
davedx 3y ago
It's a very valid point. Our past meddling with ecosystems and biologies have often produced unintended consequences to great detriment, it's not hard to imagine those from this too. Even ignoring the biological risks here, the economic risks are quite obvious - we're already in a place where many developed nations have demographic problems where ever greater percentages of the population no longer work, leading to less and less resources available to support the pensions of later generations. Imagine if all the people who are currently retired got this naked mole rat gene and lived an extra 30 years. What I do like about the article is that at least part of the longevity comes from reduced incidence of cancer. That's a medical treatment I can get behind.
- jjallen 3y ago
  Unfortunately meddling with humans is not something that is very possible or accepted. This is one of the primary reasons we’ve made almost zero progress recently in understanding ourselves.
- dgroshev 3y ago
  > Our past meddling with ecosystems and biologies have often produced unintended consequences to great detriment …we also effectively eliminated hunger, whole classes of diseases, and greatly extended healthy human lifespan across the planet. Ultimately I think this attitude stems from the premise that there's a choice of some "stable state" that humanity abandoned, some kind of safe well balanced haven that we left to "meddle with ecosystems". There isn't, "ecosystems" tried their best to kill us at every point of our history (it seems there was a moment there were just a few thousands of us, nearly wiped out by a natural catastrophe!), and the only way to avoid that is to "meddle", learning from our mistakes and becoming better stewards of the planet. We were, are, and always will be walking on a tightrope, we are just learning to do it better.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    > …we also effectively eliminated hunger, whole classes of diseases, and greatly extended healthy human lifespan across the planet. Fat lot of good that'll do us if we succeed in cooking the planet...
Terr_ 3y ago
> Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology? There's a difference between "there are probably trade-offs here" versus "this is impossible because otherwise it would have happened already." Consider that land plants evolved lignin to grow tall, leading to gigatons of free lunch sitting around for tens of thousands of years before anything else found the trick of digesting it. If there weren't any free--or at least below-cost--lunches out there, nothing would evolve, because there'd be no benefit in changing anything.
ben_w 3y ago
> Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology? Not really, no. There are examples of complex multicellular animal life with negligible senescence: some species of tortoises, of sturgeon, naked mole-rats — they don't die "of old age", only by illness and violence. But even if there was no free lunch, we might just be able to pay the price in a way that evolution can't; I'd be very surprised if we could even engineer a gene for an organic MRI machine, let alone have one evolve naturally, but we can use what genetics evolution gave us to build a machine to liquify helium to turn unnatural rocks into superconductors to peer within our bodies and look for growths.
- dghughes 3y ago
  Lobsters too. But they urinate from their eyes so it's a trade off.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    That's probably going to be a stretch goal for a crowd-funded biohacker at some point in the next decade.
  - clarionbell 3y ago
    otoh they have a shell so...
    - RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
      rejct monke, return to crab
      - messe 3y ago
        In other words, immortal or not, it’s cancer[1] either way. (Also relevant: Carcinogenesis[2]) [1]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cancer#Latin https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cancer#Latin [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenesis
  - 3y ago
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
Who said anything about infinite cancer free lives? Some animals live longer than us. Many of them have lower cancer rates than us too. Seems like a good idea to investigate the possibility of having longer and healthier lives.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Those animals (e.g. tortoises, lobsters) with longer lives combined with less cancer have significantly lower metabolisms and a far less ... intense ... lifestyle. Higher cellular respiration introduces higher chances for mutation / inflammation / cell damage. Likewise, high rates of cellular reproduction do the same. Every incidence of that is a roll of the dice for cancer. Extend the lifetime, and you will for sure get cancer, because you already have a very high chance of it. Evolution in our species has arrived at a set of trade-offs. We don't understand them all yet.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    Bats have surprisingly long lifespans for their very intense lifestyles
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    It is naive to think that human biology has already found the globally optimal trade off between longevity, cancer and metabolism. Sure we don't understand it all yet, but there's no harm in trying to.
seb314 3y ago
I believe that for a species, longer generations means slower evolutionary adaptation to environmental changes. (at least for our bodies, our hardware. Ideas/technology can iterate somewhat independently.) (longer lifespan and short generations would probably have caused resource shortages at various points in the past)
vouaobrasil 3y ago
What sounds off is that the world will fill increasingly with new people if everyone became immortal...that sounds like a world that would be horrible to live on.
az226 3y ago
The consequence is a lopsided society where there are few young people and a population that continues to grow. Also, the meaning of young will evolve. To combat this having a child becomes something of an ultra rare privilege, like a green card lottery. Most people don’t get to have one. Because of this, becoming a grandparent because a statistical anomaly. You might think if you get to live so long, you’ll become a great great great great grandparent or something but actually the opposite. Family traditions disappear. When you’re not allowed to have kids and become a family, the dynamics of relationships between men and women change drastically. With no deaths, wealth concentration grows to the extreme. A handful of people get to control the entire world. And most of those people are strange, so the fate of civilization rests on the off chance that they allow regular people to live a good life. Society as we know it will be unrecognizable in that future. Whether it’s a utopia or dystopia, I think it’s neither, but does sound a bit dystopian. So yeah, that’s not a free lunch.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  I don't think we know what happens when this is achieved, but it is fun to speculate. I'm sure what you lay out is one of many possible futures.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "With no deaths, wealth concentration grows to the extreme. A handful of people get to control the entire world." I rather think the treatment will be so expensive, that only the very rich can afford it - and then you have rich immortal overlords, ruling over the lowly mortals. But that is not a given. If there is treatment for everyone, it might make people more responsible. Most people today won't have to feel the real consequences once global warming hits hard. But if they know they might - they might see things in a different way. And this goes for everything, also how to maintain a sustainable reproduction.
Aaargh20318 3y ago
Why would there be? In the end we're just biological machines, albeit very complex ones. We're made of physical matter arranged in a specific way, physical matter can be manipulated. This means that if a biological machine is damaged or wears out, there is nothing that fundamentally prevent us from repairing it. The only thing that is needed is a proper understanding of how things are supposed to work, i.e. the desired working state, and the tooling to perform the repairs.
- t_serpico 3y ago
  Sure, nothing fundamentally prevents us from repairing it from a physical standpoint. The practicality of it is the key question. While the machine analogy is partially useful, genes/proteins/cells are dynamic, adaptive, and can exhibit stochastic traits. This fundamentally contrasts them from traditional machines, and is the reason (imo) we suck at making effective therapies to even treat diseases where we think we know what is going on.
  - dsign 3y ago
    But practicality is just a technological problem. And not to make a fine point of it, the chips of the machine where you are writing or reading this receive far more “technological attention” than any human being. That fact in itself is not a technological problem, but a social one. In my opinion, at our point of technological development, aging is about 80% a technological problem and 20% a social problem. The speed of research and development in technologies to combat aging, i.e., the derivatives of the numbers above, are probably in an opposite proportion: 95% of the slowness in research can be attributed to social problems, 5% to technological.
coyotespike 3y ago
This is a reasonable question - we might have found some sort of "no free lunch" theorem! But as others have pointed out, so far no such inevitable tradeoff has been found, which in itself supports the view that it won't be. There is Mikhail Blagosklonny's theory of programmed aging, in which aging is a byproduct of helpful developmental processes. This does seem to imply we need to mess with some pretty fundamental metabolic processes (hence mTOR inhibitors). That's close to what you're suggesting, but it still seems achievable. Since all organisms are made of somewhat-similar cells, the bristlecone pine, the immortal jellyfish, long-lived tortoises and so on, are all important existence proofs that negligible senescence with no ill-effects is possible. As they say, the goal is to die at age 150 with the body of a 30-year-old in a freak skydiving accident! It's been good to see longevity research move decisively out of crank territory in the past 15 years.

by code51 3y ago

jjallen 3y ago

"Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology?" Is there? Is this a widely accepted scientific fact? What does this even mean? That you can't get a benefit without a cost? I thought that this phrase comes from economics. I think you're thinking of economics which is... not human biology. "Infinite, cancer-free lives sounds just too good to be true. Something sounds off about that." So just accept the fact that we all die and not learn about our bodies? I mean I don't know; some of us value being alive and prefer to stay that way if possible. Do you not also see dying as a problem? If you were to know that you were going to die tomorrow you wouldn't see that as a problem? Or is it only not a problem if you die at the sort of average full human lifespan age of ~70-80? Why is dying then ok and not tomorrow?

code51 3y ago
You see I'm also a human being such as you who values life and people. It's a bit harsh to comment about my world view sarcastically like that. I was just voicing something about the process: biology is a complex thing and longevity is not attacking things from a metabolic, complex-system viewpoint. As we see here, we are after single pills or single gene activations to carry us to a healthy state. I doubt infinite health unlocks in such form. Another point is, if you transform yourself to this new state that's immortal but lose most of the biology that makes your body human, what does it mean? (reference to Leto Atreides II here maybe) Why do people suddenly make it unethical to view death as most-probably-inevitable for human beings?
- aydyn 3y ago
  Ignore that response, theyre just being a jerk. There are other mammals who live much longer than humans. Evolution optimized for continuation of the species, not longevity of the individual. So there is absolutely optimization room for increasing human lifespan.
  - rcoveson 3y ago
    > There are other mammals who live much longer than humans. This didn't ring true to me so I did a bit of reading. AFAICT there's one[0] species of mammal that can live much longer than us. We're at least tied for second-longest lifespan of all mammals. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale
    - scotty79 3y ago
      I think you should look at it in terms of lifetime calories burned per unit of body mass. Most mammals have very similar lifespan measured in this manner. With the exception of bats. Because they really needed to burn way more calories, so they figured it out how to do it without accumulating damage to their bodies that eventually leads to death at the same lousy rate that all other mammals can get away with.
    - aydyn 3y ago
      Therr are multiple whale species that live 100+. Also take into account that human lifespan in the wild without medical tech is ~40
- jjallen 3y ago
  There’s a big difference between being immortal and not having to die at some preprogrammed time that is purely a byproduct of our evolutionary history. It’s a spectrum. We don’t know what it will take to make us healthier/love longer. All we are doing is trying to understand our bodies. All cancer and heart healthier research is also trying to effectively increase human lifespan. So are anti smoking campaigns and seat belts. No one would comment the way you did for these. We just take these for granted as a good thing. But trying to understand the genetic basis of aging is however you put it.

google234123 3y ago

The fact that these naked mole rats live 30x longer than other rodants suggest life spam can obviously be controlled. Anyway, I can imagine increased life spam as just costing something (not free) - e.g. you spend more energy on error correction and detection.

jjallen 3y ago
the fact that each species tends to live its own lifespan and each lifespan is somewhat unique (like not all species tend to live 10 years, for example) suggests that lifespan is genetically programmed. There are some good, obvious reasons to not have parents and grandparents around forever in limited resource environments.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

davedx 3y ago

It's a very valid point. Our past meddling with ecosystems and biologies have often produced unintended consequences to great detriment, it's not hard to imagine those from this too. Even ignoring the biological risks here, the economic risks are quite obvious - we're already in a place where many developed nations have demographic problems where ever greater percentages of the population no longer work, leading to less and less resources available to support the pensions of later generations. Imagine if all the people who are currently retired got this naked mole rat gene and lived an extra 30 years. What I do like about the article is that at least part of the longevity comes from reduced incidence of cancer. That's a medical treatment I can get behind.

jjallen 3y ago
Unfortunately meddling with humans is not something that is very possible or accepted. This is one of the primary reasons we’ve made almost zero progress recently in understanding ourselves.
dgroshev 3y ago
> Our past meddling with ecosystems and biologies have often produced unintended consequences to great detriment …we also effectively eliminated hunger, whole classes of diseases, and greatly extended healthy human lifespan across the planet. Ultimately I think this attitude stems from the premise that there's a choice of some "stable state" that humanity abandoned, some kind of safe well balanced haven that we left to "meddle with ecosystems". There isn't, "ecosystems" tried their best to kill us at every point of our history (it seems there was a moment there were just a few thousands of us, nearly wiped out by a natural catastrophe!), and the only way to avoid that is to "meddle", learning from our mistakes and becoming better stewards of the planet. We were, are, and always will be walking on a tightrope, we are just learning to do it better.
- bitwize 3y ago
  > …we also effectively eliminated hunger, whole classes of diseases, and greatly extended healthy human lifespan across the planet. Fat lot of good that'll do us if we succeed in cooking the planet...

Terr_ 3y ago

> Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology? There's a difference between "there are probably trade-offs here" versus "this is impossible because otherwise it would have happened already." Consider that land plants evolved lignin to grow tall, leading to gigatons of free lunch sitting around for tens of thousands of years before anything else found the trick of digesting it. If there weren't any free--or at least below-cost--lunches out there, nothing would evolve, because there'd be no benefit in changing anything.

ben_w 3y ago

> Isn't there a concept similar to "no free lunch" in biology? Not really, no. There are examples of complex multicellular animal life with negligible senescence: some species of tortoises, of sturgeon, naked mole-rats — they don't die "of old age", only by illness and violence. But even if there was no free lunch, we might just be able to pay the price in a way that evolution can't; I'd be very surprised if we could even engineer a gene for an organic MRI machine, let alone have one evolve naturally, but we can use what genetics evolution gave us to build a machine to liquify helium to turn unnatural rocks into superconductors to peer within our bodies and look for growths.

dghughes 3y ago
Lobsters too. But they urinate from their eyes so it's a trade off.
- ben_w 3y ago
  That's probably going to be a stretch goal for a crowd-funded biohacker at some point in the next decade.
- clarionbell 3y ago
  otoh they have a shell so...
  - RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
    rejct monke, return to crab
    - messe 3y ago
      In other words, immortal or not, it’s cancer[1] either way. (Also relevant: Carcinogenesis[2]) [1]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cancer#Latin https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/cancer#Latin [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenesis
- 3y ago

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

Who said anything about infinite cancer free lives? Some animals live longer than us. Many of them have lower cancer rates than us too. Seems like a good idea to investigate the possibility of having longer and healthier lives.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Those animals (e.g. tortoises, lobsters) with longer lives combined with less cancer have significantly lower metabolisms and a far less ... intense ... lifestyle. Higher cellular respiration introduces higher chances for mutation / inflammation / cell damage. Likewise, high rates of cellular reproduction do the same. Every incidence of that is a roll of the dice for cancer. Extend the lifetime, and you will for sure get cancer, because you already have a very high chance of it. Evolution in our species has arrived at a set of trade-offs. We don't understand them all yet.
- scotty79 3y ago
  Bats have surprisingly long lifespans for their very intense lifestyles
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  It is naive to think that human biology has already found the globally optimal trade off between longevity, cancer and metabolism. Sure we don't understand it all yet, but there's no harm in trying to.

seb314 3y ago

I believe that for a species, longer generations means slower evolutionary adaptation to environmental changes. (at least for our bodies, our hardware. Ideas/technology can iterate somewhat independently.) (longer lifespan and short generations would probably have caused resource shortages at various points in the past)

vouaobrasil 3y ago

What sounds off is that the world will fill increasingly with new people if everyone became immortal...that sounds like a world that would be horrible to live on.

az226 3y ago

The consequence is a lopsided society where there are few young people and a population that continues to grow. Also, the meaning of young will evolve. To combat this having a child becomes something of an ultra rare privilege, like a green card lottery. Most people don’t get to have one. Because of this, becoming a grandparent because a statistical anomaly. You might think if you get to live so long, you’ll become a great great great great grandparent or something but actually the opposite. Family traditions disappear. When you’re not allowed to have kids and become a family, the dynamics of relationships between men and women change drastically. With no deaths, wealth concentration grows to the extreme. A handful of people get to control the entire world. And most of those people are strange, so the fate of civilization rests on the off chance that they allow regular people to live a good life. Society as we know it will be unrecognizable in that future. Whether it’s a utopia or dystopia, I think it’s neither, but does sound a bit dystopian. So yeah, that’s not a free lunch.

keepamovin 3y ago
I don't think we know what happens when this is achieved, but it is fun to speculate. I'm sure what you lay out is one of many possible futures.
hutzlibu 3y ago
"With no deaths, wealth concentration grows to the extreme. A handful of people get to control the entire world." I rather think the treatment will be so expensive, that only the very rich can afford it - and then you have rich immortal overlords, ruling over the lowly mortals. But that is not a given. If there is treatment for everyone, it might make people more responsible. Most people today won't have to feel the real consequences once global warming hits hard. But if they know they might - they might see things in a different way. And this goes for everything, also how to maintain a sustainable reproduction.

Aaargh20318 3y ago

Why would there be? In the end we're just biological machines, albeit very complex ones. We're made of physical matter arranged in a specific way, physical matter can be manipulated. This means that if a biological machine is damaged or wears out, there is nothing that fundamentally prevent us from repairing it. The only thing that is needed is a proper understanding of how things are supposed to work, i.e. the desired working state, and the tooling to perform the repairs.

t_serpico 3y ago
Sure, nothing fundamentally prevents us from repairing it from a physical standpoint. The practicality of it is the key question. While the machine analogy is partially useful, genes/proteins/cells are dynamic, adaptive, and can exhibit stochastic traits. This fundamentally contrasts them from traditional machines, and is the reason (imo) we suck at making effective therapies to even treat diseases where we think we know what is going on.
- dsign 3y ago
  But practicality is just a technological problem. And not to make a fine point of it, the chips of the machine where you are writing or reading this receive far more “technological attention” than any human being. That fact in itself is not a technological problem, but a social one. In my opinion, at our point of technological development, aging is about 80% a technological problem and 20% a social problem. The speed of research and development in technologies to combat aging, i.e., the derivatives of the numbers above, are probably in an opposite proportion: 95% of the slowness in research can be attributed to social problems, 5% to technological.

coyotespike 3y ago

This is a reasonable question - we might have found some sort of "no free lunch" theorem! But as others have pointed out, so far no such inevitable tradeoff has been found, which in itself supports the view that it won't be. There is Mikhail Blagosklonny's theory of programmed aging, in which aging is a byproduct of helpful developmental processes. This does seem to imply we need to mess with some pretty fundamental metabolic processes (hence mTOR inhibitors). That's close to what you're suggesting, but it still seems achievable. Since all organisms are made of somewhat-similar cells, the bristlecone pine, the immortal jellyfish, long-lived tortoises and so on, are all important existence proofs that negligible senescence with no ill-effects is possible. As they say, the goal is to die at age 150 with the body of a 30-year-old in a freak skydiving accident! It's been good to see longevity research move decisively out of crank territory in the past 15 years.