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Can science really enable us stick around on Earth forever? Experts haven’t developed ways to make us invincible, immortal beings who are unsusceptible to physical trauma or starvation. However, studies have been going on to make aging just another preventable disease. Effectively stalling the deterioration of our bodies would then mean humans could live indefinitely.
Peter Diamandis, co-founder of San Diego-based genotype research facility Human Longevity, Inc., spoke at the Singularity University in California last September about challenging aging and the deterioration of the body. The key to unlocking an indefinite lifespan was to improve the repair mechanisms of the body, said Diamandis. His research teams consider the possibility of using stem cells or nanomachines to regenerate our bodies.
Last year, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine have used chromosome extensions that dramatically increased the rate of cell division, a growth mechanism of our bodies that weakens over time. The development hints at a chance to turn back the biological clock.
Continue reading “Living Forever: What it Means to Have an ‘Indefinite Lifespan’” »
Oh, the logic of objections against rejuvenation! bigsmile
If you’ve ever tried to advocate for rejuvenation, you know it is hard. Usually, people deem the idea as crazy/impossible/dangerous well before you get to finish your first sentence. Living too long would be boring, it would cause overpopulation, ‘immortal’ dictators, and what you have. However, you’ve probably never heard anyone use the same arguments to say that we should not cure individual age-related diseases. This is largely because people have little to no idea about what ageing really is, and how it cannot be untangled from the so-called age-related pathologies. These are nothing more, nothing less, than the result of the life-long accumulation of several types of damage caused by the body’s normal operations. Unlike infectious diseases, the diseases of old age are not the result of a pathogen attack, but essentially of your own body falling apart. As I was saying, people are largely unaware of this fact, and therefore expect that the diseases of ageing could be cured one by one without having to interfere with the ageing process itself, as if the two weren’t related at all. The result of this false expectation would be that you could cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc., but somehow old people would still drop dead around the age of 80 just because they’re old. That’s like saying they died of being healthy.
Back to reality, this can’t be done. To cure the diseases of old age, you need to cure ageing itself. If, for whatever reason, you think that curing ageing as a whole would be a bad idea and it should not be done, the only option is to not cure at least some of the root causes of ageing. Consequently, some age-related pathologies would remain as untreatable as they are today.
Now, the typical objections raised against rejuvenation tend to sound reasonable at first. To some, the statement ‘We should not cure ageing because it would lead to overpopulation’ sounds self-evident. However, if we consider the implications of this statement, things start getting crazy. As said, not curing ageing implies not curing some of its root causes, which in turn implies not curing some age-related diseases. Therefore, the sentence ‘We should not cure ageing’ implies ‘We should not cure [insert age-related disease here] ‘. What happens when we reformulate typical objections to rejuvenation in this fashion?
I really wanna know why people don’t get this.
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Continue reading “How we can finally win the fight against aging” »
Scientists at the Salk Institute have found that intermittent expression of genes normally associated with an embryonic state can reverse the hallmarks of old age. This approach, which not only prompted human skin cells in a dish to look and behave young again, also resulted in the rejuvenation of mice with a premature aging disease, countering signs of aging and increasing the animals’ lifespan by 30 percent. The early-stage work provides insight both into the cellular drivers of aging and possible therapeutic approaches for improving human health and longevity.
http://www.salk.edu/news-release/turning-back-time-salk-scie…gns-aging/
Some people object we shouldn’t cure ageing because it is natural. Well, so is malaria, for example…
You know, I may even agree ageing is ‘natural’. If we define natural as something that happens spontaneously, without external intervention, as a consequence of chemical and physical interactions, then yes, ageing is natural. This is not a great argument in favour of ageing, though, because there are very many perfectly natural things that are really bad for you, ranging on the badness spectrum pretty much anywhere from ‘mildly upsetting’ to ‘catastrophically apocalyptic’: mosquito bites, genetic diseases, viral diseses, earthquakes, tsunamis, stars going nova, being eaten by lions, cancer, a pidgeon pooing on the fancy suit you rented for your wedding precisely when you say ‘I do’, bacterial infections, and so on. So, okay, maybe ageing is natural. So what? It is also the number one cause of suffering and diseases in the western world. Frankly, I don’t give a damn if it is natural or not. It’s still pretty bad.
Speaking of rejuvenation being not natural, I could nitpick a lot. I could ask, what is ‘not natural’? Is it anything human made? Then what about things made by animals? For example, if a building is ‘not natural’, what about a beehive then? Natural or not? Given we humans have a natural tendency to tweak things around to make them work the way we want, wouldn’t rejuvenation be our natural response to the problem of ageing, just like medicines are our natural response to the problem of diseases?
