There are a lot of hucksters in this area but I think some of the investments will produce good results. It’s definitely better to pour VC money into longevity research vs “Uber for X” or blockchain.
Mildly disagree. Problem with blockchain is that masses are focused on financial uses, whereas I think lots of the potential is in liquid tools for self-organizing, something ~ like zeroknowledge privacy protecting data mining. So essentially tools that are not really meant for big business or fast money schemes, but for social transformation useful for humans (and AIs). It may raise the quality not the quantity of your years. (..of course raising both would be appreciated ; ))
I do think there is potential in blockchain, I just don't think its actually needed in most situations. Zero trust is an interesting tool for a limited set of use cases, much of what I see being built on the blockchain could just be a web service with a legal guarantee, which would make it more efficient and cheaper, the majority of people would care less about the implementation.
I don’t think there will be zero actual crypto use cases. I just think dumping billions more in VC money to that stack is a bad idea at this point. And that the current “crypto industry” Is pretty much a scam/gambling. Maybe some kind of escrow, maybe privacy.. stuff.
Whenever I ask people what the real crypto projects are they still give a very abstract handwavy buzzword-heavy answer like you just did
Totally agree. Do you know any companies or projects in this space? Or in federated learning / differential privacy using blockchain? Tons of use cases can be enabled by them.
Basically it is a purposeless algorithm that saps resources for useless computations, that is only interesting insofar as it can sometimes perform sophisticated optimizations albeit in pursuit of a trivially useless goal.
Zoom out and think of the entire blockchain algorithm at a level above the incentives of a singular agent.
It's very much like having a superhuman Paperclip maximizer that has a invented amazing techniques of say, iron ore extraction but this localized advance is squandered in pursuit of an absurd goal of creating the maximum possible volume of paperclips.
Of course there is not a single agent on earth who pursues bitcoin mining with the goal of wasting energy and compute resources but it is the aggregate end result. Bostrom similarly argues the the objective function of a complex system such as an AGI may drift entirely from its original intent leading it to optimize for things we absolutely do not desire and this malignant drift is an emergent property.
I think he's saying it took a life of its own and its incentives are destructive to mankind. I disagree but I can see how you could make the argument, supposing you think bitcoin has no use / value and that smart contracts are just a fad. But maximalists have their own arguments regarding the use of blockchain and while a lot of the rhetoric isn't believable I do think blockchain tech will be +EV in the future even if most don't believe it already is.
Which is terrible. It means that there are all sorts of barriers in place to developing drugs or therapies that prevent or reverse aging -- because you couldn't get FDA approval for something that it doesn't consider disease. It’s hard to even get the studies approved.
It means that there are all sorts of barriers in place to developing drugs or therapies that prevent or reverse aging -- because you couldn't get FDA approval for something that it doesn't consider disease.
I don't see how that is a significant barrier to an anti-aging drug that actually works. Pick any one of the many recognized medical conditions that is strongly correlated with old age, like osteoporosis. Prove that your anti-aging drug effectively and safely treats osteoporosis in the elderly. The FDA will approve it. If your osteoporosis treatment also cures wrinkles and gray hair as a side effect, the FDA won't object. And once the drug is approved for one condition it can be prescribed by off-label for other conditions. Everyone will quickly learn what it's useful for, just like how people started using semaglutide for weight loss when it was "officially" still just a diabetes treatment.
> I don't see how that is a significant barrier to an anti-aging drug that actually works. Pick any one of the many recognized medical conditions that is strongly correlated with old age, like osteoporosis. Prove that your anti-aging drug effectively and safely treats osteoporosis in the elderly. The FDA will approve it.
That’s exactly what’s being done to work around the problem. However there might be some treatments that work well in advance of a disease and aren’t effective after the disease is present. It’s as if fire extinguishers can be funded but not flame resistant building materials.
> Prove that your anti-aging drug effectively and safely treats osteoporosis in the elderly. The FDA will approve it.
There are chemoterapies etc for cancer treatment approved by FDA (and its analogs in other relevant countries), which kill a ton of healthy cells along the way, and why is it considered safe? And there are many other approved drugs with severe adverse effects, why are they considered safe? While the only adverse effect for Yamanaka factors is cancer, which manifests with a long enough (month(s)) treatment to reverse cells the whole way back to pluripotency. And when Yamanaka genes are applied for a short time (~2 weeks), there are literally no adverse effects in mice.
By waiting for osteoporosis to manifest to have an approved reason to begin an approved treatment, you violate the Hippocrates oath, which states that prevention is better than a subsequent cure.
That's been the explicitly stated goal for at least some of the researchers. Lots of the expensive stuff is also age-related, the money is in the disease rather than the aging itself, so try to treat the disease by reversing that specific aspect of aging…
At least, that's how the articles about how "we know this field has a reputation for scammers but we're legit honest" phrased it.
With a GCSE grade C in biology, I can't tell what's a scam and what's a legitimate breakthrough, and I'm also mindful of the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect.
Medicine today = Live to an average or greater age for your current life expectancy.
Longevity research = Maintain the health equivalent of a young person, indefinitely.
So longevity expands regular medicine to include interventions in everybody (at least all adults) regardless of normal health, as early as possible, to halt or reverse age related loss of functions and maximally delay death.
Haven’t there always been hucksters in medicine generally? Seems like any field that is hard for lay people to understand and has a lot of money in it naturally attracts con artists for obvious reasons.
Even big pharma is sometimes guilty of huckstering, see aducanumab, the recently approved treatment for Alzheimer's that does not actually seem to treat symptoms of Alzheimer patients at all.
So what happens if we eliminate aging? Would we be doomed to work until the end of time, forever being in a state where you don't have enough money for the infinite retirement?
There's a French sci-fi show on Netflix called Ad Vitam that actually tackles this very issue. I didn't finish it but I found the overall world they built in the show interesting.
> Obviously, this poses quite a few problems; One is overpopulation and the other is the fact that there’s no need for the next generation. People aren’t getting older and they simply change jobs because they get bored. How do you enter the job market, when your competition is essentially a few years older than you (looks and health wise), while having decades more experience than you? The answer: You don’t.
> Basically, the laws have been changed making anyone younger than 30 years old a minor. Also, you can’t choose to regenerate until your 30th birthday. As someone stated in Ad Vitam “They’ve turned youth into a waiting room”. You’re not old enough to do anything and really, you’re not needed.
It's a lucky thing, for sure, but many upper-middle class people in the West take a few years off of work for various reasons now already. Sabbaticals, child care, travel, etc.
If human lifespans increase to many centuries, it would be reasonable to assume a productive person could take a five to ten year break every so often without losing too much ground to their peers.
I don't think this is happening in the US. They work you until it is time to collect social security. The society and its terrible health care system and garbage food is engineered to keep you alive until it is time to collect retirement benefits and then many just die. (including my father who worked as an engineer eating the standard American diet until he died one month before his retirement at age 64).
Seriously, the older I get the more I look forward to Resting in Peace. No more taxes, no more mortgage or rent, no more bills, etc. I'm not trying to hurry the process, but I'm not going to be sad when my time is up.
I hope you get a chance to look back on this comment and maybe see it as a call to add things in your life that would make you no longer agree with. Granter, for the vast majority of us there are a lot of these less-than-desirable things that we all need to deal which, at any given time, may even occupy an overwhelming portion of our time. And, the more we age, the more we are bound to have more and more of those
But, I'd argue that should be a call for you to be even more intentional about adding more joy, beauty, and real, meaningful pleasure into your life. Those are the things we most easily give up, and if we're not careful we're bound to have little of it around.
I'm not depressed in the slightest myself, but I just don't see why we try to keep all people alive, all the time, at all cost. Yes, I'm exaggerating a bit, but at some point life ends, and I'm fine with that.
If I have had a nice length of life (lets say something like 70 years), and am no longer happy, healthy or capable of taking care of myself, don't save me next time I need saving (in order to live longer).
(You may already know this) but at least in the US, it's common for older patients to put a DNR (do not resuscitate) order on their medical file, making it so life saving measures won't be taken near/at end of life.
Most commonly this means that CPR can't be performed.
Depends on the manner of your exit. You may not be blessed with a merciful swift stroke in your sleep. Some ways of dying (like ALS) are absolutely horrible and I am sure that in the concoction of emotions that the victim feels, sadness is a significant component. Regardless of what they imagined when they were 40 and death was still a distant event.
I'm way way older than 40, but the side of the family I most take after has a genetic history of living into our 100s with no significant illnesses. My great grandfather lived until he was 103 and was perfectly healthy in all ways until 2 weeks before he died when very quickly his body shut down and he passed away. No illnesses, just pure old age. His daughter, my grandmother, will be celebrating her 100th birthday soon. She still drives, walks without assistance, lives alone in her own home, etc. I'm not exactly a spring chicken, but I have zero health issues. I don't even ever have headaches. So, most likely I'll avoid the terrible deaths. Here's hoping.
Elimination of aging is still pretty far away. But reduction of chronic disease burden may be within reach. If people around 60 or 70 still felt like they were 30, that would be a massive improvement against the status quo.
We already know how to greatly reduce the burden of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which is the #1 chronic disease cause of death and disability. But most patients still don't take the recommended preventative measures.
People seem to want some kind of magic pill that will prevent chronic diseases while still allowing them to eat junk food and not exercise. They are going to be disappointed.
It is not all about heart disease or cancer. For example, I know some perfectly thin people with debilitating arthritis. A chronic disease need not be fatal or even life-shortening in order to make your aged years unbearable.
Eating well and exercising enough pushes all sorts of problems a decade or two away, I know it pretty well. But that still does not mean that the last quarter or so of your life will be OK.
The intended target of anti-aging is precisely this part of lifespan that sadly cannot be called healthspan.
A more optimistic outlook may be that the value of human life goes up, as age increases, to where training and education has an even greater net positive impact on society.
Further, typically anti-aging implies better health, which we can infer would lead to less strain on our current health care system (in the US).
But you do have a point, where this could be exploited. But seeing the pushback in France regarding raising retirement age, I’d hope we could come together as a country and push back against such efforts.
Only if you were very bad at financial planning. When you save up for retirement you're putting money away in investments such that you can live off the interest generated from your savings. Exactly how much you need depends on a number of factors like how exposed to risk your portfolio is and inflation rates, but typically a fund 20-25x your annual living expenses will allow you to live off the interest indefinitely. Putting that much away in 40 years is difficult and most people have to draw down their savings at the end, but with more time it gets much easier. For example you put away $300/mo for 40 years with 7% compounding interest you'll wind up with around 700k in retirement savings, which would give you about $35k/yr inflation adjusted in retirement - enough to live on but you'd probably have to draw down for things like vacations and emergency expenses. On the other hand saving the same amount over 80 years would give you $11.4 million inflation adjusted, enough to draw $570k/yr inflation adjusted forever. No one wants to work an 80 year career when life expectancy is around 80 years and the first and last quarter of that time you're not in a reasonable condition to work. But if you're living to be a few hundred years old, then those extra 40 years are nothing.
Of course this assumes that the economic system remains reasonably unchanged. It's possible that once we're all living such long lives and everyone has had enough time to build up large amounts of wealth that patterns of consumption and growth will be significantly different. But that said, the current expectation that people save up for retirement or die destitute is really a product of our current system and would likely change as well.
Likely, only the super rich would be able to use it. They live forever with power and luxury and while everyone else works and dies in squalor -- see every science fiction story ever.
Suicide is legal. The authorities don't prosecute anyone who commits suicide.
If you want legalized assisted suicide for those with terminal diseases then that's a tricky issue. It's a good idea in principle but we need careful controls to prevent abuse or coercion.
I saw an article on HN about this exact thing about a month ago concerning Canada's expansion of "assisted suicide" procedures. It was pretty fascinating!
This is an oft-repeated sentiment on Reddit, but I actually don't believe it.
First of all, if the treatments are simple enough, there will be a ton of third world countries doing it in cheap clinics and the US won't be able to stop it. Imagine trying to pressure China or India into discontinuing such services.
Second, it is advantageous for the billionaires to collect massive data on safety and efficiency of such treatments before testing them themselves, and data on mice are almost irrelevant here; for such profound treatments, you need to know how they work in people, and your dataset needs to be huge, because people are a pretty diverse lot.
Third, all developed countries struggle with aging populations. In order to keep their economies afloat, they need to be able to reduce impacts of aging across the board, not just in a few privileged people.
Because for it to qualify as a cure it must be mass producible. If it only works on one person, you haven't cured aging, you've merely repaired a body.
Realistically though, we have a pretty good idea of what we're looking for. We don't know the exact combination of chemicals that cures aging, but we know it's going to be a combination of chemicals, and we know we can mass produce those.
It'd be great if something as simple in mechanism and production as vaccination and vitamin D turned out to be the key to longevity. I tend to doubt it, though.
I get a med that's $18k every three months, for a mililiter of fluid. I wouldn't have a hope of paying for that without health insurance, and I'd expect health insurers to be resistant to covering mega-expensive life extension therapies.
Generally, the more common diseases are cheaper to treat, because the burden of development, IP etc. gets spread across more people.
Medications for ubiquitous stuff such as high blood pressure tend to be comparably cheap, unless they are a fresh novelty. And aging is even more widespread than HBP.
I am sorry to be prying such information out of you, but things with such a cost label tend to be very high-tech (e.g. tumor-invading lymphocytes etc. that need to be cultivated for each patient separately, which cannot possibly be cheap).
That's because monoclonal antibodies are targeted to a very specific protein. Polyclonal antibodies which can be used more generally are much cheaper. You're paying for the purity, not the substance.
Also we'd need to solve the overpopulation if this ever made it to mainstream. But don't we worry, most likely the only the richest would have access to this anti-aging products.
I doubt we'd face overpopulation… at least for a few millennia, but on timescales like that you need to ask about Dyson swarms etc. anyway, not just this planet.
First, eternal youth isn't a cure for all illnesses. Second, even if all illnesses were also cured and the only causes of death were injuries, malicious or accidental, the average human lifetime would be something like 1000 years (at current rates). Third, as nations get richer, the reproduction rate goes down, and in many cases is currently below replacement.
I also don't expect it to only be available to the rich. The first 5-20 years perhaps, but in my lifetime full genome sequencing has gone from impossible at any price to a few hundred USD. I expect similar for anti-aging. Even if the stuff is patented and restricted, I can say similar about heroin and cocaine, and yet the black market for those exists.
We don't have overpopulation. Statistics show that in the current mode of food production, we can support a few multiples of the population we have today. But the economic system does not even permit supporting what we have, because it needs to make food scarce and extract maximum price for it to profit. That's why millions of tons of food rot in warehouses somewhere around the world to not disturb the food prices in the market while people starve somewhere else.
In such a system, you can never solve overpopulation - the less people there are, the more system will try to make things more scarce to extract more profit from those people. A system built to be inefficient (from our perspective) so that it can be efficent from the profiteers' perspective
Why not just have a fluid work/retirement cycle? Work for a few years, take a year or two off, switch industries, etc.
We would need stricter capitalism I think. Immortals would be even more self-absorbed, and lack the motivating aspects of mortality. I personally would be content to throw away a few decades doing drugs and playing video games if I had unlimited time.
“””
Some stories on HN are a complete waste of time. Little real knowledge is ever included in the threads. No one learns anything. We just bullshit for a few hours. And this happens a few times a year for each topic.
My first suggestion is stories related to immortality. Most of the comments immediately turn philosophical.
“Death gives life meaning”
“It’ll only be for rich people”
“The money should be spent on something better.”
On HN, most people don’t want to learn anything about aging. No one discusses the basic science that we might gain by doing the research. The knowledge gained could have benefits in other areas of medicine like heart disease and cancer, for example. You aren’t going to want to live forever and have Alzheimer’s.
The idea that "will my life ever have meaning" and "will I be forced to work for all of eternity" is just bikeshedding is absolutely ludicrous.
What is with this new thing where we call death a "disease" anyways? A disease implies that getting rid of it is a good thing. It's sneaking a very controversial statement (dying should be eradicated) into the post.
As I stated 6 years ago, we aren’t likely to “cure death” anytime soon. So, rather than run into the weeds and wax philosophical, maybe we can give it a good effort
“Finally, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that death is going to be an easy disease to cure. Maybe we’ll get a few breakthroughs over the next couple of decades and we’ll figure out how to add a few extra healthy years to the average person. We definitely need to move beyond long term studies and peer deeper into our bodies.”
Before the comments come in talking about whether we actually want to cure aging, let me present my favorite argument I've seen on the topic:
Imagine the situation were reversed: nobody is aging, and we're worried about Earth's limited resources. Your proposed to solution is to kill everyone over a certain age!?
I think this argument presupposes that biological life had found some healthy, deathless equilibrium; it's hard to imagine what that would look like, since we what we have is a system where death is a vital part of all that we see--it is required, in a most basic sense, to rejuvenate the greater system.
This isn't to say that "therefore we should all accept the inevitability of death"--just that we should consider carefully whether, in ending (or forestalling) death, we might improve the lot of the individual at the expense of the greater whole (society, other life on the planet, etc.).
Another thought--what if avoiding death ends up taking exponentially more resources as one gets older, and society becomes a superorganism oriented around keeping a small number of egos alive for as long as possible, where capacity to age becomes the ultimate expression of power?
>what if avoiding death ends up taking exponentially more resources as one gets older, and society becomes a superorganism oriented around keeping a small number of egos alive for as long as possible
What is society oriented around now? While the idea of living under an immortal human god doesn't sound particularly appealing to me, it would probably be better than the present situation (i.e. living under mortal, short-lived human gods with nukes)
In either universe, the earth can only serve so many people. Since we're proposing hypotheticals, here's another one: suppose all the babies that would be born in either universe were born already, then we had to decide whether to keep the babies and kill off the old folks, or to kill the babies and keep the eldery. I don't think anyone would propose we let the older generation live. This hypothetical is in fact much closer to the situation we are in...
Research is great -- I'm all for that -- but I'm less certain about actually turning this into a product just yet.
As an analogy, it is like a weekend cyclist spending $10,000 on a high end bike to save a pound or two off their bike, meanwhile they are 30 pounds overweight. It would be better to lose that weight (for cycling performance and for many better reasons) before trying to buy cycling performance at $10,000/lb.
Getting back to the point, people imagine it would be great to live 500 years, perhaps longer. Ask yourself: are you maximizing your current life? If you are currently unhappy, bored, sick, lonely, feeling like you are trapped in a certain lifestyle, why would you want an extra 400 years of that?
Every time I’m “unhappy, bored, sick, lonely, feeling like you are trapped in a certain lifestyle” it’s precisely because I’m aging, and only have maybe a couple of decades of productive life left, at best.
You won't give anyone anything and no one will beg you for anything.
It is just going to happen at some point because people want to live (yes, even suicidal people, mostly) and not need reading glasses and worry about cancers and heart attacks by the time their kids enter high school.
I am not kidding myself that anyone currently alive will live to benefit from it, but I am also not kidding myself that I am or should be OK with the current status quo and that there is something romantic or beautiful about it, or that it is how things should be.
Well this strikes pretty directly at the heart of the whole longevity argument. There was an article on HN the other day about Bryan Johnson and how he was spending millions a year, eating exactly 1977 vegan calories per day, taking a dozen pills every day, doing 1 hour of high intensity training, and as a result some tests showed that he was scoring like an 18 year old.
It's all a bit... self-defeating? You're going to live forever spending your entire life.... trying to live forever? Living a long life isn't necessarily living a good life, and wasting the time you have in order to get more time.... maybe stop doing that and just get on with doing the stuff that you want to do given the time.
Having said that, on your analogy, it's a great business selling $10,000 bikes to rich idiots...
I think these startups look at aging like a disease and want to treat it in a way that doesn't necessarily require an incredible amount of effort from people. Somewhere between nothing and spending all your time just to extend your time.
This is the opposite approach you should have. The whole point of longevity is you no longer have to maximize your life.
The idea of doing self-improvement and min/maxing my lifestyle for 500 years sounds like a nightmare. The whole point would be getting to dive recklessly into anything without fear that you may be wasting your short life. Get fat as hell, get in insane shape, get hooked on heroin, start a successful company, be homeless, whatever. With 500 years of being 30 years old locking yourself into any "maximized" lifestyle seems stupid. A huge part of feeling trapped is knowing you are wasting the few years you have.
That's a good point. At the same time, more chances (to discover an electric life) is better. But your point really matters because however long you live, youth will only be a fraction of that (and I do expect that one's relatively-unencumbered and energetic years are better... if used well--thing is, older people usually aren't so dumb, they use their years better, which is why their self-reported happiness is higher).
Much better than that wealth being hoarded more and more without doing anything.
Its amazing how even the ultra rich who hoard dozens of billions act as if they will live forever, hoard their wealth without investing it in anything tangible but using it to hoard even more wealth, then rapidly decline in health in their later years without their wealth doing them any good.
With such investments, at they can make life longer and better for themselves and the humanity at the same time, putting that wealth into a tangible good use.
Humans take a long time and a lot of investment to bring up and educate. Any singular human lost is a loss for humanity due to the creativity and resourcefulness that even the dumbest members of human race have are invaluable. If everyone lived longer and healthier, we could be living in a much better paradigm then our current one that is still stuck somewhere in between late 20th century and the start of 21st century. The progress we can make is indescribable.
We can live longer, and if we look at the other species in our planet, we !should! be living much longer: There are tortoises that live centuries. There are sharks who live centuries. Even cetaceans can live well over a century. Higher mammals living in very hard, hostile conditions live 70 years or longer like elephants.
The biology of this planet basically says that living long is the norm for complex organisms. We humans are the exceptions to that, by living a ~70 years on average and living the last 2 decades of it with declining capacity. The problem is with our civilization and the way we live - not with biology itself.
...
There is absolutely no benefit to anyone in the hoards of imaginary wealth of this planet amassing more useless hoards of imaginary wealth by sitting in investment tools.
If even a fraction of that wealth is actually put to use, everything can change.
Does anyone know these companies or if they are promising? AI for drug discovery also boasts lofty fundraising numbers but a lot of the field is fluffy.
Sinclair is good at promotion (and self-promotion), but I would like to mention two other brilliant scientists who are not.
The first is Gregory Fahy, who works on thymus rejuvenation, and actually has a bunch of people (not mice), whose epigenetic clocks have turned back a bit, together with some improvements in physiology which indicate that the rejuvenation, albeit modest, was real.
The second is Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who works on cell rejuvenation using Yamanaka factors. He was already able to pull this off in living rats without killing them - a major success given that the Yamanaka factors aren't exactly safe.
Interested to know how much of this capital is going into basic public health initiatives (preventative health) vs what I imagine are extremely expensive treatments to stretch out one's life (acute treatment).
100 bucks says it's the latter. I therefore eagerly await a VC-subsidized BBaaS (Blood Boy as a Service).
First time hearing the term 'private longevity'. Doesn't sound quite right to me. Sort of implies there is some kind of 'public longevity'. Wouldn't 'personal longevity' make (slightly) more sense?
Edit - I'm an idiot, ignore me. It's clearly not 'private longevity' but 'private companies [that deal with longevity]'
English certainly allows you to have a string of adjectives that modify a single noun without the use of commas. The phrase is simply ambiguous, but there is no typo.
I'd think both the connection with eugenics and the lifestyle of Lazarus Long would be exactly the image of longevity improvements that they'd be trying hardest to avoid!
