Factor X have we finally found the fountain of Youth?

[GIThruster]

When the fountain gets all broken:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKPSMCc0_WI

and wormhole doorways, and other cool stuff.

[kurt9]

Would someone like to tell me why the few social conservatives who have commented on radical life extension are so hostile towards it? This is probably the number one reason why social conservatives irritate me. People who oppose the development of effective anti-aging therapies irritate me regardless of their political ideology.

It has always been obvious to me since childhood that space development and life extension are two peas in a pod. It strikes me as quite irrational to favor one but to oppose the other.

[GIThruster]

Would someone like to tell me why the few social conservatives who have commented on radical life extension are so hostile towards it?

I'm not familiar with whomever you're talking about, but I suspect that those who oppose life extension can do so on several grounds. First would be the economics of an egalitarian approach--granted it is expensive to obtain, and suddenly "inhumane" to deny, it could turn whole societies into surfs who place themselves into indentured servant status in order to pay for their life extension. This was the subject of the phil of tech stuff I did on life extension back in the early 90's.

Another argument against is that if you have life extension, and not youth, what you have is a future society of people who amplify the trouble we already have with supporting our seniors. If people live to 200 years old but can't work past 65, how do we support them?

And of course with any radical technology, you will have people who object based upon a seeming god-like power that can be abused. Usually you'll hear this as relates to recombinant genetics. Making people live as long as Methuselah is easy to presume "not in God's plan" but OTOH, maybe Methuselah lived as long as he did, because of the technology we're now developing. These very emotional arguments are pretty easily turned around, but in any case, issues like this generate angst and I think it is the emotional content that makes technological pessimists. One can note, technological optimists, who hand-wave past the difficulties are really not better. They just make different thinking errors.

[paperburn1]

Life extension is all ready here and proven. All you have to do is sew a 16 year old boy to your butt and combine the circulatory systems and you will stop aging.
yes there are downsides but it will work.
I wonder how long it will be before you start buying "young blood"to replace your own?

[williatw]

Life extension is all ready here and proven. All you have to do is sew a 16 year old boy to your butt and combine the circulatory systems and you will stop aging.
yes there are downsides but it will work.
I wonder how long it will be before you start buying "young blood"to replace your own?

Well if it is "young blood" you have a hankerin' for:

Artificial Blood Is Patient-Ready

A new source of blood could be just around the corner: red blood cells grown from fibroblasts that have been reprogrammed into mature red blood cells in the lab. The blood, developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS), would be Type O negative, also known as universal donor blood, which currently comprises just 7 percent of the blood donor pool.

“We have made red blood cells that are fit to go in a person’s body,” project leader Marc Turner, medical director at SNBTS, told Forbes. “Before now, we haven’t really had that.”

The blood is created by dedifferentiating fibroblasts from an adult donor and reprogramming them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are then cultured in a bone-marrow-like environment for a month. Blood cells are then extracted from the cell culture. If the technique can be scaled up to industrial levels (which is no trivial task), beyond potentially supplying an endless supply of life-giving blood, the artificial blood would consist entirely of young, healthy, and infection-free cells, avoiding the issues of pathogen contamination that have in the past plagued the donor blood supply.

“Although similar research has been conducted elsewhere, this is the first time anybody has manufactured blood to the appropriate quality and safety standards for transfusion into a human being,” Turner told The Telegraph.

The artificial blood could be transfused into patients in a clinical trial setting as early as 2016, likely for three patients suffering from a genetic disorder called thalassaemia, in which the body makes unusually low levels of hemoglobin—a problem that is treated frequent transfusions.

Correction (April 17): This story has been updated from its original version to correctly reflect that the researchers are deriving blood cells, not serum, from iPSCs, and that the cells themselves are not artificial. The Scientist regrets the errors.

[hanelyp]

Would someone like to tell me why the few social conservatives who have commented on radical life extension are so hostile towards it?

You must be running in different circles than I am. I'm not seeing that hostility. For instance, Glenn Reynolds, http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/, is consistently supportive of advancements in medical technology.

It's indisputable that radical life extension would be massively disruptive to some social institutions, but I'm not seeing conservatives defending those institutions.

Personally, I'm not hostile to radical life extension. I am skeptical of individual announcements, aware that advanced medicine is rarely without side effects.

[Diogenes]

Would someone like to tell me why the few social conservatives who have commented on radical life extension are so hostile towards it? This is probably the number one reason why social conservatives irritate me. People who oppose the development of effective anti-aging therapies irritate me regardless of their political ideology.

It has always been obvious to me since childhood that space development and life extension are two peas in a pod. It strikes me as quite irrational to favor one but to oppose the other.

"Whatchu talkin bout Willis?"


I have no hostility towards life extension, and I can't fathom why anyone would. Who has said they are hostile to life extension?

[Diogenes]

Would someone like to tell me why the few social conservatives who have commented on radical life extension are so hostile towards it?

You must be running in different circles than I am. I'm not seeing that hostility. For instance, Glenn Reynolds, http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/, is consistently supportive of advancements in medical technology.

Uh, he's a Libertarian, not a Social Conservative.

It's indisputable that radical life extension would be massively disruptive to some social institutions, but I'm not seeing conservatives defending those institutions.

Personally, I'm not hostile to radical life extension. I am skeptical of individual announcements, aware that advanced medicine is rarely without side effects.

Yeah, i'm not either. Now I am curious as to where he got this idea.

[GIThruster]

Haven't read it yet and don't have time right now but here it is:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/ ... QdrUSjZkkw

[kurt9]

Haven't read it yet and don't have time right now but here it is:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/ ... QdrUSjZkkw

What's amusing to me about using germline gene therapy to design kids to be free from various diseases and the like is that we are finding out that genetics has very little to do with most disease conditions. The sequencing of people's genomes has not turned up much genetic causes of diseases. The Beijing Genomic Institute decided to sequence the genomes of a lot of smart people as well as regular people. Their recent findings also show a lack of correlation of smarts with known genes. Its as if this stuff had little to do with genetics.

Genetics influences morphology and probably a lot of immunological stuff. It probably plays much less role in diseases and aging that most people think. What this means is we won't have much of the "designer baby" thing in our future since such "directed evolution" won't accomplish much.

The biggest application of bio-engineering will be for regeneration of damaged bodies and the end to aging. There will come a time when aging is something you will read about on the history blog, much like we read about polio or the black death today.

With regards to aging, I think Aubrey de Grey's theories about the causes of aging are correct and that the SENS therapies that his foundation is working to develop will cure it. Aging is not caused by genomic DNA damage but is likely causes by mitochondrial DNA damage.

My original prompt about social conservatives being hostile to healthy (radical life extension) is due to the negative comments I see from those of social conservative persuasion in response to articles about radical life extension on blogs like pjmedia and the like. Maybe these are atypical responses. I notice that Europeans seem more hostile to life extension than Americans. Articles about SENS and the like in papers such as the Telegraph or Guardian (UK tabloids) tend to attract more negative comments than articles in comparable U.S. publications. In all cases, those hostile to life extension tend to make dumb-ass comments.

I tried an experiment a few years back. I had an issue of LEF magazine that had as cover story about using genetic engineered stem cell to enable youth immortality. I was flying a lot at the time and made a point to carry this issue with me while on the flight, just to see what the responses of my fellow passengers would be. The only person who commented on it happened to be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was, of course, completely enthusiastic about the prospect of radical life extension.

My take home lesson from this is that people who are very active and dynamic, who have a lot going on in their lives are likely to be very receptive to the prospect of youthful bio-engineered immortality. People who are less active in their lives are likely to be less enthusiastic about such. People who have more dreams or who dream big have more to live for than those who do not. Hence they are more interested in life extension. This is an obvious tautology. Hence, my "experiment" did not tell me anything I did not already know.

[palladin9479]

The Beijing Genomic Institute decided to sequence the genomes of a lot of smart people as well as regular people. Their recent findings also show a lack of correlation of smarts with known genes. Its as if this stuff had little to do with genetics.

I would be extremely careful about those results, primarily because intelligence has been linked with genetic heritage for centuries. If there parents were intelligent then there is overwhelming evidence that the children are likely to be just as intelligent. Furthermore intelligence was naturally selected for in our species, natural selection itself revolves around genetics. Most of your personality traits are inherited from your parents.

So I'd start to very carefully see what metrics they were actually measuring for "intelligence", or if they were just sequencing DNA and looking for similarities between smart and average people. That would be virtually impossible for us to find with our current level of understanding as such things would be buried pretty deep in our genetic code.

[hanelyp]

One complication of genetics is that there's more than just the protein coding genes we carry. There's also the subset of genes we express, which also appears to be inherited through chemical tags, though more easily changed than the base genes themselves. So called "non-coding" DNA may also play a role in how DNA coils up, and hence what protein and RNA coding segments express at what times.

[GIThruster]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists- ... 1426542180

[williatw]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists- ... 1426542180

Thanks for the info GIThruster. From your link:

The trial aims to test the drug metformin, a common medication often used to treat Type 2 diabetes, and see if it can delay or prevent other chronic diseases. (The project is being called Targeting/Taming Aging With Metformin, or TAME.) Metformin isn’t necessarily more promising than other drugs that have shown signs of extending life and reducing age-related chronic diseases. But metformin has been widely and safely used for more than 60 years, has very few side effects and is inexpensive.

Sounds very similar to a link I posted back last October that mentioned metformin and Rapamycin:

One of the most promising groups of drugs is based on a compound called rapamycin. It was first used to suppress the immune system in organ transplant recipients, then later found to extend lifespan in yeast and worms. In 2009, mice were added to the list when the drug was found to lengthen the animals' lives by up to 14 per cent, even though they were started on the drug at 600 days old, the human equivalent of being about 60.

The most commonly used medicine for type 2 diabetes, metformin, also seems to extend the lifespan of many small animals, including mice, by around 5 per cent.

There have been no trials of metformin as a longevity drug in people, but a recent study hinted that it might have a similar effect. The study was designed to compare metformin with another diabetes medicine, using records of 180,000 UK patients. To tease out the differences between the drugs, people who started taking them were compared with people without diabetes who had been closely matched for age and other health factors, and tracked over five years.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3504&start=120

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... Cx3kbHD-Uk

Rapamycin seems to have a much stronger longevity effect (14% vs 5% for metformin) albeit with more potential negative side-effects.

[kurt9]

The Beijing Genomic Institute decided to sequence the genomes of a lot of smart people as well as regular people. Their recent findings also show a lack of correlation of smarts with known genes. Its as if this stuff had little to do with genetics.

I would be extremely careful about those results, primarily because intelligence has been linked with genetic heritage for centuries. If there parents were intelligent then there is overwhelming evidence that the children are likely to be just as intelligent. Furthermore intelligence was naturally selected for in our species, natural selection itself revolves around genetics. Most of your personality traits are inherited from your parents.

So I'd start to very carefully see what metrics they were actually measuring for "intelligence", or if they were just sequencing DNA and looking for similarities between smart and average people. That would be virtually impossible for us to find with our current level of understanding as such things would be buried pretty deep in our genetic code.

One possibility is that they did find genetic correlates and that this public pronouncement is disinformation. The Chinese are keeping these discoveries to themselves for now to ensure first-mover advantage.