Stem cell politics in Wisconsin have been heating up of late; anti-research groups and politicians have unfortunately succeeded in banning therapeutic cloning:

Everyone is against human cloning but the real purpose of this bill is to restrict stem cell research, which holds enormous potential for our state as well as the promise of curing juvenile diabetes, spinal cord injuries and Parkinson's disease," said Doyle, also in a prepared statement.

"I do not understand how anyone can, in good conscience, tell a family whose child is suffering from a life-threatening disease that politics is more important than finding a cure."

This criminalization of research is just as idiotic as every other attempt to outlaw therapeutic cloning, a technology presently vital to much of the most important stem cell research. It never ceases to amaze me that such a large number of people are so ready to turn their backs on progress towards regenerative cures for age-related conditions, placing greater value on a few hundred cells than on actual thinking, feeling, suffering and dying human beings.

The Wisconsin governor is a strong supporter of stem cell research and is expected to veto the legislation:

Gov. Jim Doyle invested $2 million in state funds in a company founded by stem cell research pioneer Jamie Thomson on Monday while promising to veto restrictions on the developing science.

Doyle said the $1 million grant and $1 million loan will help startup company Cellular Dynamics International leverage private investments that will eventually turn research discoveries into profitable products.

It is a sad thing that we live in a society in which so much effort must be expended simply to gain the freedom to research better medicine and build steps towards real healthy life extension technologies - how much further could research have advanced if not for these battles? Even after the stem cell wars have ended, it will still be a case of back to the normal mess of regulation and governance that hampers medical research and commercialization in the US. Basic science may be speeding up and producing real results, but the costs - in money, in time, in lives - imposed by the regulatory situation seem only to go from bad to worse.

Technorati tags: politics, stem cell research

Posted by Reason at 8:59 PM
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An interesting discussion is presently ongoing over at the Gerontology Research Group email list, covering such topics as workable definitions for aging and the need for biomarkers of aging. I've touched on the topic of biomarkers for aging previously; it's an important issue for the research community. How can you rapidly determine that you have successfully developed an anti-aging technology that works in humans if you cannot tell how advanced the aging process is in any given individual, or if you cannot even agree on a working scientific definition for aging? Obviously you can wait around to count years and deaths, but that reliable fallback is not a good approach for those of us who would like to see working healthy life extension medicine in our lifetimes.

A good excerpt from the GRG conversation has made it's way to the transhumantech group, and is worth reading if you have an interest in the nuts and bolts of the field.

I should mention that, in my view, the Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence approach sidesteps many of the requirements for definitions and biomarkers. If researchers jump right on in and work on fixing what we know to be root causes of degeneration, then they can't be going far wrong. You don't need a unified theory of automotive decay to use a toolkit and spare parts to extend the lifespan of your car - the only difference between the human body and a car is the degree of complexity involved. When it comes to repairing the causes of degeneration in people, scientists can measuring the effectiveness of repair strategies on specific modes of age-related damage (mitochondrial mutations, extracellular junk, damaged DNA, etc) in isolation; improvements in repair capabilities in any one area should lead to incremental benefits to patients even while other modes of age-related damage are still taking place unabated. Provided that medical research can reliably identify all causes of age-related degeneration as science moves forward and time advances, researchers should be well set to solve the problem of aging incrementally - without the need for a comprehensive understanding at the outset.

As always, the crucial missing ingredients are significant funds and public support for this sensible, necessary, practical direction in aging research. This is a problem that folks like you and I can help to solve, however, by stepping up to support efforts like the Mprize for longevity research.

Technorati tags: aging, gerontology, SENS, science

Posted by Reason at 7:31 PM
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After long aeons of waiting, the SAGE Crossroads Genetics of Longevity webcast transcript has now arrived - and there was much rejoicing. You'll be hearing a lot about the merits of yeast as a platform for aging research:

It really wasn't a good model for eukaryotic aging at all at the time we started. Yeast is the simplest eukaryote you can work on. And by that I mean, it's a cell that's related to the type of cells we have in our body.

I felt like at the time that even if we didn't learn anything that directly applied to human aging, we would at least set a paradigm for how aging might occur. I think that it's still not entirely clear how related the two species are in terms of aging by any means. But there is accumulating evidence that there are going to be some things that are in common.

Not to mention yeast and sirtuins, the latter being a hot topic elsewhere in aging research (in relation to calorie restriction):

But so - I mean, and this sort of gets back to what you asked - what limits the replicative life span of a yeast cell? We don't completely know the answer. We know that one thing that limits how many times a cell can divide is the accumulation of these extra chromosomal RDNA circles, which some people call ERCs, and SIR2 inhibits that process.

We now think that that's not the whole story, that there are other things going on. So the real question is - one thing that's interesting about these ERCs is that they seem to be specific to yeast. People have looked and there's no evidence that these circles accumulate or cause aging in other organisms. Yet it's very clear in yeast that that's how [SIR2] is acting. So it's a burning question - [SIR2] seems to regulate aging at least in yeast and worms and flies, apparently by different mechanisms. So that's one of the questions, how could such a system have evolved, and is there something else going on that we don't completely understand?

Yeast, like the nematode worm, is a fairly simple organism - this opens up the doors to some methodical approaches that would be unfeasible in more complex life:

In the meantime, the yeast community has gone and made a deletion of every single gene, each in one strain. So there are 5,000 strains now that all have a deletion of each nonessential gene in yeast. What we're doing now is scanning through those, just randomly looking for ones that are long-lived. We're finding that there are a lot of other pathways in addition to [SIR2] that are regulating aging.

As with so much of funded aging research at the moment, the primary focus is the biochemical and genetic processes governing the regulation of metabolism. This is all useful work, but Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence it isn't - tinkering with our metabolism is never going to give us radically extended healthy life spans. But back to the topic at hand: as in other laboratories, calorie restriction is a big part of that picture.

The question about how it's activated, I think, gets to the point of calorie restriction or dietary restriction. One of the clues that aging is conserved in different organisms is that if you reduce caloric intake - and that's done in different ways in different organisms. But if you reduce caloric intake, do you extend life span? That works in yeast and flies and mice and monkeys, presumably. And maybe even us.

There is a big question: what is calorie restriction doing? One model that was put forth was that calorie restriction was leading to the activation of [SIR2]. At least in the strains we work in, we think it is a lot more complicated than that, and that [SIR2] may not be the link for calorie restriction. That doesn't mean it is not regulating aging, but we think that there are other pathways that calorie restriction are affecting that are causing aging.

That's just for starters - there's a good deal more, covering telomeres, other prospective aging-related genes and processes, and half a dozen other interesting topics in passing. Go and read the whole thing.

Technorati tags: aging, science

Posted by Reason at 9:40 PM
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That was quick - the Methuselah Foundation's $25,000 Muhlestein Family Trust Challenge I mentioned last Sunday has already been met:

To the delight of all volunteers, donors and competitors involved in the Mprize competition, the Stan and Judy Muhlestein Trust $25,000 challenge has ALREADY BEEN MET. This stunning result is due especially to the generosity of David Gore, the newest member of The Three Hundred whose $25,000 donation swept the challenge. Thanks to all involved!

Upon hearing the news Dr. Aubrey de Grey said "this calls for beer all around!".

You have to move quickly if you want to take part in fundraising events around here! Thanks to these generous folks, and a surprise $125,000 from an anonymous donor, the Mprize for anti-aging research has passed the $1.75 million mark in total pledges. Things are very much on track for the Mprize to do for serious, scientific anti-aging research what the X Prize has accomplished for the private aerospace industry - to wake it up and blaze the way for tangible advances in technology and capabilities.

Have you told your friends about the Mprize and the future of healthy life extension today?

Technorati tags: activism, anti-aging, life extension, Mprize

Posted by Reason at 7:48 PM
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The Methuselah Foundation has announced the next dinner for The Three Hundred, generous supporters of the Mprize for longevity research, for December in Boston. You can find the announcement here:

The Methuselah Foundation will be hosting a small dinner party. The guests of honor will be Ray Kurzweil and our very own Aubrey de Grey! The event is free of charge.

Here's the catch: you have to be a Three Hundred member to attend.

The Three Hundred is the Mprize's core group of committed givers: those who have pledged $1,000 US per year for 25 years to the cause of finding a cure for the biggest killer of all time: aging. There's plenty of time to become a Three Hundred member... you can sign up anytime here.

If you are looking forward to a future of healthy life extension and working anti-aging medicine, then you should step forward and help to make it happen! The future cannot be taken for granted - it is something that we all build together. The more we do, the faster it comes to pass; $1,000 per year is a the cost of a cup of coffee per day, but it can be put to good use speeding up and invigorating the development of real anti-aging technologies. So what are you waiting for?

Technorati tags: activism, anti-aging, life extension,

Posted by Reason at 4:38 PM
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Comparing the stem cell therapies currently offered in Thailand with stem-cell related products just now coming onto the market in the US is an instructional exercise. For the former we have:

VesCell(tm) is "autologous" adult stem cell therapy. That means we use stem cells taken from your own blood . These stem cells are named "ACPs" (Angiogenic Cell Precursors). ACPs are cells that induce the growth of blood vessels. These cells may also turn into additional types of cells that can benefit heart patients. Similar cells, but probably less effective than ACPs, have successfully been used in dozens of clinical trials all over the world.

Cardiologists and cardiac surgeons are currently using VesCell(tm) to improve the quality of life of patients suffering from ischemic heart disease (or coronary artery disease) cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure by relieving debilitating symptoms such as severe angina pectoris (severe chest pain) and increasing exercise tolerance.

While for the latter:

Osiris has found a way to take bone from a newly deceased donor for the grafts, while preserving the stem cells. The market for Osteocel potentially could encompass anyone who needs a significant amount of bone regrown -- accident victims, people requiring hip replacements. But Osiris said its ability to supply Osteocel is limited, so it is sticking with the spine operations for now.

The next Osiris product is a drug, not a stem cell product, and the first is simply a better bone transplant technique that happens to involve stem cells. Meanwhile, the commercialization of stem cell therapies for heart disease, the cause of 1/3 of all deaths in the US, is taking place ... but not in the US. This illustrates a part of the damage caused by regulation and anti-research politics; prohibitive cost and time of commercialization on the one hand and reductions in private investment for commercial products on the other. So it is that real regenerative medicine based on the use of stem cells is currently only provided as a commercial service outside the US.

Technorati tags: regenerative medicine, stem cell research

Posted by Reason at 1:51 PM
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I didn't touch on Kurzweil's views on the interactions between overbearing government, regulation, economics and the rate of technological progress - in medicine and elsewhere - in my last post on "The Singularity is Near" (TSiN). They are a challenge for libertarians, even pragmatic libertarians such as myself: Kurzweil says that past evidence of exponential growth in technological capabilities over a period with "extensive regulation in place" is sufficent evidence to suppose that "short of a worldwide totalitarian state, the economic and other forces underlying technical progress will only grow with ongoing advances."

I'm not sold on this idea of economic incentives and the technological imperative as a gel-like mix in a packet - squeeze them down with economic damage, poor governance or regulation (which are all much the same thing) in one part of the world, and off they flow to the regions of least pressure to do their work there. To my eyes, this world doesn't have a constant amount of freedom, nor a constant amount of incentive and imperative - the freedom to research and enact progress is something we must fight for, not take for granted.

Despite exhortations here and there, there is a curious kind of passivity underlying the discussions in TSiN. This is the most dangerous form of futurism, the one that takes the future as a forgone conclusion to be prepared for, rather than something that must be worked on, nurtured and built.

Technorati tags: books, economics, singularity

Posted by Reason at 10:46 PM
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Leonid Gavrilov's latest project is entitled "Exceptional Longevity in the United States" and you can find out more from his blog:

The broad long-term objective of this project is to find out why some people manage to survive to extreme old ages (100+ years), and what are the driving forces behind mortality trends at advanced ages (which have important implications for public spending on health care, pensions etc.). This is an important issue not only for demographic forecasts of human mortality and population aging, but also for improving our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of human aging and longevity.

...

This project is also inspired by unexpected findings from our pilot study of the U.S. centenarians at the Center on Aging supported by NIA and the Society of Actuaries, which suggest that very large differences (2-3 times) in chances of exceptional survival could be linked to such surprisingly "simple" early-life circumstances as person's birth order, birth place (within the United States), and even family socioeconomic background (being raised at farm). This amazing plasticity of exceptional longevity in response to "trivial" early-life living conditions indicate that environmental and behavioral factors should receive much more attention in longevity studies, because even the search for "human longevity genes" could be greatly facilitated when powerful confounding effects of childhood environment are taken into account.

It seems to me that statistical and actuarial assistance to the process of understanding how aging, genetics and metabolism interact will be come less and less relevant as the techniques of biotechnology and bioinformatics continue to improve. Statistical studies allow scientists to narrow the search for genes and biochemical mechanisms that are relevant to the matter at hand - but powerful enough tools will make this process unnecessary.

Technorati tags: aging, biotechnology, gerontology, science

Posted by Reason at 10:51 PM
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Andrew Price pointed me to an interesting paper on mortality (and, by extension, life expectancy) and economic growth, via Bradford Plumer.

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data, we argue that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility, and lower investment in physical and human capital. Furthermore, the feedback effect from economic prosperity to better health care implies that mortality could be the source of a poverty trap.

I think that there are other factors at work in the African regions that are the focus of their paper, such as rapacious governance, absence of the rule of law, and so forth. Life expectancy and mortality in the economic boom times of the 18th century in Europe weren't much better than the worst of Africa today, after all. The basic concept is a good one, however, and we should turn it around and ask ourselves how much more economic growth could we experience if healthy life spans were greatly extended? I think it to be eminently sensible to view short-termism in the management of public companies, to pick one example, as a function of our life spans. Short-termism would still exist if we lived twice as long, but there is every reason to think that it would be lengthier short-termism, with less of the sacrifice of long term gains.

What long-term and potentially very profitable opportunities do we set aside because aging and death require us to hasten everything along - and because aging and death destroy more value than all the natural and man-made disasters worldwide each year? Now there is something to think on.

Technorati tags: economics, life extension

Posted by Reason at 8:24 PM
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I have been working my way through Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" (TSiN) over the past few days, having been the fortunate recipient of a review copy. The book might alternatively be titled "The Modern Futurist Consensus: a Review" or "Damien Broderick's The Spike: the Extended Remix." Those of us who have haunted transhumanist enclaves in the past few years (or more) are unlikely find new ideas here, but the book serves a most useful purpose in bringing the best and brightest of transhumanist, futurist themes and thinking all together under one roof, in a popularist manner, with a unifying, easily-marketed theme. It's been done before - by the aforementioned Damien Broderick, amongst others - but not quite as comprehensively. This sort of book is something of a necessary precursor to wider advocacy and education in today's culture; a pleasant irony, given the subject matter, and one could debate where in the present S-curve in the evolution of futurist thought TSiN fits.

My own two cents thrown into the ring say that the class of future portrayed in TSiN is something of a foregone conclusion. It's quite likely that we'll all be wildly, humorously wrong about the details of implementation, culture and usage, but - barring existential catastrophe or disaster - the technological capabilities discussed in TSiN will come to pass. The human brain will be reverse engineered, simulated and improved upon. The same goes for the human body; radical life extension is one desirable outcome of this engineering process. We will merge with our machines as nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing become mature technologies. Recursively self-improving general artificial intelligence will develop, and then life will really get interesting very quickly. And so forth ... the question is not whether these things will happen, but rather when they will happen - and more importantly, are we going to be alive and in good health to see this wondrous future?

As you might guess, my criticisms of TSiN center around the timeline predictions for development of new technologies, the acceleration of the rate of discovery, and the management of complexity. I made a stab at discussing this last item recently in connection with Arnold Kling's comments on TSiN (which are well worth reading, by the way):

Progress towards general (and/or strong) artificial intelligence (AI) - a grail for many transhumanists and other futurists - has been slower than we'd like. The level of difficulty has been consistently underestimated in the past, and I see this as one part of a larger underestimation of any form of complexity management. You may recall seeing this idea put forward in a variety of 1990s writing on the topic of nanotechnology; the production of millions of nanorobots wasn't thought to be as hard as the process of controlling and managing those nanorobots in a useful fashion - strategies for information processing are as much the key to future medical technologies as nanoscale and molecular manufacturing. Complexity is hard, both to manage and estimate in advance.

Now replace "nanorobot" with "human cell" and that's where we are today with biotechnology. Biological systems - such as your body, or even just a small piece of it - are immensely complex. The reason researchers can make meaningful progress today with medical technology such as gene therapies and stem cell research is that they are, effectively, tweaking settings on existing machinery that largely handles the complexity management itself. Our grasp of how things work - based on our ability to process information and build the tools required to gather information and effect change - is now adequate for this task, just as it is almost adequate to guide existing biological machinery to build replacement tissue and organs in a useful, controlled manner. But it seems to me to be a very large leap - in terms of managing complexity - to go from where we are today to reach the point of, for example, replacing biochemically complex systems within the body with artificial substitutes. Or reverse-engineering the brain, that sort of thing.

Kurzweil's commentary on types of complexity in TSiN is a good read - and one of the better explanations for the layman I've seen - but it seems a little disconnected from the actual business of dealing with complexity in ways that matter. My take on it all is that science is largely the process of discovering keys to complexity; by this I mean finding algorithms, recipies or methodologies that enable us humans to understand and manage complexity that would otherwise be beyond us. To take an applied example, manipulating stem cells through comparatively simple procedures enables scientists to perform tasks - the regeneration of age-related tissue damage - that they cannot even monitor in detail, let alone control. A simpler and more abstract example would be the mathematics and physics of atoms, comparatively simple equations that we can use to describe very complex collections of objects and behaviors.

We humans are in the process of building tools that enable us to create or meaningfully interact with ever-greater complexity, and computers are at the heart of it, but this process is one in which our individual, unaided capacities for complexity management are not increasing. Humans are still humans as of this decade, and the keys we utilize have to be useable at our level. I view the speeding of progress as part and parcel of building a larger capacity for discovering and utilizing the keys to complexity. This, as Kurzweil makes the case in TSiN, is a process that is growing exponentially, and we are moving out of the timespan in which exponential growth appears more linear.

There is one important area of complexity management in which we seem to be making little headway, however: the organization of humans in business and research. For all that we can now accomplish with faster computers and enormous leaps in telecommunications, we don't seem to have made significant inroads in getting large numbers of humans to cooperate efficiently. As Arnold Kling points out, that the excessive use of Who Moved My Cheese? is even in the running as something to try is not a good sign. I've been involved in more technological attempts to improve efficiency in large organizations, and the state of the art is not pretty - nor especially effective in the grand scheme of things.

I am prepared to go out on a limb here, as I have done before, and say that business and research cycles that involve standard-issue humans are incompressible beneath a certain duration - they cannot be made to happen much faster than is possible today:

I'm dubious about large reductions in the length of business or research cycles through technology while humans are still in the loop. You can certainly make the process cheaper and better, meaning that more attempts at a given business or research model will operate in parallel, but there is a point past which the length of the business cycle cannot be easily compressed. That point is very much a function of the human element: meetings, fundraising, decisions, organizational friction, and so forth - all very time-consuming and proven very resistant to improvements in the time taken.

This is not to say that they cannot be made cheaper. But cheaper doesn't equate to faster business and research cycles; rather, it means that any given problem will be tackled by many more parallel attempts. The professionals are joined by skilled amateurs, the priesthood dissolves, and everyone with a will to work gets in on the action. In this sort of a market, any given problem (what business model works, how does this disease process kill people, what does this biochemical signal do) is more likely to be solved in a single cycle of innovation. Biotechnology is not too many years away from this state of affairs, a repetition of what is currently taking place in the software development industry. If matters become cheap enough, people will be willing to risk ventures and research on incomplete solutions, on untested business models, and thus shortcut the existing cycle - but all to many forms of development are not vulnerable to this sort of shortcut. The answers cannot always be guessed or jumped to on the basis of incomplete work.

Back in the deep end, expensive projects mean conservative funding organizations, which means organizational matters proceed at a slow pace. This is a defining characteristic of our time: we have blindingly fast rates of research and technological advances once the money is on the table, but the cycles of business, fundraising and research are still chained to the old human timetable. I regard this incompressibility of the business or research cycle - the fact that a given iota of progress cannot be accomplished as fast as technology allows because of human organizational factors, and there is a certain minimum length of time taken to accomplish this iota of progress - as a form of limit on exponential growth, one we are now hitting up against.

Kurzweil's Singularity is a Vingean slow burn across a decade, driven by recursively self-improving AI, enhanced human intelligence and the merger of the two. Interestingly, Kurzweil employs much the same arguments against a hard takeoff scenario - in which these processes of self-improvement in AI occur in a matter of hours or days - as I am employing against his proposed timescale: complexity must be managed and there are limits as to how fast this can happen. But artificial intelligence, or improved human intelligence, most likely through machine enhancement, is at the heart of the process. Intelligence can be thought of as the capacity for dealing with complexity; if we improve this capacity, then all the old limits we worked within can be pushed outwards. We don't need to search for keys to complexity if we can manage the complexity directly. Once the process of intelligence enhancement begins in earnest, then we can start to talk about compressing business cycles that existed due to the limits of present day human workers, individually and collectively.

Until we start pushing these limits, we're still stuck with the slow human organizational friction, limits on complexity management, and a limit on exponential growth. Couple this with slow progress towards both organizational efficiency and the development of general artificial intelligence, and this is why I believe that Kurzweil is optimistic by at least a decade or two.

So how does this all fold into healthy life extension? Well, physical immortality is one obvious product of singularity-level nanotechnology, biotechnology and complexity management. There are no known barriers in physics to the construction of nanomedical systems capable of simultaneously managing, repairing - or replacing - every cell in our bodies. Even something as complex as the sum of all your cells can in principle be kept in the best possible shape for as long as you like - "all" it takes is knowledge, the future tools of nanoscale engineering and powerful enough computers. But when do we get there? This is the question, and it is one that shapes the actions of futurists and transhumanists. There are many who believe that the best sort of activism and advocacy for the future - even for healthy life extension - is in the area of artificial intelligence, because making self-improving intelligence arrive earlier will lead to all other currently pressing problems, such as age-related degeneration and death, being rendered trivial in the mid to long term. Obviously, I'm not in that camp: I'm sufficiently dubious about Kurzweil-like timescales - based on my views as set forth above - to think that we need to be tackling the problem of aging first.

Technorati tags: book reviews, books, life extension, singularity, transhumanism

Posted by Reason at 12:06 AM
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I thought I'd point out a blog essay on radical life extension that I stumbled across earlier today. The author is somewhat out of shape on the science and who is doing what, but can't be faulted for enthusiasm - the community could certainly do with more people with this sort of mindset. Advocacy is powered as much by enthusiasm as by anything else, after all. Some choice quotes, which I have hyperlinked for reference purposes:

The life extension field is haunted by pessimists who are hung up on the Greek myth of Tiphonius who asked the Gods for eternal life, but was doomed to become decrepid because he forgot to specify eternal youth. I would argue that one of the main goals of medicine is to help people live as healthy as possible for as long as possible. Getting the impaired, repaired

...

It seems that curing the diseases of old age is now more of an engineering problem than a scientific mystery. The Methuselah M-prize has been started by the people who got private industry into space with the Ansuri X-prize. The M-prize goes to the people who get mice to live significantly longer, in ways that may be applied to people.

If you can just survive to the next medical breakthrough technology, you might be able to survive a few years more, until the next little development, which might give you even more years. This way, if you're very lucky you may get climb a sort of "stairway to heaven" and leapfrog from one medical engineering discovery to the next. Imagine what the medical technology of 2150 might be able to do for us?

...

When talking about immortality its fascinating that some people get angry when you propose living forever. The audience for the panel were split between the "dyers" or "terminators" and the people who believed that life is worth living. One correspondent spoke to me about about living longer being a selfish use of Earth's limited resources. This ignores the fact that RIGHT NOW Paul and the many people who agree with him, are making selfish use of Earth's limited resources, and by the same argument that condemns old people to die in the future, they are condemning themselves to die right now. I asked himl if he was offering to suicide to give up his use of Earth's resources right now, but he declined. They've decided on a particular number that is "natural", and not only have they decided to die at that age, but they insist that EVERYBODY should be forced to go without whatever medical treatment might become available, and commit suicide at their favourite number. The dyers, with my correspondent as their spokesperson decided that most of them would like to die at age eight-five, which is about a ten year extension of the average life expectancy of seventy-five. This requires life extension technology not yet available. What right does anybody have to tell other people to commit suicide?

American writer Ronald Bailey wrote about the emotional battle between the pessimists and the optimists: "Future generations will look back at the beginning of the 21st century and marvel that intelligent people actually tried to stop biomedical progress just to protect their cramped and limited vision of human nature."

The hoary old Malthusian arguments (professions of faith, really) on the topic of resources and overpopulation just never seem to go away, no matter how well refuted or disproven. Longer, healthier lives will not lead to any challenge greater than that imposed on us by the ongoing tide of death and suffering that is aging. Challenges can be overcome - and far greater ones have been in the past century - but only if we are alive and healthy, capable of action.

Technorati tags: advocacy, life extension

Posted by Reason at 5:20 PM
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The folk at Responsible Nanotechnology have added their own thoughts to biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey's recent article on the intersection of nanomedicine and the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. How do the future of medical nanotechnology and the future of real, working anti-aging medicine overlap? Read the post here:

Of course, if CRN is right about how quickly molecular manufacturing can be developed (and probably will, once militaries and corporations start racing for it), then it will arrive long before anyone has a chance to become 200 or even 150 years old. That's the good news.

The bad news is that in different people, each aging process happens at different rates. If a thirty-year research cycle is enough to keep the average person alive, a fraction will die for lack of the breakthrough in less than 20 years. After several such cycles, the fractions add up, and by this model, most of the population would still have to expect to die of old age sooner or later. (This isn't covered in the article, but I emailed my analysis to de Grey, and he confirmed it as a concern.)

On the third hand, I expect that--if regulation allows--molecular manufacturing should allow a far shorter research cycle than 30 years. With the ability to build custom-designed diagnostic and treatment hardware on the fly for pennies per device, it should be possible for a research group to test and evaluate hundreds of treatments per year, benefiting almost instant feedback--which should make such a rapid testing cycle safer than today's medicine, if it's done responsibly.

I'm dubious about large reductions in the length of business or research cycles through technology while humans are still in the loop. You can certainly make the process cheaper and better, meaning that more attempts at a given business or research model will operate in parallel, but there is a point past which the length of the business cycle cannot be easily compressed. That point is very much a function of the human element: meetings, fundraising, decisions, organizational friction, and so forth - all very time-consuming and proven very resistant to improvements in the time taken. Regulations don't help either - if you want to slow progress, ensure that the end results are not as reliable or effective as they could be, and make the product more expensive, you can't do better than regulation. It has always puzzled me as to why CRN see ever larger regulatory structures as the way to go, but to each their own.

The Responsible Nanotechnology post ends on a gratifyingly sensible note, however:

The implications of extended healthspan are not as scary as most people assume. Birth rate has a much higher potential effect on the population than death rate. End-stage medical care takes more resources than simply staying alive and healthy. That's not to say there are no reasons for concern, but I don't think it should be assumed that trying to slow aging is irresponsible or destructive, as some have claimed. In any case, molecular manufacturing will pose far larger and more urgent problems than a population of healthy hundred-year-olds.

You