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BobYoMeowMeow wrote on 2011-07-05 04:01
LONDON (Reuters) – If Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.
A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" aging -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.
"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science.
"And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."
De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance," which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.
De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.
He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.
"The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic," he explained.
CHALLENGE
Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.
To date, the world's longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.
Some researchers say, however, that the trend toward longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.
De Grey's ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey's SENS theory was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" was never won.
The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as "pseudo science."
They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS "exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt."
CELL THERAPY
For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.
But de Grey says that's not what he's working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.
"This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," he told Reuters. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health."
De Grey divides the damage caused by aging into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.
He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, there are others where it's already almost there.
"Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It's designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it's already in clinical trials (in humans)," he said.
Stem cell therapies are currently being trialed in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.
NO AGE LIMIT
Cardiovascular diseases are the world's biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.
Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls "molecular garbage" -- byproducts of the body's metabolic processes -- which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete.
"The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell's workings," he said.
De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells -- and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans.
"If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease," he said.
De Grey is reluctant to make firm predictions about how long people will be able to live in future, but he does say that with each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.
In his view, this means that the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150.
"I call it longevity escape velocity -- where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on," he said.
"What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents," he said.
"But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."
http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110704/lf_nm_life/us_ageing_cure
well this is the scientist guy
[video=youtube;8iYpxRXlboQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYpxRXlboQ[/video]
it's such a great idea and yet its not
the cat doesnt want an a-hole to live 140 years
Edit: aw darn it, it's in bean rua...
at least more people will read this
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Nintega wrote on 2011-07-05 04:07
Great, good work on the immortality bro. Now where's my telekinesis?
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Mama wrote on 2011-07-05 04:14
if he can figure out how to prevent telomeres from fraying, then that's pretty much stopping aging in it's tracks. But there's gota be a reason why our body starts slowly killing itself after being 30 yrs old. Plus so many pathologies are due to genetics, how the hell is he gonna fix it on the genetic level? Even psychologically or due to stress, people make themselves sick and speed up aging.
seems like a pipe dream to me, this guy's goals. But he's passionate, so why the hell not? I like the idea of not having to worry about heart disease.
for some reason I think it's going to backfire horribly, or the side effects will be disastrous. But that's just a gut feeling.
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Xemnas wrote on 2011-07-05 04:15
Quote from Nintega;500515:
Great, good work on the immortality bro. Now where's my telekinesis?
You already have it, activating it is another thing though.
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Mama wrote on 2011-07-05 04:17
>just notices this is in bean rua
COOL BEANS
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Lan wrote on 2011-07-05 04:17
No thanks. When the world goes to hell I want to be dead and buried.
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TLCBonaparte wrote on 2011-07-05 04:33
I want to live forever :P This way I can play video games until end of time... or until something better comes along.
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TA wrote on 2011-07-05 04:41
Well I think I've said it before multiple times, but this is what I do. I'm actually working on this (yes,
this specifically).
To be honest, we aren't even close. Funding is an issue. It's been a little better recently. Anywho, if you want a little update, you can watch this:
[video=youtube;TuD_Fb-0sJo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuD_Fb-0sJo[/video]
Aubrey explained in his TED video exactly
how we're going to do it, if you bothered to watch it. If you can't be bothered, here's the super cliff notes version:
[spoiler]
[Image: http://i.min.us/idQtjy.png]
[Image: http://i.min.us/idUDFE.png]
[Image: http://i.min.us/ib9xAy.png]
[Image: http://i.min.us/ibDMwU.png]
[Image: http://i.min.us/ibDQDk.png]
[Image: http://i.min.us/ibDXb8.png]
[Image: http://i.min.us/ibDSLs.png]
[Image: http://i.min.us/ib96gW.png]
[/spoiler]
edit: Oh and you might find this relevant, Mama:
[video=youtube;_Mf5Jz9h-Zg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mf5Jz9h-Zg[/video]
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Mama wrote on 2011-07-05 05:49
that was an interesting video, he seems very passionate about curing mutations in mitochondria. I don't have an extensive knowledge in biology (only learned about neurons..), but I do know that mitochondria start going bonkers once telomeres start to fray, and that free radicals the dying mitochrondria produce are an important component in aging. I've only read about scientists going crazy about trying to find some sort of natural compound to activate telomerase, cause that would also keep mitochrondria healthy too iirc.
I don't understand why they aren't putting more funding into this sort of thing.
I also wonder, if they can physically make the body last for much longer, how would they keep the brain from developing stuff like dementia? They're going have to find the reason that tau starts to dysfunction since it is largely a mystery at the present time..
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Kollin wrote on 2011-07-05 06:33
bad idea, unless he found a way to slow down birth rate. me personally, i dont want to live forever. are we not tortured enough by our current lifespans? do you really want to work and pay bills for another 100 or so years (depends on how long this increases our life span)? i would much rather have eternal youth than eternal life. stay young and sexy till the day we die.
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Mama wrote on 2011-07-05 06:44
Quote from Kollin;500674:
bad idea, unless he found a way to slow down birth rate. me personally, i dont want to live forever. are we not tortured enough by our current lifespans? do you really want to work and pay bills for another 100 or so years (depends on how long this increases our life span)? i would much rather have eternal youth than eternal life. stay young and sexy till the day we die.
this is what I imagine the result is going to be, honestly..
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Kollin wrote on 2011-07-05 07:00
dieing is one of the goals on my check list. hopefully ill get everything else checked off first, but i do want to check that one off eventually.
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TA wrote on 2011-07-05 10:31
You people should really at least watch the video in the OP before you start talking.
He specifically debunks all your bird brained reasons for why it shouldn't be done. In fact, it's the very first thing that he does. It's the entire first 6 minutes, people!
Honestly, it gets me so angry reading these completely uninformed replies that I can hardly think. I can't even reply right now.
edit: Okay... I'll address some things asked by people too lazy to bother watching the video.
The entire idea behind RHR is to add, say, 30 years of healthy life to someone's current lifespan. That means you would age slower.
In short, keeping the fragility of old age from happening for longer. Wrinkles, gray hair, organ failure, and what have you.
It isn't eternal youth. Not at first at least. But maybe eventually. It's the idea, anyways.
So basically by doubling our lifespan instead of it taking 20 years to age from 30 to 50, it would take 40 years. Now that's not quite eternal youth, but it's considerably better.
The point though is that hopefully within those 40 years, it could be slowed down even further by new advances, maybe even some of the damage reversed. Because obviously we're not going to be able to make some amazing breakthrough fast enough that'll just cure it all together. It'll be a slow process and require a lot of work.
You can think of it like this... To reach the current fragility of age 100, it may eventually end up taking 1000 years. That means one's healthy life is increased considerably. The ages 30-50 would really be two entire centuries.
That's extending our healthy lifespan, and that's the general idea.
Of course, by the time someone reaches a 1000, then hopefully we'll have developed it far enough that age doesn't even matter anymore and we will basically be eternally youthful with the only thing really killing us being accidents, disasters, et cetera.
Realistically, it'll probably never be perfect. But, we should hopefully be able to extend our healthy lives indefinitely at some point, which is the idea.
This is all covered in the OP video, by the way.
As for the comments talking about why we shouldn't or why you wouldn't want to... Start watching the OP video at 1:15 or so. It should cover anything you could possibly come up with by 5 minutes.
In the future, I'm not going to bother explaining anything already thoroughly explained in the OP video. It's just a waste of my time. It takes me longer to explain it than it would for someone to just watch the damn video themselves.
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ＣＩＲＮＯ wrote on 2011-07-05 12:11
HUMANS WILL SPREAD AMONG THE STARS LIKE PLAGUE AND THEN WE WILL TRUELY BE AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE
WE ARE LEGION
WE ARE ONE
WE ARE ALL
Then Aliens come to wipe us out!
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Sumpfkraut wrote on 2011-07-05 13:14
I wonder what impact on society it would have if it has to bother with the same stupid people for over a hundred years en masse.
Terrifying. I don't look forward to it one bit, and I would indeed be very glad to see them fail.
Also consider that our reproduction cycles are way too fast to make this anywhere near comfortable.
There is enhancing natural life, and there is ****ing with it. The latter only works so far.