honestly, it the question shouldn't matter. no matter what aging really "is", it is still a universally horrible affliction that leads to nothing but increasing lower qualities of life those who are afflicted by it, and so should be dealt with as such
Actually it matters a lot for research funding and accepting papers in journals. One of the biggest things the anti-aging community has achieved is to finally get to a stage where aging is categorized as a disease modifier.
Please don't underestimate the effect of this achievement.
That's true, but it's important to acknowledge that "aging is a disease" and "aging is not a disease" are statements about the word "disease", not about aging.
I was watching Aubrey De Grey on JRE last night and was surprised to hear that ADG no longer prefers the disease label for aging. It's too dissimilar from what we're familiar with regarding diseases: something that we get, treat, and is gone.
Aging is an ongoing system maintenance issue. He indicated that he prefers to simply call it a "health problem".
From the article: "Maybe the ancients weren’t wrong, and aging can be not only delayed but cured like a disease"
It seems that's exactly the mindset ADG was distancing himself from.
>It's too dissimilar from what we're familiar with regarding diseases: something that we get, treat, and is gone.
That's absolutely not what a disease is. Off the top of my head, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Alzheimers, Parkinson's, Guillain-Barré, are some diseases that one gets, which only progressively worsens over time. A significant portion of diseases are never "gone".
At this point it's classified as a disease modifier. Diabetes and age related diabetes are different diseases and need to be treated differently.
On the long term as we get a better understanding of aging, it can be reclassified as a disease with a cure to be found, but right now it's a bit too early for that.
Since when did the definition of a disease require the existence of a cure? This whole topic feels like semantic quibbling...we could spend more time designing anti-aging plasmids and less time debating which human sounds to use
It doesn’t matter what we call it, we’re all too noob at programming biology to fix it
(or know it’s not fixable e.g. halting problem), the healthcare industry is bottlenecked by expensive regulations, bureaucracy, and status documents, we’re too scared or dense to run the experiments, and even if we knew how to fix aging, we don’t have the infrastructure to deliver these fixes affordably at scale
Aging is a disease because it is a “disorder [disruption] of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that produces specific signs or symptoms or that affects a specific location and is not simply a direct result of physical injury.”
Only if you think humans should be the ones traveling. I’m personally more in favor of better AI and robotics. Carting meat bags around the galaxy is a pretty poor proposition on way too many fronts.
Eventually. For some reason, people aren't all in favor of giving everybody universal health care. If we did, then yes, everybody would eventually have all of the advances in medical technology.
If you thought about it for 2 seconds more, you would realize that it will take up much longer to truly expand to even Solar system - I mean offloading billions, not some tiny colony.
Meaning that almost immortal general population would be doom long term and thus has to be managed. Either by bans, which might be circumvented in more favorable jurisdictions (ie orbits or moon), or by setting the price too high.
You would think management via price is impossible? Look how one of the first gene therapy single-pill 'cure' for spinal muscular atrophy Zolgensma is priced - 2 mil USD. Small cute kids are dying in pretty horrible ways because of this price all over the world.
When saving babies lives is (also) about money, why aging wouldn't be?
> Small cute kids are dying in pretty horrible ways because of this price all over the world.
No, they are dying because other companies have not found ways yet to duplicate that. In the end, it's all just information - recipes if you will. Nothing magic. When most drugs just become gene therapy, I'd suspect it will be a matter of days until they are copied and released for all - like movies high quality rips.
Only one thing is needed: a marketplace, so companies can compete on price for the customers who leave feedback to select the best providers.
This won't happen here, because of the FDA, regulations etc. But I don't see why a country with more appetite for risk (and thus money) will not become a hub for medical tourism, 1 flight away, with drugs and treatments cheap thanks to competition, and readily available thanks to the lack of regulations.
A lot of people that discuss this issue decide that "they don't want people living forever". What about you stop living after a while, and let the rest of us live longer? Keep your decision for yourself; die if you want to!
Looking at history, though, it seems like most (all?) significant social progress comes about because old people that bitterly cling their views and (most importantly) their power eventually die off, freeing room for the new.
We live in a world that isnt controlled by feudal powers owning a good portion of the population not because of wars, but because younger and less invested people forced those conflicts. The results of those conflicts are accepted because the people for whom the old way was normal die off. The new generations are able to make their own mistakes, get invested in the nest normal, and be replaced in turn.
Now I fear we will make anti-agathics before we develop a means to actually change without people dying.
I still hope. Someday we might live with death as a choice AND without oppression. Pretty sure I wont be around for it.
>because old people that bitterly cling their views and (most importantly) their power eventually die off, freeing room for the new.
This is just wrong. My 80-year-old mother is far more progressive politically than many 20-35 year old men in this country. Remember the heavily armed Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville protesting the removal of Civil War statues? Those weren't elderly people.
Well of course, values and prejudices are usually passed down through generations. But my point is: age isn't a very good indicator of progressiveness. Just look at the whole 20th century: back in the 1920s, there was huge social change, and a loosening of social mores. Then it all changed, and by the 40s-50s, things were much more conservative than before. The 60s-70s were the age of the hippies, and then that all went away with the 80s and the Reagan years.
People always seem to have some weird idea that progress will come if we can just get rid of the old people through aging and attrition, but this just isn't the case. New generations can bring progress or setbacks, and it's happened historically over and over.
Speaking of Neo-Nazis, how about the actual Nazis? Were they a bunch of old farts? No, at the time, they were all young people, led by people who weren't old at all (possibly middle-aged). They weren't preceded by generations of people who were even worse than themselves, in fact it was the opposite.
Finally, just look at the current US elections: the most progressive candidate, who others in his party think is too "radical" and "extreme", is one of the oldest.
I'm not (meaning to be) saying old people are conservative. I'm saying people, as a whole, don't change their views. The only way for new views to gain purchase in society is for the people with different views to die off of old age.
Most often those new views ARE more progressive, but not always.
But my core point is that if those in power don't die, they aren't going to change their views, and their power will only concentrate. "in power" doesn't just mean rulers, it also means numbers. Those racist uncles, those people deeply offended by same-sex marriages, etc. Unless the young are automatically more progressive (as you've just argued is not the case), then they won't go away, and won't be marginalized, and they'll keep holding their views.
Exceptions will exist, but numerically, it's an issue.
I think eliminating aging would probably bring more stability to society: people would stop forgetting the past so much, because there'd still be people around reminding them of it, who had personal experience. History tends to work in cycles, and a lot of that is because populations forget what they learned through experience, because the people who went through the experience die off and the younger generations don't learn the lesson properly. Sure, it might mean some change will be slower, but you'll also avoid highly damaging short-term aberrations (like the Nazis).
Also, you seem to believe that people never change their views. I don't think that's really true either; people do evolve over time. My views are very different than what they were when I was a teenager (and not more conservative either). Older people do adapt to changing society. Look at, for instance, the acceptance of various social changes in the US, such as gay marriage. These things did not come slowly; they were breathtakingly fast. There'd be some initial pioneers pushing it for a while, but not getting very far. But eventually, like a dam breaking after a crack, suddenly the whole society would adopt it. Go back in time 20 years and ask some random people if they think gay marriage would be legal nationwide by now and they'd think you're crazy. This didn't happen just because of some old people dying off; it happened because the entire society got comfortable with the idea, though it took many of them a while to accept it.
Finally, eliminating aging doesn't mean eliminating death or childbirth. People will still have children, and people will still die (from accidents, murder, diseases, etc.). Also, the biology of the brain that affects old peoples' thinking will presumably be altered by anti-aging treatments, making them think more like younger adults.
> Look at, for instance, the acceptance of various social changes in the US, such as gay marriage.
We would both use this as an example - you think it is because people changed their views, I think it is because a big group of people bitterly opposed to this died off, opening the door to change.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree. FWIW, I hope you're correct. I'd love to see society avoid repeating mistakes, learning from alternative viewpoints and expanding what they consider. Sadly, the one concrete case I can have of changing viewpoints is my own: In my twenties I felt as you do. In the decades since I've seen people embrace willful ignorance and proudly stand by hypocrisy so long as they didn't have to accept anything that was outside of their "normal". I retain the hope, but I've lost the expectation.
>you think it is because people changed their views, I think it is because a big group of people bitterly opposed to this died off, opening the door to change.
A group of people bitterly opposing this did not all die off in the space of a mere decade or less. That's the problem with your reasoning.
The same thing happened in the 60s with civil rights legislation.
That's a nice anecdote but what happens when you try to dislodge a ruler with 300 years worth of experience, connections, and wealth? What happens when people have so much time to amass power that at some point you realize you, the younger generation, no longer stand any chance?
Today's model of society isn't adapted for this. Postponing the effects of aging but maintaining the same lifespan within reason is one thing, greatly extending the lifespan* is quite another and we're definitely not ready for this one more than we're ready to become 4m tall from one generation to the next.
*with the multitude of options - the young and old phases are proportional to today's but longer, the young phase is just as long as today and you get to "enjoy" a longer old phase, or the opposite.
>That's a nice anecdote but what happens when you try to dislodge a ruler with 300 years worth of experience, connections, and wealth? What happens when people have so much time to amass power that at some point you realize you, the younger generation, no longer stand any chance?
Wealth doesn't keep people in power; only power does. And power extends from the barrel of a gun. The only reason people with money stay in power is because there's a bunch of people who want to keep him there, and the populace under them either accept this, or aren't willing to take whatever risks are necessary to change this. History is full of revolutions where some ruler with lots of connections and wealth was deposed, violently if necessary. Just look at what happened to rich people during the French Revolution.
Saying power gives you power is a circular argument. Wealth is like a wildcard, it can be turned into anything. And it's greatly amplified by experience as a guide to turning it into power, and allies by your side.
With wealth you buy the tools needed to stay in power: guns, lobbying, policy making, political campaigning, influencing public opinion or education, etc. No wealth and allies, no tools. Look at corporations making the game without firing one shot.
The entirety of human history showed that wealth has always been able to buy power better than anything else. And a few examples of rebellions or revolutions where people successfully overthrew the rich just show poor management on the side of the rich. Plenty more have died with guns in hand. Guns given to them by someone wealthy.
Later edit: I have edited the comment a bit for clarity, I noticed the reply later.
>Wealth, while not an exclusive means to power, can buy you power in more ways than one.
Wealth only buys you power if people are willing to accept your money, and are also refraining from simply using force to take your money from you.
>Look at corporations making the game without firing one gun.
That's because they have an entire government, with guns, enforcing the rules of the game they're playing. If the government suddenly decides to confiscate all their wealth, there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. This has happened multiple times in history (such as the Cuban Revolution).
>And a few examples of rebellions or revolutions where people have overthrown the rich just show poor management on the side of the rich.
No, it shows that at some point, having money doesn't overrule people willing to use violence against you. Most of the time, this is avoided because people tend to prefer to avoid violence, and because there's enough people willing to defend the status quo (where that money is valued), but sometimes that breaks down, and then no amount of money will save you.
It's very simple: a handful of wealthy people can never be a match for an army of people with guns. The only reason wealthy people have any kind of power is because there's an army behind them backing their claim to power.
> That's because they have an entire government, with guns, enforcing the rules of the game they're playing.
So the guns are just a tool after all. The army isn't leading the rich because it's the rich who built the army. It's the rich who create the wealth and the guns.
> It's very simple: a handful of wealthy people can never be a match for an army of people with guns
It's simplistic. The only example you came up with just showed an error in judgement on the part of the rich due to lack of experience (some things were unfathomable for them), not a failure of wealth to give you that power. Both wealth and guns can "explode" in your face if mishandled.
Insisting the French revolution is the only true evidence that wealth is worthless in gaining power is like insisting the thousands of accidental gun deaths are the only true evidence that people with guns will just accidentally kill each other.
As you can see from today's situation those people with wealth learned from the past. They know where to push and where to pull in order to successfully keep power. They have refined the tools they buy with that wealth. And the civilized world has been managing to keep going this way without using a gun (well, not on home field anyway) for the longest time in history. A library will do a far better job at making my case than I can do in a comment. I strongly encourage it.
You seem to think that "wealth" is a real thing. It is not. That's the whole problem with your reasoning. Guns are a real thing: if you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger, they will be shot and likely die. Wealth, on the other hand, is basically mutual fantasy. The only reason Michael Bloomberg, for instance, is "wealthy" is because a bunch of other people agree to his claim that a bunch of financial instruments he owns (money and stocks) are actually worth something. This only works as long as there's a functioning economy. Periods of hyperinflation in history have shown that this isn't always the case.
What motivation do people with guns have to support people with money? Only the agreement that that money is worth something, and also that that person's claim to the money is something they all agree on.
>As you can see from today's situation those people with wealth learned from the past. They know where to push and where to pull in order to successfully keep power. ... And the civilized world has been managing to keep going this way without using a gun
Have you forgotten WWII? That happened under a century ago, and one thing that happened in the 30s was the Nazis rounded up all the Jews, stuck them in death camps, and seized their money.
Money only gives you power as long as you get enough other people to agree to this. The true power lies with the people who have guns and are willing to use violence.
Just because your mom is different doesn't mean anything. It's well known that as people get older they become more conservative and set in their ways.
If somebody is discovered to have intent to commit suicide, you can bet the police will be knocking down their door to stop them. By your definition (possible to do, if not stopped by authorities), we are free to rob banks.
I don't remember the exact figures, but I believe some actuaries crunched the numbers a while back and determined that if aging were halted and all diseases made curable, people would die on average around age 400 from accidental causes. Nobody lives forever.
I bet that if aging were halted, all diseases made curable, and famine was made obsolete, the accidental death rate would go way down.
People take risks right now because "they have nothing to lose" - they're going to die anyways. Once that stops being the case the amount of risk taking would go down.
This is a pretty naive take on the subject, I think it's a much deeper problem on many level (moral, philosophical, economical, &c.), if we "cure" ageing tomorrow it'll concern everyone, even the people who don't want to be part of it. It's as if oil and fracking companies told you to shut up about pollution and just "keep your decisions for yourself".
People would be much better off by focusing on their quality of life rather than their lifespan. One is a very actionable thing, the other one is a pure gamble (and ""curing"" it is 100% sci-fi for now). Or as Seneca would put it "But tell me, pray, do you consider it fairer that you should obey Nature, or that Nature should obey you? And what difference does it make how soon you depart from a place which you must depart from sooner or later? We should strive, not to live long, but to live rightly; for to achieve long life you have need of Fate only, but for right living you need the soul."
You should try to optimize for the best quality of life for the longest amount of time possible (you could consider the expected value quality * time). I'd rather live a mostly pretty good life for many years than a good life for half of those years.
If the people working on aging treatments are right (and I imagine they probably are if you set a long time horizon), we'll eventually be able to live for hundreds of years without any of the effects of aging. Eliminating aging and most disease would improve the average quality of life far more than probably anything else we could possibly do within the same time span.
Of course dramatically extending lifespans will have a huge impact on the world, but we'll almost certainly have other shock absorbers by then to minimize the externalities. (The same things we'd be doing to deal with overpopulation from birth rates, etc.)
And once/if the technology is universally available, free, and safe, the majority of people will almost certainly opt in to it within a generation or sooner. You can be a conscientious objector if you like, but that doesn't mean you have a right to try to prevent a near-uncountable number of total hours of human flourishing. Comparing eliminating aging to retaining pollution is a much more naive take than what the parent posted, I think. I would consider it the opposite: hindering funding and progress towards treatment of aging is like blocking initiatives to fight climate change and fossil fuel proliferation, except possibly with even more dire consequences for humans in the long term than what climate change might pose.
But again that's a very naive view of the thing. Just as a reminder: people are dying right now because they can't afford insulin to treat their diabetes in the USA, and you hypothesise that the treatment to cure ageing would be free.
We could stop world hunger and cure most diseases in developing countries right now if we didn't spend our money on useless things, but we don't. You're far too optimistic.
> Eliminating aging and most disease would improve the average quality of life far more than probably anything else we could possibly do within the same time span.
Not working 60% of you awake time from 20 to 65 would probably have a bigger impact on your quality of life than working 60% of your awake time from 20 to 165. Heck, universal healthcare in the US would have a bigger impact on Americans' quality of life than living 100 years more, and it would be faaaar easier to get.
We're talking about very different time scales. Of course more mortally-urgent matters should be prioritized. But it's like the debate over people trying to set up backup planets when there's still so much that can be done to clean up Earth. I think all of those remedies need to be pursued simultaneously, rather than this simplistic "how could you possibly imagine colonizing another planet when we still have all of these issues???" argument. Colonization supporters are thinking about where (or if) we're going to be in centuries. It's not a fair comparison.
>We could stop world hunger and cure most diseases in developing countries right now if we didn't spend our money on useless things, but we don't. You're far too optimistic.
In theory there's enough money to solve almost every problem (homelessness, hunger, carbon emissions), but it's about the effective and efficient use of resources. That's why they haven't been solved. There's probably also a bit of a Mythical Man Month effect (more money/people/effort thrown into the same thing may have highly diminishing returns, in addition to all the higher potential for theft and corruption).
It's difficult to imagine universal anti-aging and near-biological immortality without universal healthcare, elimination of poverty and hunger, and no requirement for people to work much (the last one could turn out false, though working at 165 doesn't sound so awful if you have the mind and body of a 30-year-old and if you can still live comfortably if you aren't working). You need a basic good level of health if you want to prevent deterioration and death; it would be a total lie to proclaim you've cured death when there are people who are starving. I would agree those are basic prerequisites for a non-aging civilization.
I think it's all part of the same thing - each part is being worked on by the people with the most expertise to combat the respective problems, and they all have a common goal of improving the quality and quantity of life for all of humanity, now and indefinitely into the future. And hopefully it'll eventually apply to all conscious life we become aware of or create.
Yes, in terms of what would have the biggest impact in the next decade, universal healthcare for Americans would rank far higher than tripling the longevity budget. But it's a tricky calculation when you're dealing with very long time scales. If one were to hypothetically cut all longevity funding in order to implement universal healthcare, then over the next 100 years it would be a more than worthwhile investment, but over the next few thousand? Maybe not.
We should be fighting for all of those things. The question is to try to analyze as objectively as possible how to best allocate resources to achieve the most good for the most people over all time scales.
What about cancer? Transition of a cell into a particularly nasty disease state. (That term, by the way, is one the biologists throw around quite a bit to describe broken or damaged cells that no longer function as intended.)
What if senescence can be slowed or stopped? What then?
> Progeria is an extremely rare autosomal dominant genetic disorder in which symptoms ___resembling___ aspects of aging are manifested at a very early age.
Aging is a slide into disease state. A non-healthy or misbehaving cell is in a disease state. Accumulation of intracellular and extracellular garbage, DNA point mutations, transpositions, malfunction of the cell cycle, abnormal signalling, and a myriad of other break downs are disease state.
Cells are machines and they function in predictable biomechanical and biochemical manners. Aging related disease state encompasses some population of the space of deleterious state change.
In the micro, aging is a disease just like any other. It is the layperson understanding of the word "disease" that does not fit.
> In the micro, aging is a disease just like any other.
The difference is that the word "disease" is something that at least theoretically can be cured. Aging does not have that implication. It follows then that if you say "Aging is a Disease", you're effectively saying that immortality is theoretically achievable. That's what makes the claim so uncomfortable.
The lack of aging would be a sort of population wide disease, in that adaptation benefits from turnover, and a lack of adaptation would impair our odds of survival as a species ... unless anti-aging includes some form of neoteny that improves adaptation in the elderly.
Aging is a multidimensional process and if "lack of adaption" is targeted the same way "control of bowels" will be/is, then it makes sense to include this concern in anti-aging research.
Speaking this way, resistance to change should be a priority in anti-aging technology, no?
