
Ambitious New Anti-Aging Trial in Humans - sjcsjc
https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2018/01/19/ambitious-new-anti-aging-trial-in-humans/
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sjcsjc
_What we need is a ... a middle-aged billionaire angel investor who is
thinking clearly about his own destiny a decade or two down the road._

I gather HN harbours some of them.

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decorator
The idea that death is ignoble is starting to propagate more widely. I
actually think it's a _more_ popular idea within younger cohorts.
Counterintuitively.

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reasonattlm
There are a lot of people thinking about beneficial factors in young blood and
harmful factors in old blood. Some are looking at period apheresis of blood to
remove harmful factors, some are investigating transfusions, some looking at
delivery of factors directly.

I don't see this area of work as a useful way forward to major impact on human
aging and life span, though it will no doubt increase understanding of the way
in which metabolism reacts to the causes of aging as they increase. Like much
of what goes on in the research community, it is an effort to tinker with
secondary and later aspects of aging. Changes in factors in the blood are not
the cause of aging, they are the consequence of cellular reactions to the
causes of aging. So this sort of work is changing the oil and cleaning the
spark plugs in the hopes of small gains rather than repairing and replacing
the failing engine parts in the hopes of large gains.

But that is somewhat beside the point. The important thing here is that
organizations like the Society for the Rescue of Our Elders have come into
being and are surveying the field for things they can do to impact aging, ways
to accelerate the otherwise very slow progress of clinical translation in a
field of research that is, on the whole, still pretty reluctant to actually
make waves and public noise. Given who is involved in the Society, it will
mean a lot of garbage in addition to the actually useful stuff like
senolytics, but overall it is much better to have people actively trying to
organize trials to gain evidence rather than not. That speeds up the process
of winnowing out the useless, marginal projects and promoting the useful ones,
on the basis of the results rather than debate over mechanisms.

