
Does a real anti-aging pill already exist? - tvanzyl
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-02-12/does-a-real-anti-aging-pill-already-exist-
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Fletch137
I find this much less interested in getting clicks, and easier to read:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus)

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brenfrow
It's also a lot better at telling us the downsides.

"Patients on immunosuppressive medications have a 10- to 100-fold increased
risk of cancer compared to the general population"

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api
There is a school of thought in anti-aging research that some of the
mechanisms of aging, such as telomeres, are adaptations to prevent cancer. So
evolutionarily there might have been a life span / cancer risk trade-off. This
of course would have been optimized to maximize long-term reproductive
success, providing a long enough life span to have, raise, nourish, and
educate children while minimizing the risk of dying of cancer along the way.

It's likely that aging is a product of multiple such trade-offs. I very, very
strongly doubt that SENS will be achieved by simply adjusting one or two
knobs.

One possibility is that we just get really, really, REALLY good at detecting
and zapping cancer, and then we turn off all the senescence-generating anti-
cancer safety switches and decay mechanisms and just play whack a mole with
the cancers when they arise. So you get to live two or three times as long but
you're in for cancer removal at least once per decade.

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im3w1l
It'd be nice if we could proactively repair DNA to prevent cancer from
arising.

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fit2rule
Wow! This:

"A Canadian medical expedition had collected the soil from beneath one of the
mysterious stone heads on Easter Island, a speck in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean."

.. combined with this story:

[http://www.disclose.tv/news/Study_Ancient_Humans_Bred_with_C...](http://www.disclose.tv/news/Study_Ancient_Humans_Bred_with_Completely_UNKNOWN_Species/113928)

.. I'm starting to think that Szukalski wasn't such a crackpot after all.

([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Szukalski](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Szukalski))

Are we perhaps on the brink of a new era of Zermatism? Yikes, what a scary
thought... ;)

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javert
I spent a few minutes trying to figure out whether there is any evidence for
"Zermatism." I recommend others do not waste their time. It appears to be a
completely crackpot theory. I don't believe the parent comment is serious.

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fit2rule
There isn't any evidence for Zermatism, and it is a crackpot theory, but as of
now there is also the _possibility_ that this 'unknown species' is indeed the
Yeti. We shall see!

EDIT: I admire your slack.

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javert
> EDIT: I admire your slack.

What does that mean?

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fit2rule
It means I like your discordian nature:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius)

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reasonattlm
No.

There is a greater fool at the end of many paths of research and development,
the wallet or collection of wallets that indirectly bankrolls the work. Early
for-profit investment occurs because investors believe they can sell their
stake at a higher price down the line. Other reasons exist, such as the desire
to do good in the world, but are entirely secondary. Most investors, and
certainly the wealthier ones, have a fiduciary duty to turn away from world-
saving in favor of making money. The market for early for-profit investment in
turn indirectly steers research interests and the ability to raise funds from
other sources: whatever is presently hot is much more likely to receive grants
and philanthropic sponsorship. The state of the market at the end of the
development process thus reaches back to influence every part of the long
chain of research and development. The predicted inclinations of the greater
fool are the tail that wags the dog.

The greater fool of interest for this post is the one indirectly funding the
ongoing construction of a grand catalog of human metabolism, an exhaustive
accounting of the fine details of how our cellular biochemistry operates and
ages. This is understood in outline, but beneath that outline lies an enormous
unexplored space of protein interactions, causes and consequences, and the
relationship of various states in the system to health at every level. The
greater fool is told by various parties that the goal is to enhance healthy
longevity, but that isn't really happening via these explorations of
metabolism, and in truth doesn't have much of a hope of happening via this
research strategy. Look at the past fifteen years of sirtuin research in
connection with the calorie restriction response, wherein the greater fool was
- collectively - the GlaxoSmithKline shareholder community following the
Sirtris acquisition. Well-managed hype sputtered out quite quickly after that
liquidity event into nothing more than a slightly greater understanding of a
few very narrow areas of mammalian biochemistry. This process happens over and
again for each new potential calorie restriction mimetic, or other methodology
claimed to slow the progress of aging by altering the operation of metabolism.
Yet there is always a greater fool willing to buy.

Even if a drug was developed to completely mimic the beneficial effects of
calorie restriction, so what? That is a convenience device, no more. Those
practicing calorie restriction have somewhat better health and somewhat less
age-related disease, and might live as many as five years longer. It's a
larger effect than any currently available medical technology can provide.
Nonetheless, the large majority of those people do not and will not live to
see 90 years of age in the environment of today's medical technology. They
still live the last years of their lives in frailty and pain. Why spend
billions on striving to create a convenience device to recreate some of this
marginal effect, tiny in the grand scheme of things? Because some people can
get rich doing it.

The recent history of medical development related to slowing aging is that
some folk have found they can do very well thank you by promising the prospect
of enhanced longevity, while delivering nothing of value beyond scientific
knowledge. In different circumstances I might be inclined to praise this as a
great hack on investment community culture: direct more funding into life
science research rather than cat pictures on the internet, and take a deserved
cut as the individual who manages to make that happen. There are certainly far
worse things for the greater fool to be talked into doing with his or her
money.

Today, however, this business of making hay while the sun shines, based on
ways to slightly slow aging largely emerged from calorie restriction research,
is a distraction from the prospect of real progress. Messing with metabolism
in this way cannot even in principle produce meaningful rejuvenation: aging is
damage, and slowing down the damage does nothing for people who are already
old and damaged. Yet there are other research strategies that can achieve this
goal: the better approach is to repair the damage that causes aging, following
the existing detailed research plans that aim to produce new rejuvenation
biotechnologies. These can in principle restore youthful function for the old,
extend healthy life indefinitely, and should not be any more expensive to
explore and develop than a continued future of whatever the next replacement
for sirtuin research might be. If billions are spent, then let it be in the
pursuit of technologies that do offer the possibility for everyone to live to
90, and in good health, lacking frailty, pain, and disease.

It's a fight to make this case. It shouldn't be, but it is. Attention
continues to be soaked up by marginal, ultimately pointless efforts such as
the pursuit of mTOR-influencing drugs like rapalogs. It won't let you live to
be 90 in confidence, it won't create rejuvenation in the old, and no
foreseeable evolution of this strategy can in fact provide those benefits. It
is just more of the same search for the greater fool to retroactively bankroll
the continuing mapping of metabolism.

~~~
evo_9
Hubris is a funny thing, I think it prevents our knowledge from growing far
more than it should.

[http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html](http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html)

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moe
What are the webdesigners at Bloomberg smoking?

This sticky scroll nonsense works for landing pages, not for articles that
people are supposed to _read_.

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strictnein
Whatever they were smoking, I want some:
[http://bloomberg.com/404](http://bloomberg.com/404)
[http://bloomberg.com/500](http://bloomberg.com/500)

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Raphmedia
This is amazing.

Is Bloomberg an actual magazine?

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strictnein
And a provider of ultra expensive information terminals to wall street, and a
TV channel and much more. And the founder, Michael Bloomberg, is worth over
$36 billion.

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gadders
Off-topic, but what is up with those zig-zag arrows that point down as you
scroll the page?

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basseq
I thought the same thing about the design (and magazine) cover as a whole.
Looks like the internet in 1995: needs more BLINK tags and "Under
Construction" GIFs.

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Shivetya
I do like the progress bar at the top, at least it was informative as I really
could not tell how much more article I had to read was left.

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pavel_lishin
And it helps you figure out when exactly you hit the completely unrelated
article about shopping malls or something at the end.

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b1twise
It reminded me of Print Shop from the 80s. I felt an urge to print it out on
colored paper to read. The web devs over at bloomberg must have plenty of
cocaine.

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pazra
An excellent example of Betteridge's law of headlines there.

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jchomali
Really interesting article!

