
The Secret to a Longer Life? Don’t Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers - jonah
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/sunday/longevity-pritikin-atkins.html
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reasonattlm
Mildly amusing, but basically silly. There is a reason why everyone in the
past failed, and that is because they didn't have sufficiently advanced
biotechnology to (a) understand the causes of aging in terms of specific low-
level cell and tissue damage, and (b) identify and build ways to repair those
forms of damage.

We've only had a way to progress towards therapies for aging with this model
of development for somewhere between 30-50 years, and no way to make progress
towards therapies for aging with anything short of massive war-on-cancer style
programs prior to the last 20 years. (Those programs didn't happen, but in a
different world could have; arguably it wouldn't have made much difference as
to where we are now, just as the war on cancer has only been a foundational
effort for the last ten years of exponentially rapid development just prior to
the advent of universal effective cancer therapies. It is possible that
senolytics could have happened much earlier, decades ago, but finding and
validating the candidate drugs would have been very hard back then). But now
everything in biotech costs 100 times less than it did not so very long ago -
that is really why things are heating up in applied longevity science.

The article also commits the usual journalistic sin of equating every effort.
There is a vast difference between all of: eating a different diet; running a
pharmaceutical discovery program aimed at a mechanism of aging; running that
program to build a way to replicate calorie restriction; running that program
to kill senescent cells or clear glucosepane cross-links. These activities
have radically different expectation values in terms of best plausible
outcome.

The biggest mistake most people make in their approach to the new world of
rejuvenation science is to think of every possible methodology as having
similar best plausible outcomes in terms of years gained. Nothing could be
further from the truth.

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JPLeRouzic
What this article told: " _It is much more our collective decisions that
matter than individual decisions_ " is common sense but an inconvenient truth
is never well received and often simply not listen at all.

I was baffled in the early 80' when France subsidized Diesel engines, then
convinced EU that it was a sensible decision. At that time there were people
that did not hesitate to tell that breathing Diesel exhaust gases was
harmless!

Another is Cathodic TV which was known to emit X-rays from the start [0]
nevertheless people never cared and no scientists, nor journalists asked any
question.

[0] [https://www.fda.gov/Radiation-
EmittingProducts/ResourcesforY...](https://www.fda.gov/Radiation-
EmittingProducts/ResourcesforYouRadiationEmittingProducts/ucm252764.htm)

