

Is aging a disease? - kenhty
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/05/20/us-ageing-disease-idUSTRE64I6HV20100520

======
reasonattlm
This is a question that crops up regularly - and it does so entirely because
of the regulatory structure that exists in much of the Western world, such as
that imposed by the FDA. In essence the FDA only approves medicines for
specific, recognized, named diseases. Therefore you cannot legally,
commercially treat aging in the US, as aging is not recognized by the FDA as a
disease, and there is no path towards reversing that situation.

(Though let us be clear, the idea of a named disease is a nebulous entity:
"Alzheimer's" probably covers at least three distinct conditions, for example,
and it's much the same for Parkinson's and many other diseases that were named
early and only now are being split out into their various etiologies.
Ultimately at the level biotech is moving into now, names for collections of
symptoms and similar-looking damage go away in favor of treating specific
mechanisms that get you there).

To show just how much of a cost the FDA imposes just by this regulatory
aspect, you might look at sarcopenia: it has cost millions of dollars and
years to date and will cost millions and years more to lobby the FDA (meaning
put dollars into the pockets of lawyers and appointees) to recognize
sarcopenia as a condition. Until that happens, there will be no serious
commercial research into the numerous potential mechanisms and therapies,
because you can't sell the results in the US.

Now multiply that by the thousands of potential named conditions you could
carve off the bulk of mechanisms that is called aging. Look at the SENS
Foundation research pages for a primer on the underpinnings:

<http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes>

So given this ridiculous state of affairs, pretty much par for the course for
big government, therapies for aging will never happen in the US for so long as
the present regulatory structure exists, and for so long as there is no
massive medical tourism and global research and development exchange devoted
to circumventing it. That latter community is only just getting started, when
considered in the grand scheme of things.

But most people are blind to all of this, and think that the FDA is actually a
force for good - because they don't see the opportunity cost and the progress
that didn't happen. In fact, the FDA and its equivalents overseas are the
biggest obstacle to significant medical progress in this age of revolutionary
advances in biotechnology.

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/the-fda-is-a-
dest...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/the-fda-is-a-destructive-
force.php)

For more reading on the "is aging a disease" thing, you might look at:

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/05/talking-point-
is-...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/05/talking-point-is-aging-a-
disease.php)

"Because aging is not viewed as a disease, the whole process of bringing drugs
to market can't be applied to drugs that treat aging. This creates a
disincentive to pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs to treat it," said
Gems.

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/07/sage-
crossroads-p...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/07/sage-crossroads-
podcasts-on-the-pharmaceutical-industry-and-aging.php)

Why, despite the great range of potential applicable biotechnology, do we not
see hundreds of millions of dollars invested in startups attempting to address
the aging process? The answer is buried in this New York Times article on
Sirtris: "Dr. Westphal and Mr. Sinclair stress that they are not working to
'cure' aging, a condition that, so far at least, is common to all humanity and
that most physicians do not consider a disease. 'Curing aging is not an
endpoint the federal drug agency would recognize,' Dr. Westphal says dryly.
Instead, both men say, they are working to ameliorate the diseases of aging."

...

LARRY MILLER: [When] I was heading aging at Glaxo Smith Kline, the issues that
I faced were that I was very interested in developing medications for frailty
and weakness in muscle for when people get old because when people get weak
they usually stop eating and then they fall and break a hip and end up in the
hospital and die potentially, but the regulatory apparatus isn't there yet.
Sarcopenia isn’t recognized as an official disease by the FDA, so the pathway
to get drugs approved for frailty and to get more people mobile and into
society is just not there.

~~~
leoedin
Sort of connected to this, but from the other end, our requirement to classify
everything as a disease has pretty terrible repercussions across society.

As an example, my mum's a doctor and has worked in wards in which old people
die. There's a requirement for a "cause of death" for each person to die in a
hospital. Often this was given as pneumonia or similar for people who
essentially died of old age. Unfortunately, someone looked at the statistics
and discovering that lots of people were dying of pneumonia decided that it
needed to be treated, and so now with aggressive treatments people who are at
the very end of their lives are kept alive until something else comes along
and kills them. The reality is, once your body has reached a certain point
likelyhood of survival falls very quickly, and treating a single disease is
simply a very brief and ineffective way of dealing with that.

Interestingly, although human lifespan has been increasing year on year, it's
not an indication that we're actually living longer. What's happened is that
things that kill you in early to mid life - heart attacks in 50 year olds,
viruses and infections and injuries that 20 years ago would have been deadly -
have been reduced. The outlook in terms of years of life for someone that
actually manages to reach 80 or 90 has increased very little - perhaps 1 or 2
years over the last 50. (I read this somewhere but I've lost the source - I'll
try and find it).

The single thing to treat, the thing that is the precursor to all other
things, is ageing.

~~~
bad_user

          The single thing to treat, the thing that is the 
          precursor to all other things, is ageing.
    

I do not agree. My grandfather died at 99 years old. He was able to work his
land until 98, lived a full life and died with no regrets. We were sad of his
passing, but we accepted his death and were happy that he died fast, without
much struggling.

You know what's really sad? A 22 year old boy dying of an unnoticed heart
disease that led to a sudden cardiac arrest. This happened to an acquaintance
of mine and it was freaking sad, as this boy was robbed of a chance to live
his life.

Ageing is not the problem. The problem is that we are nowhere close to
treating chronic diseases like cancer or heart diseases. The problem is that
we don't even know for sure the cause of obesity or diabetes, passing baseless
assumptions and flawed studies around that cause more harm than good. The
problem is that we have no idea how to treat allergies and based on recent
trends allergic asthma will soon be considered an epidemy. The problem is that
we haven't even cured the freaking common cold.

Medicine, as far as I'm concerned, is still at the stage of alchemy. Dreaming
of increasing the maximum lifespan or even of immortality is a romantic
notion, but I would be happy if young people had a chance of living their
life, instead of dying of diseases that have been around forever.

~~~
orangecat
_My grandfather died at 99 years old. He was able to work his land until 98,
lived a full life and died with no regrets._

Your grandfather was much luckier than most.

 _Ageing is not the problem. The problem is that we are nowhere close to
treating chronic diseases like cancer or heart diseases._

Very few 25 year olds suffer from cancer or heart disease.

~~~
kamaal
Nopes, He is right.

People had healthier lives even until a while back. I agree life expectancies
were less. But that is because of wars and epidemics.

People would live in binary conditions. Healthy or dead. Unlike today people
are left hanging in between, without total cure, and at the same time without
good quality of life after treatment.

Organ transplants in my country(India) and other fatal diseases are worse than
death. In fact death is more preferable than miserable conditions where a
person is half cured. Its like the body wants to die, but is just chemically
alive. Its expensive too.

This is the biggest failure of current day medicine.

------
AngryParsley
Let's use some criteria from _Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about
disease_
([http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/real_diseases_unasking_the_quest...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/real_diseases_unasking_the_question/)).

1\. Biological? Yes

2\. Involuntary? Yes

3\. Rare? No

4\. Unpleasant? Yes

5\. Discrete? No

6\. Medicable? Yes

So aging has many aspects of what we call disease. Of course, the implied
question that everyone cares about is is, "Will humanity be better off if we
devote more resources to curing aging?" The answer to that brings much more
baggage, and depends on your moral and religious views.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Ageing is pretty discrete - at least if you're looking at the accumulating
damage, rather than the bio-machinery that creates it as a side effect.
Complex mechanism -> simple damage -> complex symptoms because the simple
damage is body-pervasive.

------
evo_9
Reminds me of this excellent read about how our perception of age and dying
taints our ability to even consider it a problem we can work on and correct:

<http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html>

------
fossuser
The following is more tangentially related to the article then a direct
comment about the interesting points it makes.

An interesting hypothesis I read about aging was that it's an anticancer
mechanism necessary to become old enough to reproduce.

The cellular metabolic process creates a lot free radicals that cause damage,
while the body has built in mechanisms to repair the damage at high rates of
replication the chance of damage resulting in turning on an oncogene
increases.

In order to combat this the body slows down its division process to prevent
the likelihood of cancer but as a side effect we experiencing the symptoms of
aging and inevitable death (usually by cancer if you live long enough to get
it).

Not sure if any of this is accurate, but the idea is interesting and something
I hadn't thought of. It also introduces problems since if at all accurate
trying to prevent aging may result in higher cancer risk.

Talk of this also reminds me of a quote I like (from
[http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/13/longevity-science-
needs-...](http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/13/longevity-science-needs-
documentation/)):

"We all express the symptoms of a fatal, inherited degenerative condition
called aging - or so the joke goes. It's a dark joke, but there's truth to be
found in it, as is often the case in black humor. Unfortunately, all too few
people think of themselves as patients suffering aging, and fewer still would
call themselves patient advocates, agitating for research leading towards
therapies and cures for aging. This is a sorry state of affairs: given that
our time is limited and ticking away, the tasks upon the table should always
include some consideration of aging.

What can we do about it? How can we engineer a research community, funding and
support to make real progress within our lifetimes? If you don't spend at
least some of your time on this issue, then you're fiddling while Rome burns.
Time is the most precious thing we have, and we live on the cusp of
technologies that will allow us to gain more of it - but those advances in
medicine won't happen soon enough unless we work at it."

------
tokenadult
Thanks for submitting the interesting article, and thanks for the interesting
comments already posted by various HN participants. I'll respond generally to
those in this comment.

From the article: "A study published last year by Danish researchers estimated
that more than half of all babies born in wealthy nations since the year 2000
will live to see their 100th birthdays."

I had the privilege of reading that study, "Ageing populations: the challenges
ahead," Lancet. 2009 October 3; 374(9696): 1196–1208. doi:
10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61460-4

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2810516/>

and then discussing it with one of the collaborators of a study author in a
"journal club" at my alma mater university. Detailed studies of life
expectancy at advanced age in a variety of countries show that various
lifestyle changes and other changes result in a worldwide trend of increasing
lifespan, such that "Very long lives are not the distant privilege of remote
future generations—very long lives are the probable destiny of most people
alive now in developed countries."

The top-ranked HN comment as I post my comment here says, "In essence the FDA
only approves medicines for specific, recognized, named diseases. Therefore
you cannot legally, commercially treat aging in the US, as aging is not
recognized by the FDA as a disease, and there is no path towards reversing
that situation." The comment has already been challenged by a knowledgeable
participant here as not fully accurate,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3968515>

and in any event is not relevant to the worldwide research effort (exemplified
by the study I have linked here) into the worldwide trend of longer lifespans
in the developed world, because the FDA regulates medical treatments only in
the United States. (I have lived in a developed country other than the United
States, and am well aware that many treatments that are not approved in the
United States are prescribed by physicians in other countries and researched
by researchers in other countries.) The FDA is not shortening lifespans in the
United States, despite what some advocacy organizations say to the contrary.

I have had multiple ancestors who were born in the 1800s live into their
nineties. And my wife's ancestors, born in a poor country then in the
undeveloped world, managed to have quite long lifespans. So we are accustomed
in our family to thinking about the implications of long lifespans. Oddly,
heritability of longevity is actually LOWER than the heritability of most
measurable human characteristics.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/health/31age.html?_r=1&...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/health/31age.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print)

It could be that anyone, even someone without much of a family history of long
life span, might meet the prediction of the study linked above that a young
person born after the year 2000 in a developed country is as likely as not to
live to the age of 100.

Thus far we are making incremental progress, all over the world in a variety
of human societies, increasing human lifespan and life expectancy at most
ages. Meanwhile a number of forms of fundamental biological research are still
just in their beginning stages. In particular, the issue of "missing
heritability" in disease research

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831613/>

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3059431/>

suggests that we have a long way to go to identify biological pathways in
living human beings that make a difference in how long individual human beings
live. The ongoing progress of science-based medicine

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/category/scien...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/category/science-
and-medicine/)

is slower than desirable partly because all human researchers, in whatever
regulatory environment, struggle to overcome their own cognitive biases as
they attempt to determine what treatments work in reducing all-cause mortality
and morbidity. And the huge role of lifestyle factors in mortality and
morbidity

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2658866/>

[http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...](http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000058)

suggests that as causation of disease and early death becomes more clear, we
will not necessarily find that all human beings choose to reduce their risk of
early death to the same degree.

To sum up, the submitted article was quite interesting. It reports, "There is
now a "groundswell" of specialists in aging, says Dillin, who are lobbying the
world's biggest drug regulator, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to
consider redefining aging as a disease in its own right." If by "aging" those
lobbying scientists mean "all-cause morbidity and mortality," that could be a
good reality check on outcome studies of treatments for specific diseases. As
it is now, people are living longer, year after year after year, and in some
places they seem to be living to a healthier old age than ever before.
Continuing that trend is a likely outcome of ongoing efforts both to evaluate
disease treatments more scientifically and to understand better at a
fundamental level how human physiology works.

------
mlinksva
Story is 2 years old.
[http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.12809,y.2011,no.4...](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.12809,y.2011,no.4,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx)
is slightly newer more in depth treatment by David Gems, the person quoted.

More similar via
[https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+%22david%20gems%22)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Betteridge's Law of Headlines -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines>

"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

------
espeed
Something I noticed the other day: Genesis 6:3 says, "My Spirit will not
contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred
and twenty years"
([http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6%3A1-4&...](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6%3A1-4&version=NIV)).

Interestingly, if you look at the list of the verified oldest people, only one
is over 120 years
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_peo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people)).

~~~
tptacek
The Old Testament also suggests Abraham lived to 175; Genesis says Enoch lived
to over 360.

Given BCE life expectancy I think it's safe to interpret all these numbers as
"poetically large" and leave it at that. :)

~~~
espeed
Hi Thomas - Yeah, and Methuselah was said to live to 969. There's some
commentary on that here
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_myths#Hebrew_Bible>).

------
delinka
There was some research headlined on HN within the last year that suggested
aging was nature's response to cancer. Something like: if our cells replicated
at a "young rate" for all our lives, replication mistakes would have us dying
of cancer at a higher rate. So nature slows down cell replication to prevent
cancer growth.

I'll try to find the link. Feel free to reply with such if you find it before
I do.

------
lsparrish
I think that if a cure for aging is invented tomorrow, I won't be able to
benefit from it. Why? Because it will _still_ be in clinical trials by the
time I die.

The simple solution is to pour money (and lots of it) into the goal of
clinically reversible cryonics. At low temperatures, aging vanishes along with
all other metabolic activity -- cancer, viral infection, and so forth would
all be stopped in their tracks. This buys precious time that can be used to
develop a cure for pretty much _any_ condition whatsoever.

Cryonics could also be cheap. The energy costs for a large scale cryonics
facility are much lower than for small-scale due to the square-cube law.
(Square the surface area and you get a cube of the volume, for any shape of
container.) So the more the merrier.

------
SonicSoul
isn't it necessary for evolution? Also to keep a balanced variety of species
in a self sustaining system such as earth. I suppose without aging, population
control would fall squarely on parasites (such as viruses), plagues, natural
disasters, and wars over domination of limited resources. Actually i suppose
we could be wired differently where organisms don't feel a need to have as
much offspring.. But that reinforces the evolution problem.

~~~
gnaritas
What evolution problem? Evolution happens regardless, but why should we be
bound to the limitations of nature when we have the potential ability to rise
above them?

~~~
SonicSoul
the way i see it as a evolution problem is two fold. Evolution happens via
generations of species. if a single generation is around indefinitely, it is
not evolving. Secondly, the units of species with inferior genes (in
evolutionary sense) are also around indefinitely with ability to continue to
have offspring slowing down the process of that genome being filtered out of
existence

~~~
gnaritas
You're making the mistake of assuming evolution is progress; that's not how it
works. Evolution is adaption to the current environment, that could be
progress or devolving, whatever works better. Older genes are not inferior.

Secondly, evolution works across great timescales, doubling or tripling
lifetimes won't stop evolution. There is no evolution problem.

Thirdly, if people could live indefinitely, there would still not be an
evolution problem, there'd be a population and resource problem, which would
change the environment thus accelerating evolution by selecting those who
could survive on fewer resources or those capable of obtaining resources.

------
MikeCapone
Whatever you call it, it's terrible and it's fixable (like other diseases), so
we should work on it.

------
jakeonthemove
I never understood why the FDA won't approve drugs that improve an aspect of
our body, but only those that treat something.

~~~
refurb
A lot of it comes down to the risk vs. benefit equation. The FDA decides to
approval/deny new drug for marketing by (attempting) to balance the benefits
of the therapy with the drawbacks.

This is why a drug like Tysabri (used to treat MS) can cause a potentially
fatal brain infect (PML) and the FDA still gives it an "OK" to be marketed.

And it's also the reason why it's so hard to get obesity drugs approved. Huge
population + small risk = a lot of patients harmed.

The FDA considers a healthy human to be the "optimal outcome". If you want to
improve an aspect of human health beyond that, you'll have to show that there
are zero risks associated with it.

------
diminish
Yet another title with question mark. Aging appears to be more of a feature
and not a bug of organic life.

~~~
philh
With respect to what design goal?

~~~
tobias3
It makes life adaptable to a changing environment.

~~~
Erunno
Humans, due to their highly evolved brains, have accumulated such a vast
amount of knowledge that we can adapt our environment to suit our needs as we
have been doing for the past centuries. And if our understanding of genetics
deepens to the point where we can directly manipulate our biology we won't
need the comparably crude trial and error methodology that is mutation and
selection anymore. This would still fall under the evolutionary advantage our
brains give us.

~~~
tobias3
It hasn't deepend to that point yet tough. It's still trial&error genetics and
medicine. Being smarter than nature is a tall order.

I'd say the long term success (Millions of years) of humankind is still not
sure. Does not seem very stable at the moment, climate change and the
potential destruction via nuclear bombs and so on...

~~~
Erunno
1\. Nature is not "smart", it is not a conscious entity. So neither can we
outsmart it nor can it outsmart us. 2\. I strongly dislike the dichotomy
between nature and humans. Our species is part of the natural world same as
any other. Investigating into influencing or even controlling our evolution
means we are making good use of our evolutionary advantages (i.e. the highly
evolved brain).

~~~
diminish
i agree, anything we score, adds to the score of the nature; finally we are
nature.

------
kiba
Aging also kills. So we'll be living longer life and healthier life if we find
a cure for aging.

------
dacilselig
Am I to assume that since the title ends with a question mark that the answer
is no?

------
jackhoy
You can help raise awareness of this issue here:
[http://questions.sciencedebate.org/forums/149344-the-top-
sci...](http://questions.sciencedebate.org/forums/149344-the-top-science-
questions-facing-america-2012-edi/suggestions/2693427-should-the-united-
states-fund-a-war-on-aging-)

------
orthecreedence
It really makes me _sick_ to my stomach that so many people spend the time and
resources on "figuring out" aging and how to stop it. Humanity's #1 problem is
overpopulation. So let's...make everyone...live longer??

We don't need to stop or slow down aging. We need to accept the fact that
everything that's alive eventually dies. "When" is arbitrary (with the
exception of people under 30 dying). Prolonging the inevitable is a waste of
resources, and an enormous burden on society.

All these horrible diseases we get when we get older are a product of the fact
that our bodies exist for so long. Normally, we'd just die, but modern
medicine keeps the body alive so the mind can rot instead. _But at least
you're alive!!!_ Also, if people are retiring at 65 and living to be 120, then
everyone who is _actually productive_ has to support all these bags of living
organic tissue hooked up to machines for another 60 years. For what purpose?

You're born. You grow up. You have children. You retire. Then you die, and you
make room for everyone else. This is one thing we don't have to sit around
questioning. Nobody deserves to live forever. This whole "I have to live
longer!!" ego trip is sickening.

~~~
roryokane
That's an interesting view, but I'm wondering about your response to some
apparent consequences of that view.

Would you say that you think society should stop using as much life-prolonging
medicine as it currently does, so that people die earlier? That would help
with overpopulation, and it's the corollary to your view that society
shouldn't make new life-prolonging medicines. Or do you think the current
medicines are fine, but we shouldn't make any more? If so, then what makes the
current level of medicine so special and desirable, compared to medicine a
little stronger or weaker?

Aren't you on your own "ego trip" by letting yourself keep living? After all,
aren't you part of the problem of overpopulation? Shouldn't you kill yourself,
and make the earth that much better? Or is your view that you living is a
necessary sacrifice, because you can hopefully convince many people to have
less children or kill themselves, and it will be worth it overall? Or would
you say that people who have already been born should keep living, but people
who have not been born yet should be prevented from living, by encouraging
people to have fewer children? If so, what's so special about the people who
are already living compared to the people not yet living?

~~~
orthecreedence
You bring up some excellent and thoughtful points. I'll try to respond to most
of them. I think that resources spent in the goal of prolonging life are
wasted resources. For instance, if you run a country that has two years of
usable oil left, do you spend all of your time and resources searching for
more oil, knowing full-well that it will run out again, or do you devote your
resources to finding another source of energy? I believe that spending time
and resources prolonging human life is time that could be spent fixing other
problems we have. Cancer comes to mind.

You're basically asking me what's the point of life. My answer would have to
be two-fold (although it's probably more of a spectrum). From a biological
standpoint, it's to reproduce and spread my DNA. From a personal standpoint,
my goal in life is to be happy without harming others. A somewhat selfish
goal, yes, but one I think I share with many other people.

Killing myself would be a drop in the bucket as far as humanity is concerned,
and if stopping overpopulation were my ultimate goal, I would do a lot better
by using the life I was given to change the world thusly by convincing people
to have less children. I don't believe new life shouldn't be created, but
rather life would a lot better for everybody if there were an equilibrium
between production and consumption.

As far as medicine is concerned, I think it has already gone too far. My
grandfather is/was a great example. He had an aneurysm in his late 60s. He was
rushed to the hospital and "saved," but over the course of 6 years, slowly
degraded into a bag of mush. He would have moments of lucidity where he knew
he was completely demented and understood the gravity of the fact that he was
losing his mind, but most of the time he was a vegetable. His last years were
spent in confusing agony. If you asked me, he really died the day he had his
aneurysm. I know of many others that have shared this same fate.

Should we throw away what medical science has done in the last 100 years? No,
I don't think so. Some people are just destined to be vegetables before they
die.

My point is that this world is getting smaller and smaller. We're starting to
realize that our resources are limited. It is in humanity's best interest to
not spend resources prolonging life, but instead use those resources for
making life better for the ones who are alive.

~~~
D_Alex
Your thinking - IMO - is affected by your experience with your grandfather,
and I can understand that. But consider that for many people, myself included,
the thought of dying in the future is a burden (not THAT big, in my case, but
it's there) that we carry with us for a large part of our lives. On top of
that there is the thought of our parents, spouses etc dying before us. I think
that sucks more than the chance of life prolonging medicine going wrong. You
know, VERY few people actually want to die even when they are debilitated by
old age.

I don't want to have to die, and I don't want other people to have to die
either. I would be delighted to spend as long as it takes solving the
overpopulation problem once the problem of dying is dealt with.

