
How Silicon Valley is trying to cure ageing - sergeant3
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11413041/How-Silicon-Valley-is-trying-to-cure-ageing.html
======
guylhem
Mortality is the #1 bug of human hardware (with cancer a close #2). It may
have been a feature a few thousand years ago, with limited resources, but it's
now hampering our progress.

I don't want mankind achievements to be limited by our limited lifespan. The
first 20 to 30 years are wasted on learning - almost like 1/3 of a average
life. But with linespans in the 200 to 300 years, that would be 10% - and
these added productive years could bring so many more good things. Imagine if
Feynman and Einstein were still alive today, having new ideas, discovering new
things. Imagine if we still learn during 1/3 of the lifespan - the amount of
knowledge that would be acquired, and the marvels we could achieve with it.

For those who will lament on how this would be bad/capitalism/not respecting
nature or (insert your favorite deity), nobody will force you do to anything.
Die of old age at 90 if you want.

Personally, I want extended life or immortality to do crazy thing when I'm
still young in my early 200 (or young again thanks to cures we can't even
imagine at the moment)

~~~
Brakenshire
I agree in the long run.

But you don't have to get very old before it's obvious that a lot of ageing is
an accumulation of small infirmities that build up over time. There may well
be a switch that can turn on or off the dramatic downturn that occurs in old
age (perhaps to do with telomeres, or lossy DNA replication, or whatever), but
it seems unlikely the same switch will also reverse that accumulation of
infirmities. Returning a 60 year old body to the same maintenance processes as
a 20 year old body won't fix torn cartilage, sciatica, or cardiovascular
damage. So obviously we should be investigating the former processes, but the
techniques for the latter small problems must be substantially fixed
beforehand, or else we'll end up in this nightmarish middle zone of people
getting more and more unwell, but not dying.

~~~
ENGNR
My limited understanding is that the repair processes also play a big part.
For example bones become brittle because stem cells no longer fill the gaps as
quickly as they appear. The body also fully replaces every cell every seven
years. If they could find a way to just restore the repair mechanisms a whole
host of problems could slowly start to disappear.

~~~
reasonattlm
Bones also suffer from other processes that damage the structural properties
of the extracellular matrix such as cross-linking by hard to break down sugar
compounds. There is also a process of growing cellular dysregulation wherein
the ongoing bone remodeling favors destruction over construction, and that is
distinct from stem cell decline. Every tissue is impacted by multiple forms of
damage beyond loss of maintenance via stem cell function, some of which, like
the cross-linking, accumulate slowly and cannot be repaired by our
biochemistry. Clearance of some sort will be needed.

The body does not replace all of its cells; different tissues have different
turnover rates. Many of the cells in your central nervous system will be with
you for your entire life. There is research to suggest that even some of the
individual proteins in those cells are never replaced either.

------
melling
A million dollars doesn't seem like much of a prize considering the result.
For that kind of money, we should be X-Prize Kickstarter projects.

~~~
lotsofmangos
I'm not sure that financial prizes give much of an incentive either way for
people trying to stop aging.

~~~
melling
Financial prizes have worked for centuries. Have to be specific on a goal.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_%28book%29](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_%28book%29)

~~~
lotsofmangos
Is a good book, but I think you miss my point. Measuring longitude is exactly
the sort of thing a cash prize helps with, elixirs of life already have such
strong incentives attached that you might as well just award a nice cake and a
balloon saying "Well Done".

~~~
melling
Nah, you're looking at it completely wrong. There are many small steps that
could improve people's lives. Many of us could get to 100 if we simply could
monitor our bodies more closely, for example, and perhaps fix "small defects"
that are detected early:

[http://tricorder.xprize.org](http://tricorder.xprize.org)

Some people live to be well over 100, so if we could closely identify why they
live longer, we might learn a lot there too.

We know so little about the human body that one day we say eggs are bad for
you then the next, they're ok to eat again.

------
jostmey
The truth is we have no idea how to stop aging. That is why it is better to
fund the heck out of basic science. When you don't know where to start, then
you have to wait on that amazing breakthrough. No one really knows where that
may come from.

~~~
reasonattlm
Various factions within the scientific community have a lot of very good ideas
as to exactly how, in great detail, to go about research and development with
a high probability of producing effective treatments for aging at the end of
the day. For example, these laundry lists:

SENS: [http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-
research](http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

Hallmarks of Aging:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.039](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.039)

Seven Pillars:
[http://buckinstitute.org/CellCommentary](http://buckinstitute.org/CellCommentary)

------
krapp
Trying to 'cure' ageing is strange and unnatural.

We're just another species of primate, we age and we die, and we rot, and then
we're nothing. Worms and pinochle and whatnot.

The only thing we should try to cure is our self-delusion and our fear. It
only wastes what little time we have. If some of us start living to 120, we'll
still moan that it isn't enough. It's never enough.

~~~
photonic28
The improbability of immortality does not mean that life extension is
worthless. Is striving to reach 80 asinine because we'll just want more?
Should we have been satisfied at 40? The status quo is no argument for what we
should want to achieve.

In fact, I'll argue that any serious life extension will have to come with a
similarly extended lease on quality. Senesence will need to be stemmed
upstream, so more of your 120 years will be good years.

~~~
krapp
I'm not saying it's worthless, i'm saying we shouldn't act as if aging or
death are diseases to be cured.

~~~
delinquentme
no. we should absolutely, act as if aging and death is something to be cured.

A rose by any other name, is just as sweet. I mean to say, all of the STUFF
associated with malady is there. So how / why does death/aging ... with all
its symptoms ... differ?

It doesn't.

~~~
krapp
It differs in that it can't be cured. Although I suppose you could consider it
a terminal illness then by definition.

Life can be extended, perhaps. Made more productive, certainly. But a cure for
death? Show me one organism in nature anywhere near as complex as a human
being with the capacity for unlimited aging and I'll believe it's possible.
Technologically extending life for a few decades on average with a battery of
complex and expensive medical treatments is not a cure.

Otherwise, looking at death or aging as a disease, while it might provide the
catalyst for any number of worthwhile medical advances, also provides false
hope. It's like waiting for the Singularity to happen so we can all upload our
minds into the Eschaton. It's just another form of hoping for an afterlife.

Yes, absolutely act as if it can be cured, but don't believe it can.

------
reasonattlm
The prize site:

[http://paloaltoprize.com/](http://paloaltoprize.com/)

The heart rate variability thing is an interesting take on a biomarker for
aging. I'm not sure I agree with its utility, but the prize should at the very
least inspire enough attention to figure out whether you can artificially
tinker with heart rate variability without having much of an impact on
anything else. I'd expect that to be possible given (a) the existence of
various heart function targeted drugs, and (b) the fact that aging results
from the downstream consequences of cellular and molecular damage that is in
and of itself many steps removed from large-scale systems level functions like
heart beat regulation.

Some thoughts on prizes in aging-related medical research and why it is that
we don't have more of them even though we should:

\------------------

Establishing a research prize is a form of investment in progress only
available in the philanthropic world. At the very high level it is easy to say
that philanthropists pay people to work on specific tasks. This is simple
enough for smaller amounts: transfer a few thousand dollars to a research
group and you have bought a very small slice of the time and equipment needed
to achieve any particular goal. When we start talking about much larger
amounts of money, millions or tens of millions, then there are important
secondary effects that occur when making such investments. In these amounts
money has gravity, money makes people talk, and money changes behavior and
expectations in a far larger demographic than just the recipients. This is
well known, and thus investment activities, philanthropic and otherwise,
become structured to best take advantage of this halo of effects. Most of the
experience in doing this comes from the for-profit world: it doesn't take too
long spent following the venture capital industry to see that investment is a
lot more complicated than choosing a target and writing a check, and this is
exactly because there are many secondary effects of a large investment that
can be structured and harvested if investors go about it in the right way.

I theorize that the reason why research prizes remain comparatively rare is
that firstly they are an investment strategy restricted to philanthropy, and
thus people with the money to burn have little direct experience, and secondly
the whole point of the exercise is not in fact paying people to do things
directly, but rather creating a situation in which near all of the benefit is
realized through the secondary effects generated by the highly publicized
existence of a large sum of money. A research prize works by being a sort of
extended publicity drive and networking event conducted over a span of years,
a beacon to draw attention to teams laboring in obscurity, attract new teams,
and raise their odds of obtaining funding. Connections are made and newly
invigorated initiatives run beneath the light of a large sum of prize money,
but at the end of the day that money becomes more or less irrelevant. It
wasn't the important thing, it was merely the ignition point for a much
greater blaze of investment and publicity. By the time a team wins, they are
typically in a position to raise far more funding than the prize amount
provides.

The ideal end result is that a field of science and technology is rejuvenated,
taken from obscurity and thrust into the public eye, made attractive to
investors, and numerous groups are given the attention and funding they need
to carry on independently. This is how it worked for the Ansari X Prize for
suborbital flight, and more quietly, for the Mprize for longevity science: in
both cases the entire field changed as a result of the existence of the prize
and the efforts of the prize organization to draw attention, change minds, and
build new networks. But the award of money wasn't the transformative act, and
in fact that award didn't really occur at all for the Mprize, but rather
change was created through the sum of all of the surrounding effects.

So consider this: people who arrive at the state of being wealthy and wanting
to change the world through philanthropy, often after decades of for-profit
investment participation, don't have much in the way of comparable experience
to guide them in the establishment and operation of research prizes. Thus
creation of a research prize falls low in the list of strategies under
consideration by high net worth philanthropists. Few people do it, and so
there are few examples from which others can learn. It is the standard vicious
circle of development, in which steady, grinding bootstrapping is the only way
to create change.

Why care? Because research prizes work well. They work exceedingly well.
Depending on how you care to plug numbers into equations, a well-run prize of
$10 million will generate $150 to $500 million in investment in an industry,
and that is just the easily measured result. Just as important is the
following change and growth enabled by that initial burst of attention and
funding. The Ansari X Prize spawned a number of other prizes in various
industries, but I think it remains the case that medicine and biotechnology is
poorly served in this respect. Outside of the efforts of the X Prize
Foundation, the New Organ prizes, and other independent efforts such as the
Palo Alto Longevity Prize, there is little going on. Given the proven utility
of prizes there should be many more of them, and yet there are not.

~~~
klipt
> Given the proven utility of prizes there should be many more of them, and
> yet there are not.

Economically speaking, if the utility of a prize is greater than its cost,
that is an arbitrage opportunity. Once enough people take advantage of that
opportunity to create prizes, there will be far more prizes to choose from and
the utility of the effort spent towards each prize will drop to equal its
cost.

A prize is somewhat like a dollar auction, but the result of any effort you
bid is more random.

------
CalRobert
Warning: autoplay video with sound not muted.

~~~
forloop
It's YouTube. They have autoplay on vids, unless you disable it.

------
pcthrowaway
I thought Silicon Valley was phasing out old people, not 'curing ageing'

~~~
pgeorgi
Silicon Valley billionaires are getting older, too.

------
cpursley
Perhaps the Valley should figure out it's housing problem before exacerbating
the issue.

~~~
reasonattlm
You are of course being facetious, but as for any objection to working on
extension of healthy life, you should ask yourself how exactly your
speculative problem is worse than the real problem of 100,000 horrible deaths
every day, as well as the ongoing pain and suffering of hundreds of millions
of people trapped in failing bodies.

~~~
klipt
Extension of healthy life doesn't solve the problems you mention, it merely
delays them (unless the extension is forever, which is impossible given our
current understanding of physics).

And population will be an issue - but I think that's largely self correcting.
If everyone lives 1000 years, it may well take 500 of those to be financially
stable enough to have kids, because you're competing against other people who
can also plan on 1000 year spans.

~~~
jordanb
It also seems weird to focus on longevity when there are so many low hanging
fruit that strike people down before they've had a chance to enjoy a long
life.

My aunt just died in her early 40s of cancer. Maybe one can argue that there's
already enough money flowing into cancer research, ok, how about parasites,
tuberculosis, malaria, the more general problem of drug resistance in
infectious diseases? While we're being bold how about research into the causes
of and solutions to violent behavior?

There's really some truth in advertising in calling this the "Palo Alto prize"
as its impetus is clearly not really to make the world a better place or to
solve serious problems affecting many millions (billions?) of people but to
assuage the minds of the privileged class of soft-livers sitting in their
suburban pleasure dome agonizing about the slow encroachment of inevitability.

~~~
forloop
> its impetus is clearly not really to make the world a better place or to
> solve serious problems affecting many millions (billions?) of people but to

Are you suggesting millions (billions?) of people don't have a problem with
death/cancer/dementia? Because that's obviously incorrect!

What do you think would happen if top research scientists lived longer and
maintained their intellectual capabilities?

What would happen if people stopped thinking so much in the short term,
because they expected to face the consequences of the more distant future?

What would happen to the resources that are currently being spent on diseases
of ageing? Heart disease, cancer, dementia.

How much wealth would be created by an increased number of experienced people
working?

Resource allocation to lifespan/healthspan doesn't seem zero-sum. Despite the
temptation to create a dichotomy, there is none!

------
owly
Listen. As a 473 year old vampire, I can tell you it's really not all that
it's cracked up to be.

~~~
GuiA
That's just the hormones speaking. Once you pass your first millenia, you gain
a perspective on things that significantly improves your life.

------
ggamecrazy
I think that before we get to be immortal we have to fix the basic vagaries of
the human mind. I feel like the only way we can advance as human beings is by
having the old with their backwards ideas (apartheid, anti-homosexuality) die
and be replaced by new people with new ideas.

If we can fix the mind first then I'm all for immortality but not before.

~~~
prodigal_erik
What if aging in the brain is the reason old people aren't disproving and
correcting their invalid ideas?

~~~
ggamecrazy
Perhaps they are both linked, perhaps it's the way we are wired, I frankly
don't know. I am just suggesting that we should fix the way we think before we
change how long we live. Just my $.02

------
pron
While population growth is one obvious concern, I am actually more worried
about more immediate effects (pretending, for the sake of discussion that the
feat of significant lifespan extension, or even immortality is possible).

Although the outcome where the poor have more time to accumulate wealth is
possible, I think that the more likely scenario is a significant increase in
the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Estate taxes will have a much
smaller (or no effect), while low income families won't be able to bequeath
their houses to their children.

Of course, it's hard for us to imagine the how things might play out after
such a complete revolution of human life, but it would be interesting to at
least explore and investigate the possible ramifications.

------
marincounty
I'm kind of with Gate's with this one. Work on alleviating pain and suffering
we can cure today? Maybe work on making the process of death less painful. My
fathers death was beyond painful. He had good insurance, and under the care of
Hospice? It's like they sent him home and didn't give him enough medication.
When the doctor says, "Sorry--I can't do anything. Look into getting your
affairs in order.". You shouldn't need to ask a doctor for more Pallitive care
medications? You should be able write your own scripts. No wonder people
commit suicide when diagnosed with a disease--even a manageable one? It's not
always clinical depression. I think about a guy I knew who was given a few
months; He went right to the streets to buy herioin. He felt it was easier
than waiting until a doctor who felt his pain/anxiety warranted a script? My
best friend died of COPD, and something else. That something else was never
diagnosed. He was racked with pain until he died in his sleep. I did take him
to one of the best pain clinics in San Franciso. He got in my car and said,
"They don't prescribe pain pills?" "They offered to cut some nerve?" I still
don't get it. Yes, people abuse the system, but look beyond your stereotypes
and alleviate the pain that's sitting in front of you? It's just going to get
worse now that politicians are looking into prescription drug abuse. It's fine
and dandy until you are the one seeking real relief from misery?

Happy Sunday-

