The Bay Area is a hub for aging research in general - there are a number of important labs nearby (and more in LA), and the SENS Research Foundation has its research center there. That whole highly networked group of people merges at the edges with the tech entrepreneur community and the life science entrepreneur community in the area. See this grassroots group for example, as representative of the overlap, that runs salons and meetings at Y Combinator HQ:
There's a super-fundamental discovery about ageing--and a possible "cure" to ageing--that longevity researchers seem to be WAY TOO cautious in discussing and pursuing.
These are telomeres.
Telomeres are a DNA pattern that sets a hard limit on the number of times a cell will divide (and thus repair itself). When the limit is reached, cells stop dividing (then accumulate damage and age). The limit for humans is something like 70 cellular divisions if I remember right.
If you can find a way to lengthen or reset telomeres, you'd have cellular immortality.
The first time I heard about it ten years ago, it blew my mind. To me, this is the biologist's equivalent of a proof that P=NP would be to a computer scientist. I expected enormous interest and research into this, and billions of dollars poured into it, but I'm amazed that it hasn't happened and most people still have never heard of telomeres.
Why isn't there an Apollo-mission-let's-devote-the-resources-of-the-whole-country effort into this? I think it comes down to fear of researching or financing anything with the word "immortality" in it. You'd sound like a crackpot even though the science is sound.
> Turn them off and you get a very high cancer rate.
Or rather, enable telomere repair mechanisms, and you get a higher cancer rate. One of the things cancers must do in order to keep existing is to activate teleomerase or the alt telomere repair mechanism.
Really? I think it has been in the press for a couple of decades now. At any rate, it's probably wise to spread the research money around. The war on cancer started with Nixon is about 40 years old, and we still have a long way to go? My hope is that crowd sourcing and funding really catches for science on in the next few years. Wouldn't it be great to have a lot more resources, both money and people, working on interesting science problems?
SENS is a detailed research plan focused on reversing and repairing age-related frailty, disease and degeneration. It is built on a broad range of research results from the past decades of research into aging and human biochemistry. An introduction to SENS for laypeople is here:
Ending Aging, the book, is essentially a crash course in the scientific backing for SENS; if you're up for reading at the boundary of popular science and actual science (i.e. harder stuff than A Brief History of Time) then you should check it out.
The SENS Research Foundation has a pretty stellar advisory board, including George Church, Anthony Atala, etc - noted figures in their fields:
The reason why SENS is accompanied by advocacy is that we're inching into a revolution in aging science; the old school of drug development and metabolic tinkering is following a path that will go nowhere fast, chewing up a bunch of money to achieve next to nothing of consequence other than knowledge. Meanwhile there is a demonstrably better and disruptive road to producing much better outcomes for intervening in the aging process. SENS is one expression of that road, but by no means the only one: anything that focuses on repair of existing metabolism over changing metabolism or understanding the progression of damage is far better.
The crucial points are made in the quote below, and these are the essence of the disruption of aging research that is coming - the speed with which it arrives determined by the pace at which SENS and similar programs stop being the underdogs and become the mainstream:
"Present arguments within the mainstream of aging research are largely over the relative importance of damage type A versus damage type B, and how exactly the extremely complex interaction of damage with metabolism progresses - but not what that damage actually is. A large fraction of modern funding for aging research goes towards building a greater understanding this progression; certainly more than goes towards actually doing anything about it. Here is the thing, however: while understanding the dynamics of damage in aging is very much a work in progress, the damage itself is well known. The research community can accurately enumerate the differences between old tissue and young tissue, or an old cell and a young cell - and it has been a good number of years since anything new was added to that list.
"If you can repair the cellular damage that causes aging, it doesn't matter how it happens or how it affects the organism when it's there. This is the important realization for SENS - that much of the ongoing work of the aging research community is largely irrelevant if the goal is to get to human rejuvenation as rapidly as possible. Enough is already known of the likely causes of aging to have a reasonable expectation of being able to produce laboratory demonstrations of rejuvenation in animal models within a decade or two, given large-scale funding."
"After advancing beyond the normal reproductive lifespan, the selective forces of Mother Nature abandon us like a delinquent parent abandoning a crying baby. She leaves us alone, scared, and subject to destruction from disorder."
SENS is worth reading about in the broader context of longevity research. Here are some things I've enjoyed reading on this topic: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/longevity/
Exactly. Once a method to significantly lengthen human lifespan is found, the challenge then becomes: where do the natural resources come from to support such an expanding world population. When that day of great scientific discovery arrives, we may all be on a calorie restricted diet, whether we choose to or not.
You need to learn the concept of the limiting factor. Drop sugar a bit, longevity goes up. Drop it a lot, longevity doesn't go above the maximum of eighty-ish. Hey, what's up, it looked so promising? Well, you solved the worst problem, but now there's all the other problems.
That's essentially what SENS is: having categorized all the problems that cause age related death, it's possible to attack them all at once. Or more accurately, attack the damage they cause, switching from either a "don't cause damage" (what you're advocating here) or a "cope with damage" (conventional geriatrics) model to a "periodically, repair the damage" one.
It will help the averages by bringing up the bottom and middle, but I think anyone seriously going after SENS doesn't care about that as much as he cares about the outliers (ie himself) who presumably do all that stuff already.
We usually come to life-saving diet decisions in our 30-s or 40-s. Imagine the society where people are not eating junk for the first half of their life. Can any SENS do it?
Then go to state department of health and see the stats, where we can dig the eye-opening data, e.g. all the science of last 50 years added only 4 monthes of longevity for those who are already at their sixties.
Do you beleive any SANS is addressing the right problem? I personally do not.
Diets and exercises are good for damage prevention, when proven, sure. However, they are not damage repair toolkit or maintenance tool for the human body, nor could we replace our hearts, organs, and other damaged parts on demand, like a car mechanics. No matter how well you eat, it is inevitable that our parts will get worn out or starts malfunctioning in old age as a result of cumulative damage.
(Yes, we do have artificial hearts, organs transplants, and so on but they have drawbacks until we improve them...)
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/peter-thiel-giv.p...
The Bay Area is a hub for aging research in general - there are a number of important labs nearby (and more in LA), and the SENS Research Foundation has its research center there. That whole highly networked group of people merges at the edges with the tech entrepreneur community and the life science entrepreneur community in the area. See this grassroots group for example, as representative of the overlap, that runs salons and meetings at Y Combinator HQ:
http://healthextension.co/