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Age Reversal Breakthrough: Harvard/MIT Discovery Could Enable Whole-Body Rejuvenation
(scitechdaily.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Why a cure for ageing would benefit everyone and not solely the ultra wealthy
If you put aside ethical and humanitarian reasons for making a cure for ageing widely available, there is still economic considerations, i.e. if you are a government you will be presented with a choice between:
Do I pay to treat people for ageing, even though the treatment might initially be expensive, or do I let them age without intervention?
The former option might actually be significantly cheaper because people in an advanced state of ageing cost more money. They have more diseases, since many diseases are age related such as dementia, cancer and cardiac disease, and need more healthcare and also can't work anymore.
If instead, the government pays for rejuvenation treatment they save on all the other healthcare costs and their people don't have to stop being productive.
So perhaps in the future when a cure for ageing is actually developed it will be made available for everyone rich and poor alike
Let me start by saying that I haven't read the article or the study, but I would be very suspicious that this could stop, slow, delay or reverse cancer. In fact, I would guess that it would actually cause more cancer. I hope I'm wrong.
We would also have to consider the impact of people living longer would have on the environment. People will still be having kids, and if you were going to live longer you might want to have many more kids while you're young. Our rock is going to get pretty crowded really fast if people stop dying of old age.
Then there's the point about people still being 'productive' to society. Honestly, if I'm going to live longer, I don't want it to be so I can continue to be productive. I don't like being productive as it is. I'd prefer that humanity focus first on fixing our economy before trying to extend our lives.
Despite appearances, I'm not trying to argue with you for the sake of argument, but more just putting other ideas out there to consider. I do hope your vision is right, and this will be something available to everyone and helps to make our final years more pleasant.
Horray, the rich will live forever! All hail our immortal overlords!
Don’t worry we'll live forever too since now we won't have to retire
Yeah, check out Altered Carbon (the first book or the first season) for how this would likely play out.
I like how you only mentioned the first season, I didn't watch season 2 at all..
Anthony Mackie did great with what he had to work with. But the writing sucked.
I guess this is the future that will come sooner or later...
Btw if someone doubts about it - it's already happening. Here is the example.
Peter Thiel and probably Donald Trump have supposedly been injecting themselves with children's blood, or at least a derivative from their blood.
Full journal article here
https://www.aging-us.com/article/204896/text
"Thus, rejuvenation by age reversal can be achieved, not only by genetic, but also chemical means."
-- Journal article abstract
Couldn’t you wait until Mitch Mconnell died until you released this? I’d rather not him be in the senate forever.
Full text of actual paper: https://www.aging-us.com/full/204896
Tldr; seems like decent science and the compounds used are fairly ordinary ones for the most part. Note however this is all in vitro so far and it might be a challenge to deliver the same chemicals in the same concentrations to all the senescent cells of the body.
Prepare to see these ingredients added in insignificant amounts to expensive skin creams before the year is out, whether they can penetrate the epidermis or not
Heh, science journalism.
Ahh, immortal super-rich people whose views get more and more conservative as they age forever... What an exciting future to look forward to!
The only upside I can think of is they'd actually start caring about the planet instead of thinking they'll be dead in 100 years anyway.
They try to get so rich no matter what, so they can evade all consequences. (That's not possible, but they want to believe it)
I see one potential good thing though: maybe people would be less interested in killing the only planet that supports human life if they knew they were going to be on it forever.
Even if for the rich, this would be good news. The rich and powerful will stop ignoring things like distant climate related deadlines, if they think they'll be alive to feel their effects.
This is the such a silver lining take I never would have thought of. Well done.
If this take is anything like whales with stock they’ll just jump ship onto the next country/planet to start over it’s a never ending cycle
A lot of the rich/ultra wealthy are selfish and don’t give a fuck unless it directly affects them so I don’t foresee any accountability if the planet Implodes instead they’ll just fling their money at the next thing that buys them a ticket out of here
I honestly don't think so. I don't think they care of the condition worsen, including theirs as long as they stay above the poorer people.
Like, if we look at the living condition of a medieval era king. You live in a stone castle do your bedroom as freezing temperature in winter, terrible healthcare so you might be in terrible pain for things that easily treatable, no hygiene the smells everywhere must be horrible... Compared with the comfort of a normal person in a developed country. ( Not the US though, now like Denmark or Switzerland) the modern life is clearly way more comfortable.
However I suspect that a lot of people, especially richer people would prefer to be the king, despite the conditions.
So aging will become a sign of poverty?
It already is
I'm greying before 30, this feels accurate.
Ugh. I barely want to live my whole life on this planet with the ways it is going.. let alone reverse back into my 20s with no actual "new game+"
I would think suddenly being able to go back to your 20s is the NG+.
Biochemist here, It's almost certainly an overhyped study. The operative term being used here is "potentially" full body rejuvenation is possible. It doesn't address issues such as administration of the therapy in tissues with virtually no turnover rate, including cardiac tissue, skeletal muscle, and nervous tissue. You cannot renew something that the body doesn't naturally replace via the cell cycle.
"Thus, rejuvenation by age reversal can be achieved, not only by genetic, but also chemical means."
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204896
-- Journal of Aging
The sci-fi type implications of this would be astounding. We would see a rapidly increasing global population with high natural resource use. On a philosophical level, is living forever a blessing or a curse?
It's not a path to living forever; cells can't reproduce once they burn through their telemeres. What this is is a way to have a youthful body at an older age so you won't spend the last years of your life frail and wrinkly
I'm betting any genuine anti-aging therapy is going to be a complex mess of many treatments. Top off the telomeres, error-correct the DNA, roto-rooter the arteries, reprogram cells, etc...
this is the worst it's just going to be available to rich assholes
And we will have the T-virus outbreak in 3... 2... 1...
Or the Krippin virus.
T-virus because I want to fight Nemesis! 😤