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This discussion relates to Technology Review's article Can Aging Be Solved?.

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  gabrielg01
  

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  07/01/2009 09:39 AM

  Freedom of choice.

  We have heard several times as some people prefer aging and death - mostly for moralizing and status quo reasons.
  
  But what about freedom of choice?...
  What if some of us do not like aging, and would also want to have a longer life than a mere 8 or 9 decades?
  
  It is very simple, really. Let people choose. If you prefer to age and let go, then just go ahead please. But some of us may want to put up a fight.

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  tcaylor
  

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  07/01/2009 11:54 AM

  wrong polarization

  As usual, this has been polarized the wrong way.  Death is not the original natural way of any thing, not just humans.  But we humans can sense that truth.  ("He has also set eternity in the hearts of men", Ecclesiastes 3:11) Thus the good desire to eliminate death.  However, we cannot eliminate it "bottom up" through reductionist methods.  The new life/order is much more grand that incremental progress of humans.  These methods are all part of the cursed machinery of the present natural order.  We sense the truth of the new order intuitively, not through reductionism.  We sense it as children and in the nostalgia that comes with age (not the aging process, but the giving up of the reductionist paradigm).  Informational/programmable/reductionistic knowledge can never attain the wisdom of the new order.

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  sndream
  

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  07/01/2009 03:10 PM

  [no subject]

  "TR: So you don't want to extend life span. But do you think it's theoretically possible?
  
  LH: Even if you put the car in a garage and don't use it, it won't stand there forever."
  
  No one say forever or replace the brain, but it will already be really nice if it adds a few more decades of life and remain young and healthy during that.

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  SudarshanP
  

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  07/01/2009 04:09 PM

  Leonard Hayflick will DIE

  Think of this... All current generation guys who prefer death will choose to die. This will slowly reduce their numbers. 21st century kids will be more open to the idea because they will not be brought up assuming death as certainity. As time progresses, will the future mainly only contain pro life people? Has anyone studied such evolutionary trend?
  
  Now comes a complex question: Imagine how terrible the situation would be if half of the government consisted of guys from the 14th century ;-)... Imagine how hard it would be to approve stem cell research if half ur governments were literally run by luddites...
  
  Conquering death represents a kind of technological progress. But once conquered, these long living people who choose not to change may be the biggest hurdle to progress after that.
  
  Isn't it a good thing for gerontology that Hayflick will die ;-)... What an oxymoron... LOL
  
  
  

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    gabrielg01
    

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    07/01/2009 04:34 PM

    Re: Leonard Hayflick will DIE

    funny post :))
    
    But people will still die, even if aging is stopped/reduced. Automobile accidents, natural disasters, disease, wars, crimes etc. will kill eventually the "non-aging" people too. So we are not talking about living forever, but living a few centuries, or perhaps a few thousand years.
    
    The positive side effect of a non-aging population will be that religious hogwash will be severely reduced. The negative side effect will be that a certain sub population will live an eternal yet meaningless life...watching TV and being a couch potato for 800 years?...Kind of disgusting, and meaningless too.

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      VxSw
      

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      07/01/2009 06:20 PM

      Re: Leonard Hayflick will DIE

      I think in 800 years we'll find something more interesting to do. Far more interesting than lying in a fucking coffin and being eaten by fucking worms. Death to the death.

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        rafael7
        

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        07/02/2009 01:43 PM

        Re: Leonard Hayflick will DIE

        The prospect of living 'forever' is enticing, but I think it is a short-sighted goal. I think the challenge is in making the life we live as meaningful and productive as we can. Examine your own life; are you living up to your potential? If you are wasting seventy years, what's the point in wasting 800?
        Life on all levels is a cycle. It gives it boundaries, and these boundaries define life. What is the point of a race if there is no finish line? Folks wanna just go on living, jes' be lazy longer...yah know?
        I am not a religious person, but it's one way of coaxing humans into 'decent' behavior. Two-thirds of humans are a waste of oxygen anyway, and a bane to civilization.
        Scoundrels always seem to work themselves into positions of power, so an unlimited lifespan would allow an accumulation of undesireables in the seats of power. The don't call death the 'Sweet Release' for no reason.
        Don't you think those fake flowers suck? They look great once, but then they never change and get all dusty, and they have NO smell...hmmmmm.

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  VxSw
  

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  07/01/2009 06:14 PM

  Thermodynamics?

  It seems naive to hear about aging as some kind of thermodynamic inevitability. It's the matter of incoming energy to keep the structure as long as we want. And we consume energy several times a day - or die. So it's not about entropy. The Second Law cannot apply to open systems we are. So it's rather some kind of scientific blindness like that of Lord Kelvin who said people won't probably fly in a million years... and then were Wrights. It is sorry to see such a genius in such a trap of thought. Really deadly kind of pessimistic wishful thinking.
  
  The automobile metaphor is rather stupid. We are not closed in a garage, we breathe, drink, eat, care about ourselves, sometimes get cured. If it was simple entropy, we won't be alive in 5 minutes. As for replacing parts... he forget we are not heaps of certain atoms, or molecules. All our atoms are replaced every 7 years or so. What we really are is systems, structures. So eventually even our brains can be renewed without us losing sense of ourselves. Just like we are renewed in nature.
  
  It is probably true any species wouldn't survive without aging, but we are not "just another species". We are the first species smart enough to read its genetic roots, and once we'll deal with this deadly legacy once and forever. Natural selection loses any sense when we begin to modify our genes directly, and besides, it's just unhuman to continue it when we can stop it. The war on aging is going on.

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    rafael7
    

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    07/02/2009 02:41 PM

    Re: Thermodynamics?

    All structures move from a state of new to old to gone. Abuse speeds the process, Care slows it. All our cells get replaced, but our scars are forever. We are fuel ourselves, burning fuel to survive, but being consumed in the process. Health is more important than age. Live life to it's fullest, and enjoy the ride. Focus on quality, not quantity.
    Do I want to live a long, long time?... yes.
    Do I want to be a vibrant, healthy person, who contributes to society?... yes.
    Would I like a treatment that miraculously un-aged my body, and gave me a youthful, lithe form, with fluid motion and clarity of mind, and quickness of mind?...sure!
    Will I lose a minute of sleep worrying about whether it will ever be possible?...NO!
    Humans do not possess the selfless intelligence, compassion or wisdom to be 'Gods'. I anticipate a lot of freaky sh*t to go down while we are figuring that out.

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  Phineas
  

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  07/01/2009 07:59 PM

  Philosophy Skeptic

  If professor Hayflick needed a procedure to extend his life, would he take it? Has he ever had a vaccination, annual physical exam, treatment, or seen a doctor to prevent an early death? Quantity AND quality of life.
  
  Just a little skeptical about this philosophy to "go gentle into that good night."

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    erbium
    

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    07/02/2009 02:17 PM

    Tx to extend life

    If professor Hayflick needed a procedure to extend his life, would he take it? Has he ever had a vaccination, annual physical exam, treatment, or seen a doctor to prevent an early death? Quantity AND quality of life.
    
    Just a little skeptical about this philosophy of "going willingly into that good night."
    
    >>treatment and preventively maintaining your health to live out your normal life is not the same as treatment to extend your life.
    
    Pretty much nothing we do now and any disease we eliminated would extend the human life more than a couple years on average.
    
    About the only Tx that WOULD extend life more than 10 years is castration.  Strange as it sounds, research on people in an institute in kansas before the 1960's when they banned this practice proves over 700+ people that the longer you have had reduction in body hormones the longer you live.    Somehow I don't think this will become a popular or accepted treatment.
    
    The same applies to women:  just as an example of the havoc hormones wreak on the body, female dogs have 33% chance of getting breast cancer in their lives, several times that of human women.
    
    If the dog is fixed, that is reduced to a tiny percent of the original figure.
    
    NOTHING 'in vitro' that causes cells to multiply infinitely will extend life in-vivo.  The human cells stop dividing for a reason:  to prevent runaway cell divion, i.e. cancer and tumors later in life.  In fact programmed death of cells is necessary to the formation of the human body.  The cells between your fingers are programmed to die in the womb.  If they did not you'd have webbed hands. 
    
    We have close to a trillion cells that originate from one cell all specialized into different tissues.  If this regeneration of the DNA did not occur regularly, errors would creep in from damage and we'd become sterile.  Not only that but parasites - bacteria, viruses, protozoa, etc would become adapted to our immune system and we'd all become chronically infected.

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      gabrielg01
      

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      07/02/2009 03:36 PM

      Re: Tx to extend life

      Actually the concept of "normal life span" has no real biological definition. If you consider a "purely natural" life, where no medical prevention and intervention is taken, then it would probably be around 40-50 years.
      
      Yet in our world many sickly people can live beyond 40. And we consider this "natural" or "normal". It is normal to have vaccinations, regular checkups, and it is also normal to have surgeries or other major medical intervention to allow you to live out your "natural life span", which today is supposed to be around 80. Why do we consider this life span "normal" if many people achieve this only via medical intervention?
      
      But many years from now, incremental technical advances will have pushed this "normal life span" way up. Maybe it will be normal for your grand kids to go in for a routine medical checkup when they are 120.
      
      And the point of "falling behind" in evolution is not true, because evolution is not the way it used to be anymore. We will be engineering evolution from now on. We will be in the driving seat, not the bacteria, nor the viruses. It's just a matter of time, but we will get there.

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        erbium
        

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        07/05/2009 01:24 PM

        Normal life span

        40-50 is correct if you assume no medicine, and death by fighting with your tribal neighbors.  Yet people with 'no medicine' can regularly live to 70-80.  This happens often in areas such as the andes.
        
        The maximum lifespan is pretty much 110.
        
        What is almost funny, I found when researching aging for a medical class, is that supposedly smart researchers would visit 'primitive paradises' in various parts of the world.  There people would tell the researchers that they were 110, 120, 130..  and the researchers, normally smart people would accept this without proof.  This included Rodale, of organic gardening fame.  When other researchers went back to the same spots years later, they found that, for various reasons these people were lying.  For cultural reasons many would take names of elders in the village who had died.  Pages would become mysteriously ripped out of church birth logs.
        
        In another funny incident in one of the USSR satellite countries, local newspapers proclaimed as here a man whose birth certificate said he was 121.  Once printed, someone else wrote into the paper that the man was only 78, that he was using his father's passport.   In countries where documenation is done carefully, maximum age varies little.
        

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