I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right.
But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?
And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.
Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.
1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.
2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.
3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.
> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates.
Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)
Sounds like you might know this but I'll add it for the public dialogue.
LNT is useful because you work with an abundance of caution when it comes to radiation. It's difficult to know what type of radiation someone received and where. Both of these can dramatically change the risk of exposure. It's not hard to measure in a lab, but an accident isn't a lab and you can't just go placing sensors all over every radiation worker's body (at least yet. Small sensors embedded in clothing would change this).
So what do you do? You purposefully over estimate. Because if your estimate is wrong, the human is much more likely to survive if you incorrectly assumed they received more than they actually did than if you error by assuming they got less than they actually did. Failure analysis is a critical part to any engineering or safety plan.
Why not over estimate as much when higher dosages are received? Well that's because it matters a lot less. As dosage increases all those nuances of where and what type matter less (they still matter).
It's still all highly complex and what I'll say is that if you haven't spent at least a year studying this stuff you're more under water than you think. It's great that there's a lot of educational material out there but unfortunately when it comes to complex topics like nuclear many of them do more harm than good. Pro nuclear armchair experts tend to be as uninformed as anti nuclear armchair experts. So like the LNT, it is always good to work with an abundance of caution. Especially when talking about complex subjects on the internet
I wonder how often people don't understand how radiation affects health- because nominal levels don't hit the news. but, oh boy, when a single Fukushima isotope decay is detected on the coast of California- its national news.
We're really good at detecting radiation. Like REALLY good. It's because we spent a lot of money during the Cold War trying to detect nuclear materials. This includes underground weapons testing, being able to detect underground nuclear signatures via satellites, and even very trace amounts on people's clothing because it can help detect spies. It then was found that these things could be used for tons of stuff, such as tracking not spies lol.
But seriously, we can detect levels thousands of times lower than what's dangerous. You can even get pretty good dosimiters for like $100 these days
In terms of your first point, I'm not sure I understand how the overall cancer rate being increased by dubious activities on the part of some people implies that efforts to cure cancer on the part of others are "not entirely noble". On the surface, this seems like a non-sequitur -- could you explain your reasoning further?
> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.
You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this
Radon, a perfectly natural source of radiation, cause more cancer than all the other nuclear sources combined. Stop it with the nuclear fear mongering!
It would be interesting if one of those anti-aging moonshots succeeds but the treatment to stop aging only works if you had a pre-treatment that has to occur before puberty.
I'd pay a fortune for eternal youth for my kids or grandkids. Kids are the most expensive investment most people will ever make, this seems like a no brainer.
By comparison, a vaccine to prevent polio did little to help the many people who were already afflicted with it, and we never did develop a cure, but at this point the disease is nearly eradicated and there is little need for a cure. It would be cool if someone came up with a cure, but resources should logically keep being focused towards vaccinating the last of the vulnerable.
"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot."
Child mortality rates are lower than they have ever been. They are basically zero in the developed world, and falling quickly throughout the developing world already. It's mostly a solved problem. Where it remains high, it's typically a symptom of other problems which prevent people from accessing adequate food and medicine. These circumstances almost always have their unique nuances that prevent them from being simply addressed by a single large effort, instead demanding a unique response informed by experience with the local conditions.
Adding a single healthy year of life to every American who lives to be over 70 would add about twice as many healthy person-years than reducing the US infant mortality rate to zero. Reducing the world infant mortality rate to zero would be equivalent to adding roughly two healthy years to the lifespans of those who make it over 70.
The headline is confusing. This is not about a company that's becoming older. It's about a building a biotech company that treats the symptoms and causes of aging.
Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve.
As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea.
For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.
Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to fiat wealth, engaged in vain wank.
Aging exists because the human body is optimized to survive and reproduce in a resource constrained environment with many threats. Our predecessors eked out just enough calories to survive to the age of 15, when we could begin reproducing. Any traits that made it more likely for us to survive until that point, even if those traits resulted in damage that would eventually accumulate and wear us down after our reproductive window, was selected for. We are all basically running the biological equivalent of overclocked CPUs without investing in proper cooling.
We no longer exist in a resource constrained environment and have access to massive amounts of energy from the sun which makes entropy a negligible concern. There is no good reason to not at least try to prevent or reverse senescence.
I don't think "live to 15, have kids, and die" makes sense as a model for humans, even if you're modeling them solely as child generating machines.
Humans are a pretty damn care-dependent species. They're not going to defend or feed themselves without years of support, so if they aren't surviving en masse into their 30s and 40s, the next generation is probably going to have a severe die-out.
Beyond that there's probably ongoing marginal benefits to species fitness with longer lifespans. If you can keep a few generations in circulation at once, you probably have greater resilience to things like disease outbreaks (the 50-year-old cohort might have some past related immunity to a disease that rampages the 20-year-olds).
This also completely ignores any value of intelligence and ability to pass down knowledge, which is definitely a fitness factor just for being able to prevent future generations from poisoning themselves as easily.
Having kids takes a long time, especially when many of them die of infection or malnutrition. So yes, you're absolutely right that evolution "cares" about human beings up until they hit ~40. At that point, human beings enter the selection shadow, when improvements to survivability have a negligible impact on selection. I was eliding this point for clarity but I don't think it really alters my broader argument.
This is all pretty obvious when you look at one of the main diseases of aging, cardiovascular disease. There are natural genetic variations that result in very low free LDL blood levels, which basically prevents artherosclerosis from every developing and which inspired the development of the PCSK-9 inhibitors. However, there's no evolutionary benefit to not dying of cardiac arrest when you're 60, but there are marginal benefits to the liver binding to fewer LDL particles when people are in a starvation environment, so these variations never became widespread.
The grandparent hypothesis is certainly compelling and might explain some marginal improvements in human lifespan relative to e.g. chimps (who live about 10-20 years less than us even in captivity). But if anything, that reinforces my broader point, which is that aging did not develop as some kind of culling agent by evolution and that we should be looking for ways to extend human longevity now that we have the resources to.
Death is a natural sweeper that allows progress, evolution, rapid change and adjustment to new situations. The opposite brings, well, the opposite.
The life well lived is a life thats easy to let go, regardless of your beliefs. The more people messed up the more they desperately cling to it (I know its vastly more complex, but this is the core of what I see around).
I am not claiming we shouldn't be trying to make lives better, or longer. But immortality will be humanity's doom - there is endless row of puttin' and trumps and hitlers and stalins and maos in every single generation, and the only real working solution is inevitable death, none of them went or will let go power on their own from the bottom of their good hearts. That is unavoidable since it comes from base character of humans, whether we like it or not.
I'd say we should shoot on sight all researchers and VCs pouring time and money into directly immortality, that's much safer bet than some immortality bringing long term prosperity for mankind.
That's a nice theory but I don't want to bet future of mankind on some feel-good logic. In my view, a-holes remain a-holes, self-centered narcissists double so.
Feel like trump for example got wiser and saner and more rational the second term? Because literally whole world believes otherwise. He has his whole clan to think of due to consequences of his actions, if he cared. puttin' is same, just sour keg of bad beer that should be poured down the river (or some better ecological disposal of garbage).
Why do you think 70-80 year old "middle aged" politicians would get a chance when 150 year old "boomers" with wealth and powerful networks might be able to call the the shots?
What interest I have in anti-aging is less about living forever than alleviating suffering on the way out. Living to 80, 90 or 100 seems like plenty of time on earth but making that last half of our lives less achey, infirmed and delirious is a noble goal.
By that logic, why not just execute everyone over 35? They're just slowing down human progress.
Aging doesn't exist because it benefits us, we did not choose 70-80 to be the ideal lifespan, and my back doesn't continuously ache to give new ideas a chance to spring forth.
> For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.
Sure but that's because the US voting demographic is old. It's the tyranny of the majority [1]; as the largest generation the baby boomers can vote and do vote for things that advance their interest. I'm not sure this phenomenon works if people live out to 150 years as the generational bubbles would be relatively smaller.
Anti-aging would be an attempt at reversing it, rather than still going "yep, this happens" but making it a nicer ride before you're forced to get off.
Strange because in a way we've already had these for a long time for the visual signs of aging, moisturizers , wrinkle creams etc.
And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
I wonder how much the prohibition of stem cell research set back anti-aging.
I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.
Creating stem cells from blood samples is a well-established industry practice now. I don’t think limiting embryonic stem cells research is significantly hindering stem cells research, is it?
To my knowledge stem cell research is clicking along just fine, and I can guarantee you that certain other countries (looking at you here China) don't give Shit One about the ethical/religious hangups around it in the West.
From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.
"A successful aging treatment would be something that:
prevents diseases of aging, ideally more than one;
preserves a healthy function that normally declines with age (like fertility, immune function, cognitive function, resilience, or physical fitness); or
reverses the course of at least one age-related disease."
I think a lot of the anti-aging companies out there would say that the real answer is a combination of the second and third - reversing the course of age-related decline.
Also, I think it's sort of contradictory to have two of these points focus on diseases of aging but in a subsequent section say that oncology isn't anti-aging. Cancer is in many ways a disease of aging (it's very clear from the numbers that increasing in age causes increases in likelihood of developing cancer, generally more than any other single factor). Curing cancer obviously isn't going to get you a general-purpose anti-aging treatment, but that's why it seems odd to say that reversing the course of an age-related disease is a successful aging treatment.
From an anti aging perspective, cancer is the most visible symptom of DNA gradually becoming more and more damaged.
The anti aging solution that happens to solve cancer as a side effect is then to figure out how to repair DNA damage, and/or replace cells with damaged DNA with cells with intact DNA.
Pedantic semantics gripe: DNA damage refers to actual damage to the DNA molecule (breakage of the sugar-phosphage backbone, loss of nucleosides, etc). DNA accumulates MUTATIONS over time, which lead to the loss of genetic fidelity.
Many cancers have unregulated DNA repair pathways, which is one of the mechanisms by which they can sustain proliferation without succumbing to apoptosis. Common chemotherapeutic targets are actually DNA repair factors that can both help kill the cells and sensitize them to radiation. It's well known in the DNA repair field that cells maintain rather delicate balance between carcinogenics and death by regulating repair. The vast majority of research into DNA repair is aimed at solving problems treating cancer, with some peripheral voices (albeit ones that garner more publicity) working on anti-aging applications. I personally wouldn't sign up for any of these start-up nonsense treatments; traditional scientific orthodoxy may be overly reductionist, move slowly, and lack imagination but good god does it beat all of these people that treat grand problems in biology like some sort of app you just need to take the right angle on to figure out.
Perhaps it was unwise to use the term dna damage yes. I used it to mean any deviation from the initial dna of the fertilized egg, including breakage, point mutations, missing chromosomes, viral insertions and probably more I can't think of right now.
Edit: I suppose those are all called mutations. Somehow I thought mutation meant a small local change only.
Wouldn't it only be cancer if your immune system doesn't destroy it? If your immune system can handle it, that's just normal.
The DNA damage that the parent was talking about would lead to cancerous cells which your immune system cannot handle, which is different from the ones that your immune system can handle
As a co-founder of Ginkgo Health[1], this is a refreshing discussion to see.
The "Is this aging?" article perfectly articulates the philosophy that drove us to start the company. We saw a huge disconnect between the longevity industry's focus on hype and moonshots, and what the science actually shows is effective for improving healthspan. The article's point about focusing on frailty and sarcopenia is spot-on ; functional health is one of the most powerful and evidence-based levers we have to improve quality of life as we age.
That's precisely why we built Ginkgo Active. We wanted to create a genuine "geroprotector" that was accessible to everyone, not just a theoretical treatment for the wealthy.
When we responded[2] to the recent CMS RFI[3] on the Health Technology Ecosystem, we outlined this exact approach. Our goal is to provide a practical solution to functional decline and chronic disease, which are massive burdens on the healthcare system.
Here’s how our thinking aligns with the article's main points:
Focus on Function, Not Just Biomarkers: Instead of chasing clocks, we focus on delivering personalized exercise prescriptions designed to improve strength, balance, and cardiovascular health. Our AI platform uses over 170,000 rules from authoritative sources like the American College of Sports Medicine to create these plans.
Prevention and Healthspan: Our platform is built to help people before they get sick, preventing or delaying the onset of 18 different chronic condition risk factors. This is about adding healthy years to life, which is the core of a real aging intervention.
Accessibility and Equity: We believe this kind of preventative care should be a right, not a privilege. We intentionally designed our platform so that it doesn't require expensive wearables or equipment. Our goal is to provide the same expert-level care to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live.
We believe the first real, scalable product of the longevity industry will be one that improves healthspan for the many. That's the problem we're dedicated to solving.
But is it the medication, or reduction in oxidative stress and glycation?
Medications almost always come with some form of negative side effects for a portion of those prescribed to. I think part of it needs to come from awareness of what we're putting into our bodies in the first place. I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".
"Food is medicine," also means food is poison. Not all are created equal. This isn't to completely decry all advancements in food production, or even all processed foods... but there's definitely more that needs to be looked into.
Neither. It is the prevention of high sugar to prevent steady organ damage. For those with diabetes, there is no way to reverse it. They just have to reduce their intake. And all organs will continue to be steadily damaged over time.
Type 1 has been reversed through pancreas and islet transplants, recently in at least one individual by stem cell transplants, now he makes his own insulin.
For some type 2 individuals diagnosed early enough, blood sugar can be managed through diet and exercise, and insulin response can be normalized back to typical levels. This seems to work best when caught early, and when the person has the ability to make long lasting lifestyle changes. And the risk of relapse seems to remain much higher than in the general population.
I know a lot of people that manage their diabetes just with keto/carnivore diet and moderate activity. That said, it's not easy and doesn't address a lot of the underlying issues that bring people to overeat to begin with... Overcoming the hormones once you're there and even maintaining are really hard.
>I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".
Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.
Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.
1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
3. Unlike other technological advantages, life extension is a _multiplier_ for inequality. The Undead pay no estate tax. The Undead never change their minds. The Undead never have to give up their bought-and-paid-for seats in Congress.
Wouldn't a treatment for Alzheimer's be more accessible to the wealthy than the poor, making it unethical by your definition? Isn't it good that evil rich people often lose their cognitive capabilities thus limiting the harm they can do?
Alzheimer's treatment levels the playing field by restoring to sufferers something of which they have been bereaved: normal mental function. Even if only a subset of the population has access to it, all they're gaining is normalcy. Moreover, it can plausibly be comped by health insurance, especially in countries with universal healthcare. In a healthy economy, the political class has an incentive to keep workers healthy and productive longer, and to reward them for their service with a comfortable and dignified retirement, by making such medicines available to them.
Conversely, pure life extension creates an exceptional state of existence—no one except those using them has a chance of living a thousand years. The wealthy have a clear-cut motivation not to let these drugs become readily accessible, as it is a competitive advantage that feeds directly into their pecuniary pursuits; they no longer need to worry about:
1. Dynastic management (heirs are unreliable—be your own);
2. Estate taxes (the government wants some of your money—hiding it adequately can be tiresome);
3. Religious threats of punishment after death (if such things matter to them—probably not); or
4. "You can't take it with you," which is perhaps the main reason why billionaire philanthropists exist.
As such, we aren't going to see lobbying efforts to democratize life extension cures—ever. There are real incentives for the rich and powerful to lobby against such a possibility.
Finally, we already know that many proponents of life extension research in the VC space have neo-reactionary sympathies or aspirations; our favorite whipping boy Peter Thiel has contributed directly to the "Dark Enlightenment" movement. These are people who are not hiding their desires to become feudal lords and absolute despots, and not taking them at their word in such matters is the sort of 5D mental gymnastics that belongs on 4chan.
It is much less of a problem if the playing field is level, which is an eventual outcome with conventional quality-of-life efforts like Alzheimer's research. While it is not out of the realm of science fiction possibility that all humanity could someday be blessed with the gift of immortality—as well as fix the planet and somehow keep our population at a replacement level—the nutjobs currently militating for it are about as trustworthy as a Ferengi handshake.
Oh no, not a CGP Grey video. And a parable, at that!
It's a shame the humans in the story still die of natural causes, otherwise it might actually be relevant to the discourse around the ethics of life extension. The dragon is a metaphor for normal preventative diseases and does not scale well to the demographic crises caused by functional immortality.
> It is a very specific, high-effort kind of ... whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory.
> But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd rather the rest of mankind wait twenty years for the treatments than to never have had them at all.
The ailments peculiar to the rich (gout notwithstanding) are largely ameliorated by functional immortality, but these ameliorations are greatly diminished by universal immortality. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment and then rethink again whether you want to give these people unlimited time to cosplay as Sauron.
"It's important that you must die, so that the rich can also die" -- you. Can you really not come up with better solutions to psychopaths having too much power than everyone must die?
One intuition pump that always works well in these discussions is to imagine that death is already solved, and all your worst nightmares are true. So we live in a world where a small number of humans own and control everything forever. What is your proposed solution? Kill everyone who is old? Really? That's the best you got? Literally just force everyone to die?
We already live in a world where most people's lives are made shit by the whims of a few rich psychopaths, it's just that right now the specific set of rich psychopaths randomly changes every so often. So? Why is that better? Why does it matter to me that the boots on my neck belong to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos instead of John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt?
That sounds similar the prevailing criticism of biotech companies: their primary concern is to develop treatments for the rich or, at a very minimum, common (and often trivial) conditions in first world nations. In other words, for people who can afford to pay. The only real difference in the latter case is that wealthy nations are pulling the strings.
Not to mention everyone would be better off if the money invested in these VCs was invested in clean energy, public transportation and whatnot. Many of us just have to live with the knowledge that we are handicapping our life expectancies just by living in a heavily polluted major city. Living in São Paulo I'm reminded by national news every year how many cigarettes I am "smoking" daily just by existing in this place
Aside from being an unpopular opinion, it's also a rather stupid one. I can think of no better way to say it. Virtually every technology currently used by the majority of human beings in the world to make their lives better in some way started as a privilege of the wealthy, but the tendency of a timespan between it going from that to something widely and affordably affordable has historically not only held ground but shortened.
To deny the possibility of breakthrough medical therapies that possibly save millions of families from the tragedy of prematurely losing loved ones just out of some half baked spite against the rich is grossly short-sighted at best. If anything is unethical, it's such a worldview itself.
Immortality is not just another technological advancement. It entrenches power permanently and creates a world of slaves who will never escape the grip of their masters. Democracy would permanently die and the rule of law would be whatever the overlords decide. Imagine an immortal Caligula. Do you want Elmo to be your permanent master, for example?
Dude, let's not jump the gun here. If a fear of an entrenched immortal oligarchy is your justification for the idea of forbidding billionaires from funding medical innovations that extend life and health-span, you're being a huge bit too optimistic, to the point of absurdity.
We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.
That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.
What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.
People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.
Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.
Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.
This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument.
I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks...
It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal.
The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict.
There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?!
The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin:
> To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair
> The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress
> The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people
> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish
In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good.
...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.)
If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?
It might not be the mainstream on HN, but most popular polls I've seen show similar trends of a lesser proportion of people wanting to live longer, citing the same societal collapse concerns. In any case, whether something is espoused by the majority or the minority doesn't really add much weight.
I don't think there is an "anti-aging agenda". Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of an ideological movement. But I do think that there is an unhealthy persistent cynicism underneath the current popular culture. This cynicism makes people not want to be optimistic/idealistic in fear of being wrong or looking naive. I am not suggesting we should all tint our lenses rose colored, but I do think allowing people to expand their optimistic ceiling is warranted; especially when it is so easy to imagine a dystopic future currently.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your sardonic reply.
The distance between a scientific revolution being accessible to the ultra-wealthy and the average consumer is measured in years, and shrinking rapidly.
I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
You’re not wrong, but still most people would want to live healthily longer regardless, and it’s kind of unavoidable that the progress that can be made will be made.
Also: The Future is not really looking very bright for anyone besides the already-wealthy. I don't know why you'd want to live in the future. If you're an average middle-class American, the peak best time to live ever (stretching out into the past and predicting into the future) is probably the 1990s or so. My standard of living is slightly worse than my (Boomer) parents', and my kid's standard of living is very likely going to be worse than my own, and I would bet that her future kid's standard of living will be further worse.
Aging well requires a both biological and lifestyle interventions. One company called Nuraxi [1] is geared precisely to support that, They aim at studying the super-agers in the Sardinia "blue zone", and build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based on the insights from super-agers. Sounds like a promising way to get personalised longevity recipes.
I was under the impression that the majority of recent analysis pointed to the interpretation that most of the claimed blue zones were primarily marked as such due to poor record keeping rather than true super ager status.
> build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based
Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked proper they'd be making a killing in pharma trials and drug development
My understanding of a "digital twin" is not as something that aims at simulating human biochemistry. It's rather a model that captures specific aspects, not necessarily biological ones. There's a good amount of literature on that subject, e.g. interesting meta-studies studies as [1] and [2], and more [3].
I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right.
But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?
It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit.
And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.
Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.
1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.
2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.
3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.
> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates.
Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)
Sounds like you might know this but I'll add it for the public dialogue.
LNT is useful because you work with an abundance of caution when it comes to radiation. It's difficult to know what type of radiation someone received and where. Both of these can dramatically change the risk of exposure. It's not hard to measure in a lab, but an accident isn't a lab and you can't just go placing sensors all over every radiation worker's body (at least yet. Small sensors embedded in clothing would change this).
So what do you do? You purposefully over estimate. Because if your estimate is wrong, the human is much more likely to survive if you incorrectly assumed they received more than they actually did than if you error by assuming they got less than they actually did. Failure analysis is a critical part to any engineering or safety plan.
Why not over estimate as much when higher dosages are received? Well that's because it matters a lot less. As dosage increases all those nuances of where and what type matter less (they still matter).
It's still all highly complex and what I'll say is that if you haven't spent at least a year studying this stuff you're more under water than you think. It's great that there's a lot of educational material out there but unfortunately when it comes to complex topics like nuclear many of them do more harm than good. Pro nuclear armchair experts tend to be as uninformed as anti nuclear armchair experts. So like the LNT, it is always good to work with an abundance of caution. Especially when talking about complex subjects on the internet
I wonder how often people don't understand how radiation affects health- because nominal levels don't hit the news. but, oh boy, when a single Fukushima isotope decay is detected on the coast of California- its national news.
We're really good at detecting radiation. Like REALLY good. It's because we spent a lot of money during the Cold War trying to detect nuclear materials. This includes underground weapons testing, being able to detect underground nuclear signatures via satellites, and even very trace amounts on people's clothing because it can help detect spies. It then was found that these things could be used for tons of stuff, such as tracking not spies lol.
But seriously, we can detect levels thousands of times lower than what's dangerous. You can even get pretty good dosimiters for like $100 these days
In terms of your first point, I'm not sure I understand how the overall cancer rate being increased by dubious activities on the part of some people implies that efforts to cure cancer on the part of others are "not entirely noble". On the surface, this seems like a non-sequitur -- could you explain your reasoning further?
> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.
You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this
>a measurable contributor to cancer rates
Source: greenpiss?
Hormesis is more likely.
Radon, a perfectly natural source of radiation, cause more cancer than all the other nuclear sources combined. Stop it with the nuclear fear mongering!
It would be interesting if one of those anti-aging moonshots succeeds but the treatment to stop aging only works if you had a pre-treatment that has to occur before puberty.
Or let's say you need to harvest organs from healthier people. Pro death penalty? The sci fi book writes itself.
I'd pay a fortune for eternal youth for my kids or grandkids. Kids are the most expensive investment most people will ever make, this seems like a no brainer.
By comparison, a vaccine to prevent polio did little to help the many people who were already afflicted with it, and we never did develop a cure, but at this point the disease is nearly eradicated and there is little need for a cure. It would be cool if someone came up with a cure, but resources should logically keep being focused towards vaccinating the last of the vulnerable.
Because growing old is a privilege denied to many. Maybe focus on the kids first?
Yes the VC class is famously very good at practicing empathy towards their fellow humans.
"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot."
He is wrong though.
Child mortality rates are lower than they have ever been. They are basically zero in the developed world, and falling quickly throughout the developing world already. It's mostly a solved problem. Where it remains high, it's typically a symptom of other problems which prevent people from accessing adequate food and medicine. These circumstances almost always have their unique nuances that prevent them from being simply addressed by a single large effort, instead demanding a unique response informed by experience with the local conditions.
Adding a single healthy year of life to every American who lives to be over 70 would add about twice as many healthy person-years than reducing the US infant mortality rate to zero. Reducing the world infant mortality rate to zero would be equivalent to adding roughly two healthy years to the lifespans of those who make it over 70.
The headline is confusing. This is not about a company that's becoming older. It's about a building a biotech company that treats the symptoms and causes of aging.
Wouldn't this be an anti-aging company? Aging is bad and not aging is good.
Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve.
As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea.
For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.
Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to fiat wealth, engaged in vain wank.
Aging exists because the human body is optimized to survive and reproduce in a resource constrained environment with many threats. Our predecessors eked out just enough calories to survive to the age of 15, when we could begin reproducing. Any traits that made it more likely for us to survive until that point, even if those traits resulted in damage that would eventually accumulate and wear us down after our reproductive window, was selected for. We are all basically running the biological equivalent of overclocked CPUs without investing in proper cooling.
We no longer exist in a resource constrained environment and have access to massive amounts of energy from the sun which makes entropy a negligible concern. There is no good reason to not at least try to prevent or reverse senescence.
I don't think "live to 15, have kids, and die" makes sense as a model for humans, even if you're modeling them solely as child generating machines.
Humans are a pretty damn care-dependent species. They're not going to defend or feed themselves without years of support, so if they aren't surviving en masse into their 30s and 40s, the next generation is probably going to have a severe die-out.
Beyond that there's probably ongoing marginal benefits to species fitness with longer lifespans. If you can keep a few generations in circulation at once, you probably have greater resilience to things like disease outbreaks (the 50-year-old cohort might have some past related immunity to a disease that rampages the 20-year-olds).
This also completely ignores any value of intelligence and ability to pass down knowledge, which is definitely a fitness factor just for being able to prevent future generations from poisoning themselves as easily.
Having kids takes a long time, especially when many of them die of infection or malnutrition. So yes, you're absolutely right that evolution "cares" about human beings up until they hit ~40. At that point, human beings enter the selection shadow, when improvements to survivability have a negligible impact on selection. I was eliding this point for clarity but I don't think it really alters my broader argument.
This is all pretty obvious when you look at one of the main diseases of aging, cardiovascular disease. There are natural genetic variations that result in very low free LDL blood levels, which basically prevents artherosclerosis from every developing and which inspired the development of the PCSK-9 inhibitors. However, there's no evolutionary benefit to not dying of cardiac arrest when you're 60, but there are marginal benefits to the liver binding to fewer LDL particles when people are in a starvation environment, so these variations never became widespread.
The grandparent hypothesis is certainly compelling and might explain some marginal improvements in human lifespan relative to e.g. chimps (who live about 10-20 years less than us even in captivity). But if anything, that reinforces my broader point, which is that aging did not develop as some kind of culling agent by evolution and that we should be looking for ways to extend human longevity now that we have the resources to.
Death is a natural sweeper that allows progress, evolution, rapid change and adjustment to new situations. The opposite brings, well, the opposite.
The life well lived is a life thats easy to let go, regardless of your beliefs. The more people messed up the more they desperately cling to it (I know its vastly more complex, but this is the core of what I see around).
I am not claiming we shouldn't be trying to make lives better, or longer. But immortality will be humanity's doom - there is endless row of puttin' and trumps and hitlers and stalins and maos in every single generation, and the only real working solution is inevitable death, none of them went or will let go power on their own from the bottom of their good hearts. That is unavoidable since it comes from base character of humans, whether we like it or not.
I'd say we should shoot on sight all researchers and VCs pouring time and money into directly immortality, that's much safer bet than some immortality bringing long term prosperity for mankind.
I think those 70–80 year old politicians would be much less short-sighted if they expected to be around to reap what they're sowing.
That's a nice theory but I don't want to bet future of mankind on some feel-good logic. In my view, a-holes remain a-holes, self-centered narcissists double so.
Feel like trump for example got wiser and saner and more rational the second term? Because literally whole world believes otherwise. He has his whole clan to think of due to consequences of his actions, if he cared. puttin' is same, just sour keg of bad beer that should be poured down the river (or some better ecological disposal of garbage).
Why do you think 70-80 year old "middle aged" politicians would get a chance when 150 year old "boomers" with wealth and powerful networks might be able to call the the shots?
What interest I have in anti-aging is less about living forever than alleviating suffering on the way out. Living to 80, 90 or 100 seems like plenty of time on earth but making that last half of our lives less achey, infirmed and delirious is a noble goal.
> Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve.
We're not undoing death, dying healthy would be better than aging the way we do right now.
Increasing healthspans as a society would be great in a more family integrated society rather than an individualistic one.
I'd love my retirement years to be spent helping my kids and grand-kids instead of the other way around.
A senior community that can stay involved actively has been part of the "it takes a village" until very recent times.
I rather think that terms like "nature" or "evolve" are better at describing what has happened rather than some guidelines to adhere to.
One could say air conditioning is similarly "unnatural" but it will be saving lives this summer.
By that logic, why not just execute everyone over 35? They're just slowing down human progress.
Aging doesn't exist because it benefits us, we did not choose 70-80 to be the ideal lifespan, and my back doesn't continuously ache to give new ideas a chance to spring forth.
That is a much more philosophical point than I was trying to make, but it definitely raises some interesting questions.
> For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.
Sure but that's because the US voting demographic is old. It's the tyranny of the majority [1]; as the largest generation the baby boomers can vote and do vote for things that advance their interest. I'm not sure this phenomenon works if people live out to 150 years as the generational bubbles would be relatively smaller.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
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Anti-aging would be an attempt at reversing it, rather than still going "yep, this happens" but making it a nicer ride before you're forced to get off.
Strange because in a way we've already had these for a long time for the visual signs of aging, moisturizers , wrinkle creams etc.
And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
It’s also not about the Next Generation of AGI. ;)
I wonder how much the prohibition of stem cell research set back anti-aging.
I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.
Creating stem cells from blood samples is a well-established industry practice now. I don’t think limiting embryonic stem cells research is significantly hindering stem cells research, is it?
To my knowledge stem cell research is clicking along just fine, and I can guarantee you that certain other countries (looking at you here China) don't give Shit One about the ethical/religious hangups around it in the West.
From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.
"A successful aging treatment would be something that:
prevents diseases of aging, ideally more than one;
preserves a healthy function that normally declines with age (like fertility, immune function, cognitive function, resilience, or physical fitness); or
reverses the course of at least one age-related disease."
I think a lot of the anti-aging companies out there would say that the real answer is a combination of the second and third - reversing the course of age-related decline.
Also, I think it's sort of contradictory to have two of these points focus on diseases of aging but in a subsequent section say that oncology isn't anti-aging. Cancer is in many ways a disease of aging (it's very clear from the numbers that increasing in age causes increases in likelihood of developing cancer, generally more than any other single factor). Curing cancer obviously isn't going to get you a general-purpose anti-aging treatment, but that's why it seems odd to say that reversing the course of an age-related disease is a successful aging treatment.
From an anti aging perspective, cancer is the most visible symptom of DNA gradually becoming more and more damaged.
The anti aging solution that happens to solve cancer as a side effect is then to figure out how to repair DNA damage, and/or replace cells with damaged DNA with cells with intact DNA.
Pedantic semantics gripe: DNA damage refers to actual damage to the DNA molecule (breakage of the sugar-phosphage backbone, loss of nucleosides, etc). DNA accumulates MUTATIONS over time, which lead to the loss of genetic fidelity.
Many cancers have unregulated DNA repair pathways, which is one of the mechanisms by which they can sustain proliferation without succumbing to apoptosis. Common chemotherapeutic targets are actually DNA repair factors that can both help kill the cells and sensitize them to radiation. It's well known in the DNA repair field that cells maintain rather delicate balance between carcinogenics and death by regulating repair. The vast majority of research into DNA repair is aimed at solving problems treating cancer, with some peripheral voices (albeit ones that garner more publicity) working on anti-aging applications. I personally wouldn't sign up for any of these start-up nonsense treatments; traditional scientific orthodoxy may be overly reductionist, move slowly, and lack imagination but good god does it beat all of these people that treat grand problems in biology like some sort of app you just need to take the right angle on to figure out.
Perhaps it was unwise to use the term dna damage yes. I used it to mean any deviation from the initial dna of the fertilized egg, including breakage, point mutations, missing chromosomes, viral insertions and probably more I can't think of right now.
Edit: I suppose those are all called mutations. Somehow I thought mutation meant a small local change only.
We all get cancer everyday, normally our immune system destroys it.
Wouldn't it only be cancer if your immune system doesn't destroy it? If your immune system can handle it, that's just normal.
The DNA damage that the parent was talking about would lead to cancerous cells which your immune system cannot handle, which is different from the ones that your immune system can handle
Wouldn't this be an anti aging company?
As a co-founder of Ginkgo Health[1], this is a refreshing discussion to see.
The "Is this aging?" article perfectly articulates the philosophy that drove us to start the company. We saw a huge disconnect between the longevity industry's focus on hype and moonshots, and what the science actually shows is effective for improving healthspan. The article's point about focusing on frailty and sarcopenia is spot-on ; functional health is one of the most powerful and evidence-based levers we have to improve quality of life as we age.
That's precisely why we built Ginkgo Active. We wanted to create a genuine "geroprotector" that was accessible to everyone, not just a theoretical treatment for the wealthy.
When we responded[2] to the recent CMS RFI[3] on the Health Technology Ecosystem, we outlined this exact approach. Our goal is to provide a practical solution to functional decline and chronic disease, which are massive burdens on the healthcare system.
Here’s how our thinking aligns with the article's main points:
Focus on Function, Not Just Biomarkers: Instead of chasing clocks, we focus on delivering personalized exercise prescriptions designed to improve strength, balance, and cardiovascular health. Our AI platform uses over 170,000 rules from authoritative sources like the American College of Sports Medicine to create these plans. Prevention and Healthspan: Our platform is built to help people before they get sick, preventing or delaying the onset of 18 different chronic condition risk factors. This is about adding healthy years to life, which is the core of a real aging intervention. Accessibility and Equity: We believe this kind of preventative care should be a right, not a privilege. We intentionally designed our platform so that it doesn't require expensive wearables or equipment. Our goal is to provide the same expert-level care to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live.
We believe the first real, scalable product of the longevity industry will be one that improves healthspan for the many. That's the problem we're dedicated to solving.
[1] https://ginkgo.health
[2] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CMS-2025-0050-0264
[3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/16/2025-08...
Diabetic medication can be a significant factor for increased healthy longevity.
But is it the medication, or reduction in oxidative stress and glycation?
Medications almost always come with some form of negative side effects for a portion of those prescribed to. I think part of it needs to come from awareness of what we're putting into our bodies in the first place. I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".
"Food is medicine," also means food is poison. Not all are created equal. This isn't to completely decry all advancements in food production, or even all processed foods... but there's definitely more that needs to be looked into.
Neither. It is the prevention of high sugar to prevent steady organ damage. For those with diabetes, there is no way to reverse it. They just have to reduce their intake. And all organs will continue to be steadily damaged over time.
Interesting recent news about diabetes!
Type 1 has been reversed through pancreas and islet transplants, recently in at least one individual by stem cell transplants, now he makes his own insulin.
For some type 2 individuals diagnosed early enough, blood sugar can be managed through diet and exercise, and insulin response can be normalized back to typical levels. This seems to work best when caught early, and when the person has the ability to make long lasting lifestyle changes. And the risk of relapse seems to remain much higher than in the general population.
I know a lot of people that manage their diabetes just with keto/carnivore diet and moderate activity. That said, it's not easy and doesn't address a lot of the underlying issues that bring people to overeat to begin with... Overcoming the hormones once you're there and even maintaining are really hard.
>I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".
we're not going to natural food our way to 150.
Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.
Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.
Hang on there a moment—you missed a few things:
1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
3. Unlike other technological advantages, life extension is a _multiplier_ for inequality. The Undead pay no estate tax. The Undead never change their minds. The Undead never have to give up their bought-and-paid-for seats in Congress.
Death is the ultimate Chesterton's Fence.
I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's.
Wouldn't a treatment for Alzheimer's be more accessible to the wealthy than the poor, making it unethical by your definition? Isn't it good that evil rich people often lose their cognitive capabilities thus limiting the harm they can do?
Alzheimer's treatment levels the playing field by restoring to sufferers something of which they have been bereaved: normal mental function. Even if only a subset of the population has access to it, all they're gaining is normalcy. Moreover, it can plausibly be comped by health insurance, especially in countries with universal healthcare. In a healthy economy, the political class has an incentive to keep workers healthy and productive longer, and to reward them for their service with a comfortable and dignified retirement, by making such medicines available to them.
Conversely, pure life extension creates an exceptional state of existence—no one except those using them has a chance of living a thousand years. The wealthy have a clear-cut motivation not to let these drugs become readily accessible, as it is a competitive advantage that feeds directly into their pecuniary pursuits; they no longer need to worry about:
1. Dynastic management (heirs are unreliable—be your own);
2. Estate taxes (the government wants some of your money—hiding it adequately can be tiresome);
3. Religious threats of punishment after death (if such things matter to them—probably not); or
4. "You can't take it with you," which is perhaps the main reason why billionaire philanthropists exist.
As such, we aren't going to see lobbying efforts to democratize life extension cures—ever. There are real incentives for the rich and powerful to lobby against such a possibility.
Finally, we already know that many proponents of life extension research in the VC space have neo-reactionary sympathies or aspirations; our favorite whipping boy Peter Thiel has contributed directly to the "Dark Enlightenment" movement. These are people who are not hiding their desires to become feudal lords and absolute despots, and not taking them at their word in such matters is the sort of 5D mental gymnastics that belongs on 4chan.
It is much less of a problem if the playing field is level, which is an eventual outcome with conventional quality-of-life efforts like Alzheimer's research. While it is not out of the realm of science fiction possibility that all humanity could someday be blessed with the gift of immortality—as well as fix the planet and somehow keep our population at a replacement level—the nutjobs currently militating for it are about as trustworthy as a Ferengi handshake.
https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY
Oh no, not a CGP Grey video. And a parable, at that!
It's a shame the humans in the story still die of natural causes, otherwise it might actually be relevant to the discourse around the ethics of life extension. The dragon is a metaphor for normal preventative diseases and does not scale well to the demographic crises caused by functional immortality.
The story was specifically written to provoke discussion around the ending of human senescence: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
> It is a very specific, high-effort kind of ... whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory.
> But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd rather the rest of mankind wait twenty years for the treatments than to never have had them at all.
The ailments peculiar to the rich (gout notwithstanding) are largely ameliorated by functional immortality, but these ameliorations are greatly diminished by universal immortality. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment and then rethink again whether you want to give these people unlimited time to cosplay as Sauron.
I want to give everyone unlimited time. The elimination of involuntary death should be one of mankind's top five priorities.
Anyway, go away deathist. Shoo, troll.
"It's important that you must die, so that the rich can also die" -- you. Can you really not come up with better solutions to psychopaths having too much power than everyone must die?
One intuition pump that always works well in these discussions is to imagine that death is already solved, and all your worst nightmares are true. So we live in a world where a small number of humans own and control everything forever. What is your proposed solution? Kill everyone who is old? Really? That's the best you got? Literally just force everyone to die?
We already live in a world where most people's lives are made shit by the whims of a few rich psychopaths, it's just that right now the specific set of rich psychopaths randomly changes every so often. So? Why is that better? Why does it matter to me that the boots on my neck belong to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos instead of John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt?
That sounds similar the prevailing criticism of biotech companies: their primary concern is to develop treatments for the rich or, at a very minimum, common (and often trivial) conditions in first world nations. In other words, for people who can afford to pay. The only real difference in the latter case is that wealthy nations are pulling the strings.
Yes, which is why we need to protect publicly-funded biomedical research—grant review tends to be more sober and less selfish than investment capital.
Not to mention everyone would be better off if the money invested in these VCs was invested in clean energy, public transportation and whatnot. Many of us just have to live with the knowledge that we are handicapping our life expectancies just by living in a heavily polluted major city. Living in São Paulo I'm reminded by national news every year how many cigarettes I am "smoking" daily just by existing in this place
Aside from being an unpopular opinion, it's also a rather stupid one. I can think of no better way to say it. Virtually every technology currently used by the majority of human beings in the world to make their lives better in some way started as a privilege of the wealthy, but the tendency of a timespan between it going from that to something widely and affordably affordable has historically not only held ground but shortened.
To deny the possibility of breakthrough medical therapies that possibly save millions of families from the tragedy of prematurely losing loved ones just out of some half baked spite against the rich is grossly short-sighted at best. If anything is unethical, it's such a worldview itself.
Immortality is not just another technological advancement. It entrenches power permanently and creates a world of slaves who will never escape the grip of their masters. Democracy would permanently die and the rule of law would be whatever the overlords decide. Imagine an immortal Caligula. Do you want Elmo to be your permanent master, for example?
Dude, let's not jump the gun here. If a fear of an entrenched immortal oligarchy is your justification for the idea of forbidding billionaires from funding medical innovations that extend life and health-span, you're being a huge bit too optimistic, to the point of absurdity.
We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.
That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.
What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.
People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.
Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.
Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.
pfff, apologies for the syntax errors. They never fail to embarrass me.
This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument.
I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
> I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
This broadly applies to a majority of new technologies or advancements as well. It's not unique to medical advances.
It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks...
It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal.
The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict.
There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?!
The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin:
> To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair
> The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress
> The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people
> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish
In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good.
...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.)
If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?
It might not be the mainstream on HN, but most popular polls I've seen show similar trends of a lesser proportion of people wanting to live longer, citing the same societal collapse concerns. In any case, whether something is espoused by the majority or the minority doesn't really add much weight.
I don't think there is an "anti-aging agenda". Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of an ideological movement. But I do think that there is an unhealthy persistent cynicism underneath the current popular culture. This cynicism makes people not want to be optimistic/idealistic in fear of being wrong or looking naive. I am not suggesting we should all tint our lenses rose colored, but I do think allowing people to expand their optimistic ceiling is warranted; especially when it is so easy to imagine a dystopic future currently.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your sardonic reply.
The distance between a scientific revolution being accessible to the ultra-wealthy and the average consumer is measured in years, and shrinking rapidly.
I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
What school of ethics holds that you should oppose medicine to treat yourself so that other people are also denied the benefit?
You’re not wrong, but still most people would want to live healthily longer regardless, and it’s kind of unavoidable that the progress that can be made will be made.
Also: The Future is not really looking very bright for anyone besides the already-wealthy. I don't know why you'd want to live in the future. If you're an average middle-class American, the peak best time to live ever (stretching out into the past and predicting into the future) is probably the 1990s or so. My standard of living is slightly worse than my (Boomer) parents', and my kid's standard of living is very likely going to be worse than my own, and I would bet that her future kid's standard of living will be further worse.
Aging well requires a both biological and lifestyle interventions. One company called Nuraxi [1] is geared precisely to support that, They aim at studying the super-agers in the Sardinia "blue zone", and build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based on the insights from super-agers. Sounds like a promising way to get personalised longevity recipes.
[1] https://www.nuraxi.ai
I was under the impression that the majority of recent analysis pointed to the interpretation that most of the claimed blue zones were primarily marked as such due to poor record keeping rather than true super ager status.
Is Sardinia an exception to this?
> build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based
Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked proper they'd be making a killing in pharma trials and drug development
My understanding of a "digital twin" is not as something that aims at simulating human biochemistry. It's rather a model that captures specific aspects, not necessarily biological ones. There's a good amount of literature on that subject, e.g. interesting meta-studies studies as [1] and [2], and more [3].
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10379674
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01073-0
[3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=digital+twin+health&hl=...