Factor X have we finally found the fountain of Youth?

[Betruger]

Natural selection has no part in this.

I think it's still pertinent to consider that in the first place nature did select our brains, precursors to "artificial" selection.

[GIThruster]

Who said anything about letting/causing them to die? Merely stated that maladaptive behaviors/innate tendencies will be selected against; there is nothing I nor anyone else can do to alter that long term.

Yes but you need to keep in mind that all natural selection operates by killing that portion that is not selected for survival. It always and only speaks of letting/causing something to die. By definition, selection means what survives long enough to replace itself, and conversely, what does not survive that long. So when you express that any/all disability is something that ought to be selected against, you are suggesting those who are disabled, should not receive the helping hand society provides them. In the strongest of senses, civilization, is acting completely opposed to natural selection, as strongly as if it had no other purpose. It is when we loose sight of this, that we end up with progressivism's Eugenics and ethnic cleansings, Hitler's Nazis (50 million killed) and Stalin's Socialists (70 million killed) and Mao's Communists (120 million killed.) When societies fail to fight against natural selection, they become the thing most dread in all the world.

[krenshala]

Yes but you need to keep in mind that all natural selection operates by killing that portion that is not selected for survival. It always and only speaks of letting/causing something to die.

I have to disagree with this. Natural selection operates on the principle of that portion that succeeds better that its competition does. It can (and, I admit, usually does) include death of the 'less fit', but can also be nothing more than one group expanding/prospering while another merely maintains its current status because it isn't the most fit for then current situation.

[Betruger]

This discussion IMHO should be more pertinent to the bigger picture if it accounts for scarcity.

The reason some cranky douchebag like Hitler (hello Godwin) makes his mark in history is thanks to popular support, itself due to scarcity. And arguably, not just any scarcity, but scarcity at the bottom Maslow levels. The trend people love to point to - Christianity's relative diplomacy compared to Islam's - is arguably that same thing: a higher (theologically manufactured) neurological sating of those primal self-preservation mechanisms allowing higher "maslow" activity, free of the overhead of those more basic needs' inescapable (for most) nagging. Nagging which the worse interpretations of Islam short-circuit into murderous "justice", conveniently dressed up in the same neurological exploit as all religions - that "sense of God".

Without significant scarcity, diseases like Islam, and arguably Christianity*, wouldn't have a leg to stand on. * In Christianity's case, it seems almost a distinction without a difference, because we're past those days of (e.g.) Spanish Inquisition. Christianity is already relegated to token, figurehead status: saying that Christianity is a good, invaluable crutch to get people to "do the right thing", is specious. The right thing is what matters. Not obsessing over which Cargo Cult Do-the-right-thing is the True Way.

Do you care why someone (for argument's sake, with the gift of omniscience) has/will be perfectly fair and good to you, purposedly - not by accident - from now till eternity? Only in some twisted 1984 like reality would you care what thoughts motivated that person's action. Or in the mind of some theologically motivated thug as exists today.

edit for engrish

[williatw]

Natural selection operates on the principle of that portion that succeeds better that its competition does. It can (and, I admit, usually does) include death of the 'less fit', but can also be nothing more than one group expanding/prospering while another merely maintains its current status because it isn't the most fit for then current situation.

Exactly. Any "enhancements" we do in the future to ourselves or our progeny will be subject to a selection based on how well they function in the real world. I am choosing to call that a species of "natural selection" because ultimately nature (reality) will decide which induced changes work & which changes don't. I am simply substituting willful alterations for random mutations; the rest of natural selection still seems to apply for the most part. Alterations that caused the people who have them to do well will propagate at the expense of those which don't. It doesn't require or even need "genocide"; if people choose some alterations over others it is because they are perceived to be beneficial to the ones who have them, it is not required or needed for anyone to "kill" or let die anyone. To give a simple example, if you could select for 20:20 vision or better either for yourself (3-D bio-printed enhanced eyes/optical nerves) replacing you cataract ravaged eyes you would. Likewise for your progeny if they/you were born with severe astigmatism you would opt for medical enhancements if available for yourself and your progeny.

[Betruger]

Natural selection operates on the principle of that portion that succeeds better that its competition does. It can (and, I admit, usually does) include death of the 'less fit', but can also be nothing more than one group expanding/prospering while another merely maintains its current status because it isn't the most fit for then current situation.

Exactly. Any "enhancements" we do in the future to ourselves or our progeny will be subject to a selection based on how well they function in the real world. I am choosing to call that a species of "natural selection" because ultimately nature (reality) will decide which induced changes work & which changes don't. I am simply substituting willful alterations for random mutations; the rest of natural selection still seems to apply for the most part. Alterations that caused the people who have them to do well will propagate at the expense of those which don't. It doesn't require or even need "genocide"; if people choose some alterations over others it is because they are perceived to be beneficial to the ones who have them, it is not required or needed for anyone to "kill" or let die anyone. To give a simple example, if you could select for 20:20 vision or better either for yourself (3-D bio-printed enhanced eyes/optical nerves) replacing you cataract ravaged eyes you would. Likewise for your progeny if they/you were born with severe astigmatism you would opt for medical enhancements if available for yourself and your progeny.

Assuming comparable rates of reproduction. And assuming that population size is a selective advantage. E.G. (vulgar exaggeration for demonstration's sake) a smaller but fitter population that significantly outlives and out-influences a larger but genetically less fit population.

And considering what seems like good evidence for this period of minimal artificial evolution being only transitional towards basically unlimited genetic manipulation, for better or worse, the long term picture is more like the above argument, than like the current pre-post-scarcity and pre-post-aging status quo.

[williatw]

Patient, Heal Thyself

Treatments from our own cells could cure many diseases—if Washington will only allow it to happen.



Emily Whitehead, a child given cell therapy for acute leukemia; her family says that she shows no sign of the cancer today.

Personalized medicine” has become a familiar term that refers to the process of fitting drugs to patient molecular profiles that make it likely that the drugs will perform effectively and safely. Now emerging is literally personal medicine: treatments derived entirely from a patient’s own cells, or almost so, and largely controlled by the nimble and powerful biochemical know-how already embedded in those cells.

Unlike conventional drugs, these cell therapies are created from scratch, one patient at a time, and many of the tools used to create them are simple, compact, and cheap enough to land in laboratories that serve hospitals, small clinics, and doctors in private practice. They have been landing there in growing numbers in the last decade, and Washington has been trying to keep pace. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has taken the position—upheld in February 2014 by a federal appellate court—that a patient’s cells become a “drug” when extracted and manipulated in a laboratory, and may not be used to treat the patient without FDA approval. But it is far from clear how the agency should set about approving a custom-made drug that will be prescribed to only one patient, in whom its safety and efficacy will be largely determined by how the patient’s molecular biology interacts with itself.

The widespread interest in human-cell therapies—together with the still-blurry lines between the broad statutory definition of “drugs,” which require FDA approval, and the “practice of medicine,” which does not—has set the stage for an extended and fractious struggle for control, pitting many doctors and patients against Washington. At stake are extremely versatile treatment methodologies that can regenerate damaged tissues and organs and have the potential to cure many currently incurable diseases.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_c ... apies.html

[Diogenes]

Christianity is already relegated to token, figurehead status: saying that Christianity is a good, invaluable crutch to get people to "do the right thing", is specious. The right thing is what matters. Not obsessing over which Cargo Cult Do-the-right-thing is the True Way.

The Nazis thought they were doing the right thing too. This is why your foundational assumptions matter. If you believe in Eugenics, the "right thing" is wiping out those you consider inferior.


The Muslims also know what is the "right thing" to do. Serial Killers know what is the "right thing" to do as well. Everybody knows what is the "right thing" to do, and some of those "right things" will most certainly be regarded as the "wrong thing" by others.


After a bit of everyone doing their own version of the "right thing" I expect those on the losing end of the "right thing" will suddenly start waxing nostalgic for some benign system of getting everyone to agree as to what is the "right thing", so long as it includes some version of letting them live.


Yeah, we don't need that superstitious stuff. *SCIENCE* has all the answers. Just ask Dr. Mengele.

[JoeP]

Succinctly stated. Can morality exist without a foundation? And just who gets to define the baseline? These are complex issues.

[williatw]

Succinctly stated. Can morality exist without a foundation? And just who gets to define the baseline? These are complex issues.

Agreed. One of our areas of mutual agreement "Dio"; whether you choose to believe in the underlying "supernatural" basis for the Judeo-Christian religion or not, it is the underpinnings of much of our ideas of right/wrong. Remove the governors at your peril.

[williatw]

Silicon Valley Is Trying to Make Humans Immortal—and Finding Some Success

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, plans to live to be 120. Compared with some other tech billionaires, he doesn’t seem particularly ambitious. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000; Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible,” and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to someday “cure death.”

These titans of tech aren’t being ridiculous, or even vainglorious; their quests are based on real, emerging science that could fundamentally change what we know about life and about death. It’s hard to believe, though, since the human quest for immortality is both ancient and littered with catastrophic failures. Around 200 B.C., the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, accidentally killed himself trying to live forever; he poisoned himself by eating supposedly mortality-preventing mercury pills.

Centuries later, the search for eternal life wasn’t much safer: In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII died after blood transfusions from three healthy boys whose youth he believed he could absorb. A little closer to modern times, in 1868 America, Kentucky politician Leonard Jones ran for the U.S. presidency on the platform that he’d achieved immortality through prayer and fasting—and could give his secrets for cheating death to the public. Later that year, Jones died of pneumonia.

But historical precedent hasn’t dissuaded some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Thiel, for example, has given $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation. Aubrey de Grey, Methuselah's co-founder, says the nonprofit’s main research initiative, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), is devoted to finding drugs that cure seven types of age-related damage: “Loss of cells, excessive cell division, inadequate cell death, garbage inside the cell, garbage outside the cell, mutations in the mitochondria, and crosslinking of the extracellular matrix.… The idea is that the human body, being a machine, has a structure that determines all aspects of its function, including its chance of falling apart any time soon, so if we can restore that structure—at the molecular and cellular level—then we will restore function too, so we will have comprehensively rejuvenated the body.”

But SENS, which has an annual operating budget of $5 million, is puny compared with the Brin-led Project Calico, Google’s attempt to “cure death,” which is planning to pump billions into a partnership with pharmaceutical giant AbbVie. Google is notoriously secretive, but it’s rumored to be building a drug to mimic foxo3, a gene associated with exceptional life span.

Then there’s the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, the granddaddy of modern antiaging initiatives, started by venture capitalist Paul F. Glenn in 1965. Since 2007, the foundation has distributed annual “Glenn Awards,” $60,000 grants to independent researchers doing promising work on aging. The Glenn Foundation also works to kick-start antiaging initiatives within large institutions (“It began at Harvard, and then we sought out MIT and then the Salk Institute and then the Mayo Clinic,” Mark R. Collins, spokesman for the Glenn Foundation, explains), and it puts more than $1 million per year toward grants by the American Federation for Aging Research, a charitable foundation dedicated to age-related disease.

The Glenn Foundation also works closely with the Ellison Medical Foundation, a far younger institution (founded in 1997). Ellison’s passion project gives out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants each year to scholars pursuing research on, and remedies for, aging. Their decision to fund independent research—as opposed to creating grandiose, in-house programs—may be paying off. Relatively modest research projects funded by Ellison and Glenn appear to be developing into a verifiable means to stave off old age—for lab mice. The tantalizing question: Can those lab results be replicated in humans?


Aging in Reverse

In 1956, gerontologist Clive M. McCay performed a somewhat ghoulish experiment on the rural upstate New York campus of Cornell University: He sewed the flanks of live mice together in order to link their bloodstreams. In the pairings McCay stitched together, one mouse was spritely, healthy and young; the other was old and in relatively bad shape. With their bloodstreams linked, the old mouse seemed to age in reverse, getting healthier and younger as the experiment continued. The young mouse, meanwhile, aged prematurely.

At the time, relatively little was understood about the makeup of blood. McCay's experiments were fascinating but a bit of a dead end, so he shifted his focus to calorie restriction, where his experiments eventually made him famous, while his ingenuous blood work was largely left to languish.

Fast-forward 48 years to 2004. Amy Wagers, at Harvard University’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, repeated McCay's flank-stitching experiments to see if she could reproduce his results. And it worked. So Wagers—in part funded by Glenn and Ellison—decided to try to isolate individual proteins in the mouse blood to see what was causing the ghoulish effect.

She found that a protein called GDF11, common in the blood of young mice but sparse in the systems of the older rodents, caused much of the old mice’s "reverse aging." In the bloodstream, GDF11 is responsible for keeping stem cells active; when GDF11 levels drop, as they do with age, stem cells (which are responsible for tissue renewal) falter, injuries heal more slowly and aging begins to take hold. But even in very elderly bodies with very little GDF11 inside them, those stem cells never go away—they merely become dormant as GDF11 levels drop. Injecting young blood, with its high levels of GDF11, into old mice seemed to restart those dormant stem cells, causing the old mice to "age in reverse" as they produced the healthy, vital tissues associated with youth. The work is “incredibly promising,” says Collins.

Meanwhile, at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of the Ellison Medical Foundation’s Senior Scholars in Aging had also been experimenting with ways to keep mice from growing old. Dr. Ronald DePinho was interested in telomeres, structures that cap the tips of chromosomes like aglets do the end of shoelaces. In young bodies, an enzyme called telomerase keeps telomeres healthy and stable; in older bodies, levels of telomerase drop, telomeres shorten, and the chromosomes begin to fray. It seemed likely these fraying chromosomes were responsible for some of the physical effects of aging, and DePinho wanted to find out how.

His team genetically engineered mice whose telomerase output could be toggled and found that in the “off” state, where there was no telomerase at all, the mice aged prematurely. "We took them to the point where they were the equivalent of 90-year-old humans,” he says, “with shrunken brains, impaired cognition, infertility, thin bones, hair loss, etc."

Then DePinho and his colleagues toggled the telomerase back on—and what he saw was incredible. "The organs started to restore themselves,” he says. “The brain increased in size, cognition was improved, fertility was restored, hair returned to a healthy sheen, and all of the other problems that we saw in the animal were alleviated." Giving telomerase to a telomerase-deprived animal didn't just halt the aging process—like GDF11, it seemed to make the animals younger.

Might either or both of these discoveries be used to create a Ponce de Leon–style fountain of youth? "We've not done any life span studies on these animals, so we don't know whether this would have an effect on their life span. But we think that it would affect one's health span—meaning the number of years that you live without a significant illness," says Wagers. Preliminary studies look promising. Wagers says a colleague has been looking into a protein she describes as the fly version of GDF11. “When he gives more of it to flies, they live longer. And if he takes it away, their life span is shortened."

There’s one (huge) caveat here. Telomerase is linked to both the prevention and progression of cancer. Aging cells that lack telomerase are more likely to become cancerous; when older cells replicate, their "fraying" chromosomes, unprotected by telomeres, often give birth to cancer-causing mutations. And once cells become cancerous, their telomerase levels rise, letting the mutant cells spread and multiply uncontrollably. Doctors treating cancer often work to deprive those spreading cells of telomerase—and many are worried that flooding the body with telomerase might help cancer along. In other words, this path toward making us live longer could kill us.


DePinho and others think telomerase therapy will likely reduce the incidence of cancer—by making chromosomes less likely to fray. And though scientists like University of California, Berkeley's Irina M. Conboy have raised concerns that GDF11, by promoting cell regrowth, might also increase cancer incidents, Wagers's cautious optimism mirrors DePinho's: She says there is no evidence GDF11 causes higher incidence of deadly diseases. Still, she says, more experiments must be done. Neither she nor DePinho think their substances of choice will reach human clinical trials for several years yet.

But with discoveries like Wagers's and DePinho's prompting an eruption of scientific excitement, the idea that we could live longer—not a few years more but maybe a century or even several hundred years longer—suddenly becomes one of the more stirring and controversial topics of the coming century. "What this means for longevity must be defined carefully, of course, because with such dramatic developments there will be a very big difference between how long people have lived so far and how long people expect to live," says de Grey. If we start living for an average of 400 years instead of an average of 80, we may have to rewrite a lot of the stories we tell ourselves about how life—and death—work.

According to Wagers, if aging can be reversed, instead of the slow, steady decline into senescence we are used to, we might just live and live and keep on living, as healthy and apparently young-seeming humans, right until some organ or other fails catastrophically. This in stark contrast to the dystopian future imagined by, for example, Gregg Easterbrook last year in the article “What Happens When We All Live to 100?” in The Atlantic. Easterbrook and others posit a future in which life spans keep extending but "health spans" don't, and the sickly elderly live for decades and suck all of the money out of the economy. In Wagers’s version, on the other hand, everybody stays healthy right until they die—so maybe there doesn't need to be a retirement age, and the economy grows and grows. Though perhaps that's a recipe for another kind of dystopia: one where we work and work and work and never stop working for 384 years, until the day we die

Print Your New Liver

But maybe, in the future, we won’t need to worry about organ failure. For all those times when there isn't an organ to spare, there'll soon be cloned copies, either grown in the lab or 3-D printed: We've already 3-D printed livers and kidneys, turned skin cells into stem cells and stem cells into organs, and we're redefining the definition of fatality, thanks to a procedure called cold saline resuscitation. Replacing a dying body's blood with a rush of cold saline can drop the body's temperature and put a dying patient into a state of suspended animation. And once a patient is in that state, doctors can fix a whole lot of things that might otherwise be fatal: gunshot and knife wounds, hemorrhages and organ failure—especially if there's a handy supply of spare, cloned organs available in the emergency room.

To our current tastes, there's something a little ghastly about this paradigm: living forever, or at least a long time, in an eternal, static youth, with trips to the emergency room more frequent as we get older, to periodically replace failing organs. According to a 2012 Pfizer study, when it comes to aging, our greatest fears are of “being dependent” or “living in pain.” That might be replaced in our cultural imagination by fear of eternal youth leading to sudden, stunning death—what if your heart, 200 years old, suddenly gives out when you're nowhere near a hospital? The body horror of the future may be very different from today’s, but it's body horror all the same.

Perhaps the fix is to replace bodies—these unreliable vessels, plagued with problems!—altogether. That's the goal of the most ambitious billionaire-backed immortality investment of them all, Itskov’s 2045 Initiative. Founded in early 2011, the initiative has already collected an impressive set of experts in specialties ranging from robotics and neural interfaces to artificial organ creation. Their goal: replace our current meaty cases with robotic or holographic avatars by (you guessed it) 2045.

In some ways, the 2045 Initiative’s goal isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. Tele-operated robotic avatars exist, though so far they're more novelty than lifestyle choice. Itskov thinks that as tele-operated avatars become more fine-tuned, “the jobs with an increased risk to human life and health, such as that of a fireman, a police officer, a first-responder, a miner, etc., will disappear.” Eventually, says Itskov, these tele-operated avatars will be “superior to the biological body in terms of its abilities,” thereby ushering in an era of increased avatar popularity.

.








http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/sili ... 11402.html

[williatw]

New class of drugs dramatically increases healthy lifespan, mouse study suggests

Summary:

Scientists have identified a new class of drugs that in animal models dramatically slows the aging process -- alleviating symptoms of frailty, improving cardiac function and extending a healthy lifespan.

Scientists report that a new class of drugs dramatically slows the aging process in mice. Will it also work in humans?

A research team from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Mayo Clinic and other institutions has identified a new class of drugs that in animal models dramatically slows the aging process -- alleviating symptoms of frailty, improving cardiac function and extending a healthy lifespan.

The new research was published March 9 online ahead of print by the journal Aging Cell.

The scientists coined the term "senolytics" for the new class of drugs.

"We view this study as a big, first step toward developing treatments that can be given safely to patients to extend healthspan or to treat age-related diseases and disorders," said TSRI Professor Paul Robbins, PhD, who with Associate Professor Laura Niedernhofer, MD, PhD, led the research efforts for the paper at Scripps Florida. "When senolytic agents, like the combination we identified, are used clinically, the results could be transformative."

"The prototypes of these senolytic agents have more than proven their ability to alleviate multiple characteristics associated with aging," said Mayo Clinic Professor James Kirkland, MD, PhD, senior author of the new study. "It may eventually become feasible to delay, prevent, alleviate or even reverse multiple chronic diseases and disabilities as a group, instead of just one at a time."

Finding the Target

Senescent cells -- cells that have stopped dividing -- accumulate with age and accelerate the aging process. Since the "healthspan" (time free of disease) in mice is enhanced by killing off these cells, the scientists reasoned that finding treatments that accomplish this in humans could have tremendous potential.

The scientists were faced with the question, though, of how to identify and target senescent cells without damaging other cells.

The team suspected that senescent cells' resistance to death by stress and damage could provide a clue. Indeed, using transcript analysis, the researchers found that, like cancer cells, senescent cells have increased expression of "pro-survival networks" that help them resist apoptosis or programmed cell death. This finding provided key criteria to search for potential drug candidates.

Using these criteria, the team homed in on two available compounds -- the cancer drug dasatinib (sold under the trade name Sprycel®) and quercetin, a natural compound sold as a supplement that acts as an antihistamine and anti-inflammatory.

Further testing in cell culture showed these compounds do indeed selectively induce death of senescent cells. The two compounds had different strong points. Dasatinib eliminated senescent human fat cell progenitors, while quercetin was more effective against senescent human endothelial cells and mouse bone marrow stem cells. A combination of the two was most effective overall.

Remarkable Results

Next, the team looked at how these drugs affected health and aging in mice.

"In animal models, the compounds improved cardiovascular function and exercise endurance, reduced osteoporosis and frailty, and extended healthspan," said Niedernhofer, whose animal models of accelerated aging were used extensively in the study. "Remarkably, in some cases, these drugs did so with only a single course of treatment."

In old mice, cardiovascular function was improved within five days of a single dose of the drugs. A single dose of a combination of the drugs led to improved exercise capacity in animals weakened by radiation therapy used for cancer. The effect lasted for at least seven months following treatment with the drugs. Periodic drug administration of mice with accelerated aging extended the healthspan in the animals, delaying age-related symptoms, spine degeneration and osteoporosis.

The authors caution that more testing is needed before use in humans. They also note both drugs in the study have possible side effects, at least with long-term treatment.

The researchers, however, remain upbeat about their findings' potential. "Senescence is involved in a number of diseases and pathologies so there could be any number of applications for these and similar compounds," Robbins said. "Also, we anticipate that treatment with senolytic drugs to clear damaged cells would be infrequent, reducing the chance of side effects."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 144823.htm

[Diogenes]

Succinctly stated. Can morality exist without a foundation? And just who gets to define the baseline? These are complex issues.

Agreed. One of our areas of mutual agreement "Dio"; whether you choose to believe in the underlying "supernatural" basis for the Judeo-Christian religion or not, it is the underpinnings of much of our ideas of right/wrong. Remove the governors at your peril.

Oh I agree alright. It doesn't matter if the supernatural forces exist or not, believing in them constrain real world behavior. If it is a fiction, it is a VERY USEFUL fiction.


It should not be tampered with unless someone has a better system which can accomplish the same effect.

There are much worse things than a Judeo-Christian based society.

[Diogenes]

New class of drugs dramatically increases healthy lifespan, mouse study suggests

Saw that. I expect that we shall see life extension within our lifetimes, or at least a staving off of the onset of geriatric pathos.

[williatw]

Saw that. I expect that we shall see life extension within our lifetimes, or at least a staving off of the onset of geriatric pathos.

Using these criteria, the team homed in on two available compounds -- the cancer drug dasatinib (sold under the trade name Sprycel®) and quercetin, a natural compound sold as a supplement that acts as an antihistamine and anti-inflammatory.

Don't know anything about Sprycel but I have been taking Quercetin as a supplement for well nigh 20 years:





http://www.swansonvitamins.com/solgar-q ... oCRRjw_wcB