Dopers are getting on in years and some of the greats have left us already. Forty years ago, given advances in genetics and molecular biology, at the time I thought there was maybe a 25% chance that I would see the advent of indefinite life spans. And certainly one keeps hearing about this and that experimental strain of lab mice that demonstrate remarkable youth and longevity; or stem cell transplants; etc. In science fiction it seems like such a slam-dunk that significant life extension if not full perpetual youth is often taken as a given.
But practical human results so far? Nada. Afaik there’s nothing even regarded as an effective enough anti-agathic for doctors to universally recommend it. The first quarter of the 21st century is drawing to a close, and doctors still can’t do much other than treat some age-related conditions to help prevent premature sickness and death. We’re still left with “eat right, live a healthy lifestyle and avoid things that are bad for you”– the advice we’ve probably found engraved on cuneiform tablets. There probably hasn’t been much practical life extension since the introduction of antibiotics allowed more people to survive infections that used to finish them off in their 60s or 70s.
So are we any closer today to slaying the Dragon-Tyrant yet?
Instead of like last century when it was so impossibly far in the future that only a nutbag would hazard a guess, now we’re to the point where at least this nutbag will hazard a guess:
Assuming scientific research, the USA, and human civilization remains largely as it was in 2024, not 2025 or worse, we’re 25 years from the first drug-into-human experiments towards functionally slowing or stopping the aging process. Which won’t be great successes. IMO it’s 75 years to a useful safe medication that does something significantly better than placebo.
We have learned a great deal in the last 25 years about how the aging process works, compared to our prior total abject ignorance. And we now know we understand about 0.1% of the part we know about, and as always in biology, the closer you look, the more you discover new stuff that you didn’t know existed, much less that you didn’t understand.
Rejuevenation = reversing aging, will always be fiction.
Here’s a ref to 96 blog posts on this topic by a medical chemistry researcher I follow. Derek Lowe - Aging and Lifespan | Science | AAAS. You will know a lot about the state of the art and about an appropriate timeline expectation to have after reading these.
Indefinite life spans is probably a pipe dream. What there has been in the last fifteen years is several things that independently have been consistently shown to extend the lifespans of yeast and mice by as much as 25-50%. People are definitely not mice, despite some similarities in the DNA, and similar studies in people are expensive, tricky and take many years. There is hope, and some interesting preliminary results that have been overhyped. Doctors are not going to universally recommend anything without extraordinary evidence, and more work needs to be done.
A reasonable introduction to these new hopes can be found by reading (Harvard geneticist) David Sinclair’s 2019 book Lifespan. He generally avoids extravagant claims and selling things, and his work has inspired many more recent experiments.
I have also sent Lumpy a limited gift link to my he Economist article (normal link) below. The Economist gift links are often only valid once, so my apologies.
The biggest difficulty is that we’re efficiently engineered, or the evolutionary equivalent of that. There are a whole bunch of things that all fail to kill us at around the same age. Even if you manage to eliminate one of them, another will just kill you not long after. It’s only once you’ve dealt with all of them that the lifespan would change much.
On the other hand, where we have made some pretty big advances is in quality of life. We might not live longer, but we stay vibrant longer now.
It’s an interesting documentary on this rich tech guy that wants to extend his life span. They go into all the unproven nonsense he is into. It’s expensive snake oil.
The man is 56 years old, and pretty much looks it. I would like to see a photo of him at 85. As far as him inspiring other recent experiments goes…have any of them panned out?
Entropy is an irrefutable reality. Yes, a disciplined approach to diet, exercise, and emotional well being coupled with good genetics can produce centenarians, but aging over time has shown that the end comes quickly from that point on.
I quietly observe the life spans of the rich and powerful. They seem to age and die pretty much the same way the rest of us do, and that tells me that there currently isn’t any burgeoning miracle drugs yet in existence.
Calorie restriction (CR) is a potent modulator of longevity in multiple species. A growing body of evidence shows that sustained periods of CR without malnutrition improves risk factors involved in the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and neurological disorders in humans.
Does anybody who knows the field better than I (i.e. at all) know how significant the promise here really is?
Yes and no. There are studies that have shown some positive results. These have often inspired other studies which sometimes show benefit, and sometimes don’t show as much or any benefit - a familiar situation in medicine already. As you might expect, any positive study is wildly hyped, usually beyond the original claims of its authors. No study is yet so positive that it would widely be given as official medical advice. Few studies span decades.
I don’t fully agree with either of the books The Longevity Solution (Fung) or Super Agers (Topol). But they are quite good, are a reasonable starting point, give references (more credible in Tool) and a pretty balanced view of recent studies, but are not completely free from hype or shill (though are compared to lots of stuff on these topics). Topol already assumes you know a fair amount of medicine and does not explain basic concepts well. In terms of longevity, exercise and strength training is surprisingly beneficial.
A lot of money is going into this research, but doing good studies on people is challenging, expensive and takes a decade or three. Both these books discuss calorie restriction, which offers a possible small benefit but lowers health if too restrictive. There seem to be better ways to mimic calorie restriction without much actual restriction. Much recent research in oncology overlaps with this field.
I’ve watched videos on Youtube and read books from several doctors that work in that general area, at least from the side of diet. They all, to one degree or another, advocate for some things that aren’t (yet) mainstream medical standard of care, but also aren’t wildly outrageous. One thing they all have in common, however, is that they state their own personal goal, and the goal of the lifestyle regimens they propose, is, in the words of Dr. Steven Gundry “die young at a ripe old age”.
In other words, the healthy lifestyle gurus aren’t even aiming at eternal youth or lifespan extension. They are aiming for a goal of getting people to live disease free and die in their sleep peacefully in their 100s or 110s. Given that there’s a good chunk of people in the field who are no longer even working towards the goal of eternal youth or even lifespan extension into the 120s and up, my guess is that the goal is unrealistic.
ETA. As a further guess, I think the major bottleneck will be that we will be unable to come up with a process to genetically modify somatic cells on a large scale, so that even if we are able to pinpoint the genes that cause us to age and how exactly they work, we won’t be able to do anything practical with that knowledge.
Couldn’t find the cite but one study seemed to indicate that the aging process bottoms out in extreme old age; that is, a 110-year old is no more likely to die in the following year than a 105-year old. Given the paucity of subjects, and of course “no more” likely when the likelihood is already extremely high, it’s doubtless a difficult thing to test.
Probably; my worry is that there are good reasons for supposing that a radical breakthrough in preserving or restoring youth would be kept highly secret. Heck, there are those who insist that people ought to grow old and die.
IIRC that’s a mathematical corollary of the fact that you can’t have a negative life expectancy, and not any kind of “bottoming out” of the aging process.
I’d be in favor of at least two people doing so. Though they’ve shown if there is a secret, it wouldn’t be so easy to keep.
My understanding is that a major hurdle is aging is a failure of multiple system simultaneously, and even if you fix one, the others still break. Even if you fix 90% of the systems, the 10% that fail will end up killing you of age related diseases. Evolution doesn’t have incentives to make creatures survive longer than necessary for procreation. The total breakdown of repair mechanisms is fairly universal across life forms, with a few exceptional lifeforms that do not seem to age.
IMO, humans will learn what consciousness is, and learn to transfer it to machine substrates before we learn how to develop biological immortality (or at least a freezing of the aging process. People will still die of accidents). We will eventually have biological immortality, but not anytime soon. How would you even test if a new therapy makes you live to 130 without waiting to see if anyone actually makes it to 130?
I’ve been following the subject for 20 years. There are advances in the lab, but that’s not the same thing as widespread, FDA approved treatments for the public.
David Sinclair studies and writes about the science of aging and anti-aging, but again, the ROI seems fairly minimal. People aren’t living to 100 with these therapies.
My understanding is that intermittent fasting could provide the benefits of calorie restriction without the constant deprivation of chronic calorie restriction.
My take is the first human experimental subjects for extended lifespans would have to experience an extended old age, an experience which generally sucks according to my observations so far.
I’m starting to travel that road myself, aches, pains, general weakening, additional doctors, more social isolation. I’ll tolerate this stuff for another decade or two, but beyond that and with ever growing debilitations, fifty years or more? No thank you.
There is a real possibility of extending your life by up to ten years with proper attention to exercise, diet, and taking steps to avoid chronic disease. I don’t think our current understanding is better than that.
A challenge for widespread adoption of that strategy is that many of those healthful habits need to be adopted while one is still young and thinking of oneself as immortal. Sure, there’s some gain to be had by adopting healthy(ier) habits even post-retirement age. But AFAIK, much of the leverage is lost.
My understanding as a general rule of thumb is someone with average genetics and a poor lifestyle will die of old age in their 70s, someone with average genetics and a good lifestyle will die of old age in their 80s. But I think beyond age ~90 or so, its pretty much genetics that determines how much longer you’ll live.