Aubrey de Grey "Ending Aging"?

[OFL]

I have been following the work of de Grey for about a year now. He is a Biological Theorist that believes he can reverse aging and prolong our lives indefinitely. In my opinion i think he is onto something that will change the way we view life for the rest of time. There already held a challenge to the top generologists in the world at MIT and they could not prove his theory wrong. Thats doesn't mean it is right either, but he has passed the first test. I believe he is going to make this happen. From what i read about him and his work my intuition tells me he has a very good chance of pulling it off. It will take at least a few decades to solve, but i'm donating to his foundation so we can find out if he is right.

I for one would like to see the next 1000 years, and be young in health at the same time. I could learn all the things i want to learn before i die. ;D Give de Grey's site a look and read the article if you are interested.

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OFL :thumbsup:

[thegnat]

You're definitely right on the fact that it will take at least a few decades to solve. At least.

Let's just say hypothetically that we have a way to keep muscles from aging.

We have our skeleton, internal organs including heart and brain, and lungs.

Will everyone eventually get osteoporosis?

Will people start developing heart diseases even if they wouldn't have in the first 100 years?

Will people's lungs/diaphragm be able to keep up the good work?

Will *everyone* eventually get Alzheimer's?

Oh and we have prolonged exposure to carcinogens. Will everyone get some form of cancer? Skin cancer? Any other kind due to whatever they're around on a normal basis?

If the last two are true then we need a cure for cancer and Alzheimer's before we expect to live indefinitely. And osteoporosis too while we're at it.

I know he's talking about this goo - but the heart and brain especially are weird organs. And even your skin is an organ so what do we do with this whatever stops this goo? Then would our bodies accept it? That's the next question. It could also attack regular cells perhaps. The brain though, the brain would have to solved and Alzheimer's would have to be cured I strongly feel. (btw I'm always a little suspect of people who say the cause of something as incredibly complex as aging is goo - plus it's *hard* to find his research)

I think he has a really long way to go. Hopefully he gets it at least partially solved so that he can live longer to research it fuller ;)

[blueback]

I've never met an animal that was 1000 years old. There might be some plants that old, but they are pretty boring.

However, I have met a few man-made structures that are 1000 years old.

Therefore, I predict that if we want to remain conscious for 1000 years we are going to have to build ourselves a new body.

The only biological structure we really need at the moment is our brain, so we might have to keep it. However, if we can figure out how to mimic the exact operation of our brain with synthetic structures then we will be well on our way to immortality.

It just seems like there is less work and more certanty involved in starting from scratch than trying to figure out how to force performance into a system that doesn't want to accept it. Our bodies were never supposed to fight off all forms of cancer, or last for 100 years, or do anything more than keep us alive long enough to pop out some babies.

So, basically, what you are talking about doing is altering our bodies in such a way that they drop their old function and accept a new one. That's evolution but there's no natuaral selection pressure. This Grey guy is trying to look at the human body and figure it out. It's not going to happen because our body is an incredibly complicated balance between entropy and life.

The only funciton we're really interested in, when we talk about immortality, is keeping our mind as it is. We want to be able to think and feel 1000 years from now. No one says "You know, I really want to be able to piss on something 1000 years from now." There are plenty of things our body does that are theoretically unnecessary. So why keep the body. Upgrade to a new model that is optimized for the task we want it to perform.

[OFL]

WOW,

INTJ's making conclusions without reading all of his work and fully understanding what he is trying to do. Thats interesting to see your response. His work has to do with restoring the health of damaged cells throughout our entire body. Have you done alot of research into this topic? The reason i ask is because you are spouting off all the things that skeptics are saying about his theory with out fully understanding what he is doing. Aging research is not only being driven by Degrey, but by many of the bio-tech leaders. He is not the only one that is working on this project. Have you heard of the Bio-Tech company called Biological Sciences. One of the researchers that had a major role in cracking the human genome is working on this very subject and he believes that his group will also be able to renew the body for longer life expectancy (at least 2-3 times longer). This kind of work is going to be the next revolution in the coming decades. Scientist already are prolonging the lives of other organisms that show great promise for life extension in humans. Aubrey de Grey is a little different in his quest because he plans on reversing aging, and in turn extending life that way.

With de Grey's theory it is possible to get rid of cancer and any other genetic disease. These disorders are just cells that have lost there ability to perform the proper way too early before the person has had time to live into old age. If you attack the problem with the cells you solve the problem. His theory says that he will figure out the way to deliver the proper gene fix so that the cells will no longer continue its progress towards death. We die simply because our cells get so damamged from our environment or genetic heritage that they are no longer able to reproduce perfect replicas of the original gene/cell. This is the new way of looking at the reason why we age. It is no longer believed to be linked to so many genes that we would have no way of doing such a thing consistently in every human because of the variance seen from human to human. They already have ways of introducing new genes into existing genes of fully developed humans to correct problems. They use viruses that penetrate our cells and instead of infecting us with a virus they introduce the new gene that will fix the problem. This method is still new, but they feel strongly that they will be able to use this method in a more complicated way in the upcoming decades. Just look at how far we have come from the start of the mapping of the genome. They thought that it would take much more time than it really did (from the mouth of the director of the company Biological Sciences), and we are progressing faster and faster as every year passes. It is not to hard to imagine that this technology will be present in 30-50 years from now.

All the different systems that are involved really are the secondary part of the process. If you look at how long we have been trying to cure cancer, PD, and other horrible genetic diseases we have not made much progress in curing them. Maybe the reason for that is not paying attention to disorders in the right way. Maybe we should look at the root cause of these problems and fix it there, the genes. At the moment all we do is treat the problem, so the person lives a little longer or is able to live with their disease in a controllable way, but is that really curing anything. I know the drug companies don't really care about curing any disease (and that is where most of the research money comes from). There is no money in the cure, so what do they spend their billions of dollars on; band aid treatments. What benefit would the drug company get if they lose business as soon as they cure the disease. If they did such a thing the cost of the cure would be gigantic. Only the richest people would be able to afford it, and the majority of the peolple would continue dying from their afflictions.

This is the very thing de Grey wants to stop. There are many problems that will have to be fixed before any reversing of age happens. The over population of the earth for one would have to be dealt with and many others, but this is no reason to stop sciences progression. de Grey makes a great point about scientist and thier goals. He says that they are only interested in finding out what has been around for ages already, not engineering fixes for the problems. Once a geneticist figures out what genes cause what problems does that same geneticist find out how to cure that genetic problem, the answer is usually not. They just identified it. They are a type of experimental historians that figure out what is already present (that we haven't figured out yet) in our day to day lives, all the while people die from diseases that are not going to be fixed in an timely fashion because there are not many geneticists that know how to fix the problem, just find it.

Doesn't it make sense that an engineer would come up with a theory like this. He is looking at the problem in a totally different way, because he is not the usual type of scientist that work on such problems. Usually we INTJ's and others work on these problems, but if you know any strong *NTPs you know that they think very differently than we do, but that does not make them wrong in any sense. Intj's are not usually people that come up with things that are completely original and have never been thought of in anyway. I know for myself, it is hard to come up with ideas that are totally original and have never been thought of before (like theorists and or mathematicians). I usually figure out things that have patterns in the external world, and i usually use evidenence from others past work to see new patterns that may have not been thought of before. *NTPs have the talent of thinking of things that are not able to be seen through external stimuli like we do (of course they need some, but not as much as us). Just look at all the great *NTPS of our past (Einstien, Edison, Newton to name a few). We INTJ's are not top engineers or theorist. We do have representatives in the engineering field, but not likely at the top of the game. Our *NTP brothers and sisters are the ones that are talented in these fields. This is probably the reason you have doubts about these theories. We are not naturally able to see what they see so easily. I have both INTP and ENTP friends so my eyes have been opened to what they see in the future and i believe this theory is a viable one. Now i'm not saying it is going to happen for sure. He could fail, and if he does fail i'm not going to have any bad feelings towards him or his work. If i die when my cells give up, then so be it, but that is no reason to say he is not right on any level.

If your opinion about his theory is that strong you should do alot more research into this newly developing field of science. You really can't make such a strong opinion on such a big subject in one day, and on speculation. The questions you brought up are the usual reactions to these kinds of theories, and are already, or are in the process of being refuted. Do more research into the field, you might be suprised by what they already know about this subject.

OFL :thumbsup:

[thegnat]

Still skeptical.


With de Grey's theory it is possible to get rid of cancer and any other genetic disease. These disorders are just cells that have lost there ability to perform the proper way too early before the person has had time to live into old age. If you attack the problem with the cells you solve the problem.

This sends up a red flag for me. Cancer and any other genetic disease? That's....HUGE. That is Not as simple as he says it is.

First of all - that's messing with human DNA. Do you realize how difficult that could be while humans are living and/or before without making them some completely different creature?

Cancer isn't genetic. It's exposure to carcinogens making mutations in DNA. Some cancers you don't even know the cause of. Like low grade mucoepidermoid carcinomas. Google it. Even if you change the DNA, DNA will not be carcinogen-resistant. Our world is full of them (carcinogens), too.

A "proper gene fix" could be re-writing the human genome. Cancer just doesn't affect one gene it affects many. I don't think that wold be a good idea.

So even though the nervous and cardiac systems age just as much and are as vital IF not MORE vital than the cells, we shouldn't worry about them? Oh yeah and pulmonary. What are we going to do with a perfect body if our brain can't function? heck, we probably won't even know we have a perfect body.

All cell types are different too. We'd have to fix the DNA so that EVERY cell type would be able to survive. That's again a ridiculous idea. It's essentially like the HGP all over again times 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000.

And heck, we don't even know everything about every organ yet, especially the brain.

[blueback]

Well, cancer must be related to genetics because sharks don't get cancer. It's actually hard to GIVE it to them.

Anywho, to expand on my point about engineering ourselves a new body.

The longer you live the greater the certanty that you will experience an incredibly improbable event. For example, very few people have a building collpse on them. A few do, but only a small fraction of the people in the world. If you live for 1000 years you are going to have something really really bad happend to you. If you can't survive it you won't live 1000 years.

So, our frail little squishy body is unlikely to last 1000 years even if it reproduces its own cells perfectly for that whole time period. In 1000 years we are going to get into a terrible airplane crash, or become infected with an incredibly deadly plague, or get hit by lightning while stepping into a bear trap and getting a blood clot in our brain at the same time.

Like Tyler Durden said in Fight Club. On a long enough time line, the survivability for everyone drops to zero. The longer you want to live the tougher you have to be to survive calamitous events.

[thegnat]

Well, cancer must be related to genetics because sharks don't get cancer. It's actually hard to GIVE it to them.


True, but as you were talking about with your new body - their body, their skin, is very different. It may be much more resistant to carcinogens or even cancer given to it. Plus, they're underwater. Do you see many underwater animals getting cancer, period? Maybe their cells secrete something ours don't? And maybe the other part of this secretion's function is something that helps keep them afloat/help them survive underwater?

We just don't know so much about cancer. It's like the brain - we know a lot about it but we don't know a lot about it on the same hand.

And I completely agree with you blueback with respect to your expansion on the new body.

[rwyatt365]

I think that de Grey's work is interesting and could potentially lead to some solutions for some (if not all) of the effects of ageing. I won't debate whether his methodology is, or is not correct or whether his research will produce the intended outcome – it's all too speculative at this point (like trying to say in 1905 that Einstein's theories would produce a nuclear bomb – who knew?).

My own personal take on it would be that I'd have no desire to live 1000 years (and certainly not indefinitely).

[rocksteady]

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