143 replies to this topic

[niner]

So, you know for a fact that the detirioation of the aging body isn't caused by one or two phenomena which then cascades into a multitude of manifestations? I don't think anyone alive can say for a fact that aging isn't caused by one or two simple and reversible phenomena (yet to be identified).

 

So, you know for a fact that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, and not in the west?   Aside from math, there is no perfect knowledge, only degrees of uncertainty.  I'm quite certain that aging involves more than one or two simple and reversible phenomena.  How certain?  Well, I'd put a good sum of money on it.

 

Have you seen this?
 

[Rocket]

So, you know for a fact that the detirioation of the aging body isn't caused by one or two phenomena which then cascades into a multitude of manifestations? I don't think anyone alive can say for a fact that aging isn't caused by one or two simple and reversible phenomena (yet to be identified).

So, you know for a fact that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, and not in the west? Aside from math, there is no perfect knowledge, only degrees of uncertainty. I'm quite certain that aging involves more than one or two simple and reversible phenomena. How certain? Well, I'd put a good sum of money on it.
Uu
Have you seen this?

I venture to say that most here on this site are aware of SENS.

I don't hypothesize that ALL vestiges of time can be erased from a multi celled animals. But if by aging is meant the loss of cellular function(s) and all that encompasses, then, 'yes,' that may very well be "cured" within 30 years.

If you want to discuss micro machines zipping along through the body and repairing things that aren't cellular in nature, arterial plaque for instance, then you're off in the he realm of Gene Roddenberry. See you in the 23rd century!

[niner]

I don't hypothesize that ALL vestiges of time can be erased from a multi celled animals. But if by aging is meant the loss of cellular function(s) and all that encompasses, then, 'yes,' that may very well be "cured" within 30 years.

If you want to discuss micro machines zipping along through the body and repairing things that aren't cellular in nature, arterial plaque for instance, then you're off in the he realm of Gene Roddenberry. See you in the 23rd century!

 

You said "So, you know for a fact that the detirioation of the aging body isn't caused by one or two phenomena which then cascades into a multitude of manifestations? I don't think anyone alive can say for a fact that aging isn't caused by one or two simple and reversible phenomena (yet to be identified).",  but now you are talking about a small subset of what we conventionally think of as "aging".   If you can't cure things like atherosclerosis or crosslinked extracellular proteins, then you really can't claim to have cured aging. 

 

I don't see micro machines as the way forward.  Indwelling chemical sensors and neural prostheses would be interesting.

[Brett Black]

Death and aging is not a disease to be cured,

Do you seriously think alzheimers, arthritis, dementia, stroke, cancer, heart disease, blindness, hearing loss, incontinence, erectile dysfunction, muscle wasting, long-sightedness, memory failure, frailty, loss of balance, lack of libido, loss of energy, poor sleep etc etc etc etc etc should not be cured? (and then there's the "superficial" aspects that seem to get a lot of attention: wrinkles, sagging, baldness, grey hair, loss of physique, loss of sporting abilities etc etc etc)

"Aging" is not just some abstract thing, it is a fundamental cause of all those states of suffering and disability that I listed(and many I did not list), and it begins to noticeably impact even the healthiest human beings starting at mid-life.

It's easy to get used to the weak, shuffling, hunched-over, half-deaf elderly people you see around...society and repeated exposure have it set up so you(and even they) just accept it with little thought...but the reality is that these people are very very sick, they are suffering, they are literally at the last stages of falling to pieces, and it is due to aging. To oppose helping them, to oppose medically/scientifically finding ways to cure aging (and in doing so, also helping every other human including yourself) is cruel beyond measure.

Edited by Brett Black, 06 September 2014 - 05:31 AM.

[Brett Black]

Aging research seems to be progressing rather slowly at the moment; instead, most efforts have been directed at age-related diseases (extending healthspan rather than maximum lifespan). Is it possible that aging would be cured in the next 20-30 years, even with the current financial crisis?

I don't think I or anyone else can predict if aging will be cured in 20-30 years. Is it possible? Yes, I believe it is possible, I think it could feasibly occur in that timeframe. That's not the same as saying it is probable or likely though.

As far as aging research progressing slowly and the focus on extending healthspan rather maximal lifespan: I don't think these things are seperate.

It's reasonable to believe that making people healthier for longer will automatically result in longer lifespans. Old people don't die because they are healthy. Old people die because aging makes them very very sick and unhealthy. Hence, if you make older people healthier they should be expected to live longer.

Research into extending healthspan and curing age-related disease may both indirectly(as I explained above) and directly lead to cures for aging. In fact, medical and scientific research across a wide variety of areas could unintentionally lead to progress in curing aging.

It's possible that rejuvenating only limited parts/systems of the body could have an unexpectedly universal rejuvenating effect. Think of how replacing a single flat tyre on a car will not only fix the tyre but will also make the steering easier, will reduce whole-car vibrations thus extending the lifespan of other areas of the car, will allow the whole car to survive stresses it otherwise wouldn't survive like extended driving over bumpy roads etc.

There already exist many active areas of medical research that seem to be progressing well and that hold much promise for treating aging. Stem cell therapies for repairing the damage of aging. Whole replacement organs/parts grown from the patients own cells. Application of various signalling molecules to instruct the body to use it's own dormant built-in repair and regenerative capabilities. These could all have dramatic effects against aging.

We may be much closer than we think to curing aging.

[addx]

Death and aging is not a disease to be cured,

Do you seriously think alzheimers, arthritis, dementia, stroke, cancer, heart disease, blindness, hearing loss, incontinence, erectile dysfunction, muscle wasting, long-sightedness, memory failure, frailty, loss of balance, lack of libido, loss of energy, poor sleep etc etc etc etc etc should not be cured? (and then there's the "superficial" aspects that seem to get a lot of attention: wrinkles, sagging, baldness, grey hair, loss of physique, loss of sporting abilities etc etc etc)

"Aging" is not just some abstract thing, it is a fundamental cause of all those states of suffering and disability that I listed(and many I did not list), and it begins to noticeably impact even the healthiest human beings starting at mid-life.

It's easy to get used to the weak, shuffling, hunched-over, half-deaf elderly people you see around...society and repeated exposure have it set up so you(and even they) just accept it with little thought...but the reality is that these people are very very sick, they are suffering, they are literally at the last stages of falling to pieces, and it is due to aging. To oppose helping them, to oppose medically/scientifically finding ways to cure aging (and in doing so, also helping every other human including yourself) is cruel beyond measure.

I agree.

But ageing is still not a disease to be cured.

And all of you misunderstood me but I accept that it might be my fault.

It is not a disease to be cured, but a meaningful process to be reversed. And in order to reverse it you need to know what it normally does and how, what its meaning or evolutionary intent is. I know its hard to accept that there's an evolutionary advantage to having a "time window" for life, but that's exactly my point. Without accepting that, it's hard to set the stage for proper research about it.

In other words, I don't think any revolutionary "cure for ageing" will come out of a thought process that begins with thinking that ageing is a fault in our genome, a lack of evolution, a bunch of random failures as such thought process aims to rescue the random failures rather than discover the process that enables the seemingly random bodily failures.

I do feel that changing the perspective will finally lead research to enabling ourselves to actually sustain "youthfullness" indefinitely(and so immortality) and I do feel that this also might be very dangerous for the civilisation in ways we can't even predict properly now. Still, that doesn't stop me from digging through studies trying to explain ageing processes.

I take my Memantine (alzheimer pills) daily btw I do not consider it a disease but a process probably "overstimulated" by a genetic predisposition. And I consider myself greatly at risk for it.

I hope this clears up matters and is still somewhat on topic. It has been discussed here wether ageing is a result of only a few "root phenomena" or that ageing is a simply a set of many more or less independently arising bodily failures to be addressed. Are there common denominators? And my perspective explained above says there are common denominators speaking in favour of the "only a few root phenomena" perspective.

Edited by addx, 06 September 2014 - 09:11 AM.

[niner]

In other words, I don't think any revolutionary "cure for ageing" will come out of a thought process that begins with thinking that ageing is a fault in our genome, a lack of evolution, a bunch of random failures as such thought process aims to rescue the random failures rather than discover the process that enables the seemingly random bodily failures.

I do feel that changing the perspective will finally lead research to enabling ourselves to actually sustain "youthfullness" indefinitely(and so immortality) and I do feel that this also might be very dangerous for the civilisation in ways we can't even predict properly now. Still, that doesn't stop me from digging through studies trying to explain ageing processes.

 

Aging can easily fit into an evolutionary paradigm- the organism maximizes its ability to pass on its genes, not to live a long time.  Processes that optimize reproductive fitness may harm the organism after reproduction has occurred.  Such a state would be more evolutionarily favored than one in which we lived longer but were less fertile.   The problem with evolution is that the minimization of suffering is not on evolution's radar screen.  We, on the other hand, are very interested in that.  We have taken control of evolution in myriad ways, curing aging is just going to be yet another of those ways. 

 

I understand your concern that the elimination of aging may have negative impacts on civilization as well as positive.  We will need to manage the negative impacts if we wish to reap the rewards of curing aging.  

[Logic]

So, the cumulative impact for seven years would be around 45% and growth is more or less exponential.

However the growth rates for medium-hot area of research related to longevity are much greater.
For example,
for sirtuin, there were 16,286 publications in 2006 and seven years later there were 69,936, an increase of 329%
For klotho there were 43 publications in 2006 and 192 in 2013, an increase of 347%.
For iPSC there were 47 publications in 2006 and 434 in 2013, an increase of 823%.
For ncRNA there were 47 publications in 2006 and 168 in 2013, an increase of 257%.

These numbers suggest far more than doubling of knowledge in key longevity-related topics over a 7 year period.

http://www.anti-agin...g-on-longevity/

Edited by Logic, 06 September 2014 - 03:03 PM.

[niner]

These numbers suggest far more than doubling of knowledge in key longevity-related topics over a 7 year period.

 

It would if every new paper represented an equal step forward, but most don't really advance the field very much, and some actually set it back.   Some papers are wrong, and they waste resources by sending other researchers on various wild goose chases.   In other cases, they shut down research on a topic because everyone thinks it's settled, when it actually is not.  Part of this is because agencies won't fund work to look further at something that has "already been proven".

 

Looking on the bright side, I think this increase in papers suggests that aging-related topics are getting a lot more attention these days.  It's clear that the field is moving forward, although it can be hard to quantify the absolute rate.

[Antonio2014]

I think it's rather likely that we enter the "escape velocity era" before 30 years from now.

 

Most of the proposed anti-aging therapies depend on stem cells, which are actively investigated outside the anti-aging community, and gene therapy, which is progressing at good pace and had a probably big breakthrough recently (CRISPR/Cas). So I'm optimistic. Research fields outside anti-aging but related to it are seeing good progress. Also, genetic techniques/machinery (sequencing, etc.) are getting cheaper and faster. Anti-aging researchers need "only" to fill in the gaps (yeah, that filling in is a lot of work, but I think it's doable if properly funded).

 

Edited by Antonio2014, 08 September 2014 - 02:39 PM.

[D Mason]

I think it's rather likely that we enter the "escape velocity era" before 30 years from now.

 

Most of the proposed anti-aging therapies depend on stem cells, which are actively investigated outside the anti-aging community, and gene therapy, which is progressing at good pace and had a probably big breakthrough recently (CRISPR/Cas). So I'm optimistic. Research fields outside anti-aging but related to it are seeing good progress. Also, genetic techniques/machinery (sequencing, etc.) are getting cheaper and faster. Anti-aging researchers need "only" to fill in the gaps (yeah, that filling in is a lot of work, but I think it's doable if properly funded).

 

The funding will be interesting indeed.  There are many wealthy men out there who do not want to die.   As the years go on, I'm curious to see what billionairs will never grow old.   David Murdoch comes to mind.   There's a great article about his dieting and his goal to live to 125.  If you google David Murdoch newyork times, you should be able to find it.    Or it may be posted somewhere here already.

[follies]

One strategy that seems promising is young blood. I imagine some billionaires, Larry Ellison? , may be getting transfusions of young blood. Why not? I would, if I were a billionaire.

[niner]

One strategy that seems promising is young blood. I imagine some billionaires, Larry Ellison? , may be getting transfusions of young blood. Why not? I would, if I were a billionaire.

 

You wouldn't need to be a billionaire, but you might need to bend the law a bit...  One problem is that we don't know how much blood you'd need.  In the mouse parabiosis experiments, it wasn't just a transfusion, it was continuous sharing of blood.  With frequent enough transfusions, you could approximate this, but even doing a couple pints a day would be a pretty serious PITA.  I question how much it would help, considering all the causes of aging that it wouldn't be likely to affect, like glycation, or atherosclerosis.

 

If a pint a day were enough, how much would you have to pay someone between the ages of, say, 14 and 24 for a pint, no questions asked?  A few hundred bucks? A grand?  You could probably pick it up for a pittance in the third world.  That would give a whole new meaning to the term 'blood sucking colonialist', wouldn't it?

[Jose_LER]

Maybe in more than 30 years...

I think the human body would be view as an information center. A machine will read all the information, compare that information using Big Data analytical techniques and extracting from the cloud computing and artificial intelligence the solution.

In what way?

If you've seen the film Elysium, there is a machine called the MedPod. I think it will be something similar to that.

 

The body will be seen as a quantum non-linear system as it will be managed like that.

Edited by Jose_LER, 09 October 2014 - 05:57 PM.

[Danail Bulgaria]

I thought, that the MedPod is somesort of scanner, which detects the problem, and then uses some sorts of guided energy to fix it.

[Jose_LER]

I thought, that the MedPod is somesort of scanner, which detects the problem, and then uses some sorts of guided energy to fix it.

 

Something like that. We're speaking about science fiction, but I think it could be possibly in some decades to build something like that. A machine that can "read" the electrical signals from the body, chemical properties and a lot of different informations... send it over the net to a datacenter where it's analyzed using big databases and statistical models and then irradiating the solution to the living organism. At the moment there are some tools to made something like that. I started to build something similar to use in plants some years ago.

 

In a future, the cures will be developed in minutes, not in years like actually.

[Thew]

Maybe it will put more efforts, money and time(more and more) before possibly(?) having it.

[Florian Xavier]

very low chance

[drew_ab]

I think the chances are low, but that there will be extensions in life span.

[Danail Bulgaria]

The technology, that will make us immortal, or forever young, does not exist yet. So, if we want the aging to be cured in the next 20-30 years, we have to invent it. If we will be forever young, or not, depend entirely from us.

 

Each one of us must ask himself/herself the following questions: What can I sacrifice in order to be developed a way to live forever? Money, free time, knowledge, something else? Can I sacrifice my free time? Or maybe a part of my free time? What can I do in my sacrificed time to help the immortality comes true? Does my job deals with some aspect of the aging, or some aspect of the aging changes, or even with some aging change, or with some immortality related topics from some aspect? How can I use best my skills and my surrounding environment in order to help the developments of the forever young technologies?

 

If each one of us thinks deeper for the answers of these questions, we will see, that we can do much more, than we think we can do.

If we do everything, that we can to be forever young, then yup, the forever young technology will emerge after 20 - 30 years.

 

[pone11]

Denham Harman extended mouse lifespan by 45% with BHT in 1968. His achievement was widely reported in the popular science press of the day. I was ten years old, and a bit of a science geek. I remember it very clearly. In retrospect it is clear that he didn't accomplish as much as he thought he had, but you have to admit, it sounds about as impressive as anything resveratrol has done. It was a dead end, but he was not a nut. He was a competent scientist with an idea that proved to be imcomplete and insufficient--something that may yet prove to be true for our current theorists. I hope that you are right and I am wrong, but I'll admit that I no longer expect to see anything more than incremental progress in my lifetime.

Mike

 

Just to celebrate the life of Denham Harman a little, this was the guy who proposed the free radical theory of aging in 1956!   I guess there was not enough experimentation there to win a Nobel prize, but it is a big accomplishment.   This is his original paper:

http://www.uccs.edu/...56_13332224.pdf

 

It is Harman who then extended this idea and in 1972 proposed the mitochondrial theory of aging.   His main point was that all of these antioxidants we take orally are not entering the mitochondria, and that is where they need to be to extend aging.   

 

Does anyone have access to a PDF copy of Harman's paper proposing the mitochondrial theory in the April 1972 Journal of the American Geriatrics Society?   If there is some source online that keeps many of his papers collected, I would love to see that as well.

 

He passed away just last November 2014, at the age of 98.   Let's appreciate his great contributions.

Edited by pone11, 04 January 2015 - 10:46 PM.

[pone11]

I'd disagree on both points.

Modern medicine actually tends to focus on keeping people alive rather than improving their health (if you haven't noticed there are a lot more old people around than there used to be) and we have made more advances in the bio sciences in the last two decades than in the entirety of human history. I think there are three reasons you don't hear as much about anti aging medicine.

1) Some people find it controversial
2) It's only in the last couple of years that an indefinite human life span has become a reality
3) Anti aging tech doesn't receive any kind of federal funding (this is a big one at least for the United States)

I expect that in the next 30 years we will have a great deal more control over our DNA and I wouldn't be surprised if we had the ability to remove cancer causing mutations from our chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA, as well as add telometric repeats to the end of chromosomes with relative ease. Research into tissue differentiation, stem cells, and or regeneration could probably replace things like neurons that don't readily replace themselves naturally and also potentially repair things like cellular matrices. Plain old pharmacology or possibly nanotech could take care of inter and extra cellular aggregates. That's the seven causes of aging (according to de Grey) right there. Our ability to effectively cure aging is going to depend mainly on how well we can manipulate the DNA, RNA, and proteins in our bodies, and we are just starting to get really good at that.

 

In the world of startup companies, there is an expression about "throwing sh*t at the wall, and it sticks".   What that means is a lot of startup companies have no idea what they are doing, just randomly create some stuff, and suddenly millions of people like it for reasons that no one creating the product had in mind.   Companies like eBay and Twitter are examples of that.   They just got lucky.

 

I think we are in the same type of activity for life extension.  People are just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing if it sticks.   So the resveratrol studies, and the C60 studies, are examples of just randomly experimenting with some substance, and sometimes that can have a dramatic outcome.

 

I think there is a good chance that sometime in the next 20 years, some researcher is going to throw something against the wall, and it's going to do something dramatic.  Increasing average lifespan to over 100 seems not very far fetched.   Increasing maximum lifespan is probably a lower probability, but that could happen.   In either case, there is a big difference between making it happen and understanding *why* it happens.   I am much more likely to believe that someone will do some random experiment and it will have a dramatic outcome, and then they will spend another 20 years understanding why it works.

 

As long as Denham Harman's name came up in this thread, his basic theory was that oxidation inside the mitochondria grows over time.  The mitochondrial membranes are damaged, and the mitochondrial DNA is not as well protected as cell DNA, so the mtDNA also gets very damaged.   This increases oxidation further and oxidation becomes a self-perpetuating thing in the mitochondria.

 

What I don't understand is why doesn't someone do experiments that try to move SOD, catalase, glutathione, and other antioxidants *into the mitochondria* and then observe the result?    Do they just have problems observing or measuring a result?   They could at least try lifespan studies with that strategy?

[pone11]

I think its possible but unlikely due to the many roadblocks we will have in gaining new knowledge.

The amount of experiments you can do with the human body are very limited due to a funny thing called ethics. Without the ability to truly study human biology we probably wont be able to do it. We may do it on mice, but we can do whatever we want to mice, we cant do a lot to healthy human beings in the name of science.

Plus then there are political barriers, monetary barrriers. And greed. If someone does find the cure to aging, someone would probably be too greedy to let the public know about it.

Id say that even if they had already made a mouse live for 100 years.. Id still doubt it would be available for humans within that time frame. Or ever.. I dont know if it is in many peoples/ governments/ society / species best interest to start having people live forever.

 

If the substance that extends maximum lifespan is proprietary, you can be sure that there will be a political circus around it.  Such a substance would sell for astronomical amounts of money, and would be subject to regulation by FDA, and the politicians would surely want to consider the outcomes of releasing it.

 

But what if the cure involves over the counter substances, just delivered in innovative ways?   For example, what if we discover that an intracellular antioxidant like lipoic acid, if taken every three hours (the half life) doubles maximum lifespan?   What if the delivery vehicle for that was liposomes?   No one would be able to stop humans immediately starting to duplicate the research on their own.   Look what is happening with C60.   

[John Schloendorn]

why doesn't someone do experiments that try to move SOD, catalase, glutathione, and other antioxidants *into the mitochondria*

 

 

Sure, people have been doing that to little furry critters ever since Harman's days.  Sometimes it lives longer, or more likely some biomarker changes, and then they get to publish a paper.  You can easily find them by Googling "mitochodria targeted... <your favorite antioxidant>".  

 

In humans, the enzyme experiments of course can't be implemented in folks unlucky enough to already have been born.   Small molecules purporting to do that are published and can be bought and ingested in principle (surely someone around here must be doing that?)  Yes, in humans you have grave problems measuring the result of a life span study due to the time frame involved.  People really don't like it when they have to die from aging before they get to publish the result of their study.  That makes the "see what sticks" strategy really really impractical, unless you believe that mouse strains aren't rigged to show whatever a professor needs to win the next grant. 

 

In theory you could find longevity as a side-effect of certain drugs in humans.  Some people say that's what happened with metformin.  (I don't know that data)  

 

Given an absence of low-noise time-to-death biomarkers, and short of folks already having done the necessary treatments and follow-up 20 years ago, what options do we have to uncover longevity effects in humans with unknown mechanisms?  Just wait it out & hope for the best?  Sounds unsatisfying... 

 

 

 

[pone11]

 

why doesn't someone do experiments that try to move SOD, catalase, glutathione, and other antioxidants *into the mitochondria*

 

 

Sure, people have been doing that to little furry critters ever since Harman's days.  Sometimes it lives longer, or more likely some biomarker changes, and then they get to publish a paper.  You can easily find them by Googling "mitochodria targeted... <your favorite antioxidant>".  

 

 

This site should have a section that lists all major theories of aging, and then categorizes the important studies by actual agents tested within that theory.

[pone11]

 

why doesn't someone do experiments that try to move SOD, catalase, glutathione, and other antioxidants *into the mitochondria*

 

 

Sure, people have been doing that to little furry critters ever since Harman's days.  Sometimes it lives longer, or more likely some biomarker changes, and then they get to publish a paper.  You can easily find them by Googling "mitochodria targeted... <your favorite antioxidant>".  

 

 

What I have often seen are studies where they genetically engineer more of some antioxidant into the mice.  Those studies usually have good outcomes, like this one with catalase overexpression in mice:

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/21109199

 

What I have not seen as much are experiments where they try to endogenously deliver the antioxidant into the mitochondrial matrix.   One of the reasons that anti-aging research is going through a renaissance is that there new liposomal-based delivery vehicles, so for the first time they are increasing bioavailability of substances that have long had good research results in vitro.   Longvida curcumin is an example of that.

[niner]

 

why doesn't someone do experiments that try to move SOD, catalase, glutathione, and other antioxidants *into the mitochondria*

 

 Small molecules purporting to do that are published and can be bought and ingested in principle (surely someone around here must be doing that?)

 

They certainly are.  See, for example, the c60health forum and threads on MitoQ.  The effects that people are seeing with c60 fatty acid adducts are shockingly good.  We now have over two years of experience with this substance.

[pone11]

 

I'd give it a 50% chance in the next 30 years.  Knowledgeable people will say, "But we don't fully understand XYZ..." The problem with that argument is that you don't need a fully developed understanding of some-thing for a breakthrough to occur.  There are many instances throughout science and engineering of "fluke" discoveries and accidental breakthroughs.  With respect to aging, all of the necessary prerequisites are in place to accidentally discover a cure and to deliver into the host organism...  Its just a matter of needing that one accidental discovery. 

 

Curing aging doesn't require just one breakthrough, it will require about a dozen, or maybe a hundred.  If the odds of one breakthrough in the next thirty years are 50%, then two breakthroughs would be 25%, and twelve would be (0.5 ** 12) * 100 = 0.024%   (1/4096)  For a hundred it would be 8e-29%  (that's 8 times 10 to the -29th power, or approximately zero.)  The numbers are of course meaningless, since we're just pulling them out of our ass, but the math is the math.  The actual number of breakthroughs needed to "cure" aging will probably be a lot less than 100, depending on how you define "breakthrough", but a lot more than one. 

 

Your real point might be that future technological developments are inherently unpredictable, which I agree with.  One thing that we can count on is that technological development is accelerating, and new knowledge and improved tools will lead to further acceleration in the pace of technological development. 

 

 

You make great points on needing to solve many problems, but the issue there is they are not all equally important.   For example, what if we someday discover that 80% of what we call aging is attributable to hydroxyl radicals in the mitochondria, and that these can be fully mitigated by a single antioxidant for which we create a delivery system?   That one discovery might solve 80% of the problem and might have a remarkable effect on longevity.   

 

And my point in my other post is that we will discover that by luck.  Someone will create that antioxidant based on some random thoughts, form a hypothesis that is little more than "this might stop some radicals, so let's feed it to some mice and see what happens."   And only after the mice live for 6 years will we realize that we solved a really important problem, the details of which someone else will figure out in 10 years.

[sensei]

 

It is not a disease to be cured, but a meaningful process to be reversed. 

 

 

I would argue that it does not need to be reversed, merely prevented.

 

Understanding the mechanisms of cellular genesis and differentiation; the prevention of cellular senescence; as well as the ability to precisely cause apoptosis ---

 

means that we could 

 

1. cause the genesis of new young cells -- cells free of AGE's lipofuscin etc.

2. cause them to differentiate into whatever tissues and organs we desire

3. cause the death of cells that are approaching senescence, are crosslinked with AGEs, full of lipofuscin etc.

 

Once all the old junk is cleared out -- you basically have a young organism  

[Antonio2014]

 

means that we could 

 

1. cause the genesis of new young cells -- cells free of AGE's lipofuscin etc.

3. cause the death of cells that are approaching senescence, are crosslinked with AGEs, full of lipofuscin etc.

 

 

1. Nope. You will cause the genesis of old cells. You don't even know how mitosis works. How can you propose a therapy for aging?

 

3. AGEs affect the extracellular matrix, not the cells themselves.