JCC So, how long do you want to live?

On the previous page we have Church in possible human trials in a couple of years. We have Bill Andrews doing human trials this year.

And here is Aubrey de Grey with potential human trials by 2021

 

More with Liz and others.

 

Indefinitely. I certainly don’t want to die of a disease like old age, even if it’s a disease society largely accepts because they’ve previously had no choice

I made a short film on this subject, it has always interested me. Shot in 4K with a private jet, yacht, crane and Ferrari shots, we had it all. Lots of fun. Didn’t go as far as I wanted, usual criticism was it looks beautiful and well made but no true ending, they didn’t like the cliffhanger for a short, Blah blah whatever don’t agree with any of it but not offended either as it was years ago and well past. I made it as a jumping off point to a feature so I didn’t really care if some festivals didn’t think it had closure as for me that was the point - it was a start not an end. Started with a quote from Aubrey

 

Why is everyone just on their phones in the opening? What’s the point of that?
Eugene isn’t a great actor, but the main guy is decent
Too much dialogue, jeez it’s just endless
No idea who these ‘bad guys’ are, just random
He just walked in and deleted everything, no backups at all? Too easy, unrealistic.
And then what was the point of that minor amount of ‘drama’ if they discover it anyway in the end? Eh?
A short story shouldn’t just be a springboard to a larger movie, it should stand on its own two feet.
Couple at end is cheesy
the Ferrari is nice though
and yes it’s easy to criticise etc

 

Eugene is actually a VO actor mainly now, he’s made it pretty big in that field. Unfortunately our talent field here is... limited, to say the least. And I agree with you it’s not that it’s just too much talking, it’s actually that nobody is doing anything while talking in too many scenes. I wouldn’t have done it that way except for limited locations I could use, limited time to film (and more actions mean more shooting days), and too few crew resources up here. We could do the basics but it didn’t translate into what I ultimately wanted. Even the scene you mentioned is not how it was scripted originally either, as far as him stealing the data. That was my only location where they literally kicked me out and I had to improvise a lame scenario.

I honestly only am happy with how the film turned out visually and the locations I could use. I also like the music (Ramin did Sharknado! Lol). I dislike the pacing, the acting is solid but it’s not great, the story is not a short so it doesn’t really work, and it bores me and I made it; it was a failed project. My only such one that didn’t go to many film festivals (3 I think), but it was the germ of an idea. I wrote an unrelated feature script called “The Death of Aging,” had nothing to do with the short though.

I fully agree it simply doesn’t stand on its own two feet as a short. An experiment, but it was almost like trying to cram feature ideas into a short time frame which means nothing gets developed properly. Also too many characters. A short should stay focused on one or two characters and keep it tight.

 

I do like that you hit the major talking points such as daily death, to death do us part, worries of overpopulation, etc.

The latest from Aubrey.

 

An interview with David Sinclair

I knew his father was taking "the stuff" but didn't know it was for a decade.

 

Ah here we go

The company, which has carried out preliminary tests on beagles, claims it will make animals “younger" by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.

“We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we’ll move on to humans,” Church told the podcaster Rob Reid earlier this year.

The company’s efforts to keep its activities out of the press make it unclear how many dogs it has treated so far. In a document provided by a West Coast veterinarian, dated last June, Rejuvenate said its gene therapy had been tested on four beagles with Tufts Veterinary School in Boston. It is unclear whether wider tests are under way.

“Dogs are a market in and of themselves,” Church said during an event in Boston last week. “It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We’ll do dog trials, and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.”

The Harvard group now plans to publish a scientific report on a technique that extends rodents’ lives by modifying two genes to act on four major diseases of aging: heart and kidney failure, obesity, and diabetes. According to Church, the results are “pretty eye-popping.”

In a January presentation about his project at Harvard, Davidsohn closed by displaying a picture of a white-bearded Church as he is now and another as he was decades ago, hair still auburn. Yet the second image was labelled 2117 AD—100 years in the future.

The images reflect Church’s aspirations for true age reversal. He says he’d sign up if a treatment proved safe, or even as a guinea pig in a study. Essentially, Church has said, the objective is to “have the body and mind of a 22-year-old but the experience of a 130-year-old.”

 

A new insight into telomere

-----The researchers, led by Dr. Tony Cesare, Head of the Genome Integrity Unit at Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) at Westmead, discovered that each telomere forms a loop structure. This loop hides the chromosome end and keeps it protected; however, the researchers found that this loop unravels, exposing the chromosome end and registering as DNA damage [1].

The researchers show that rather than just telomere length, it is their structure that is important. As telomeres shorten with age, it becomes increasingly harder for them to form the loop structure and thus protect the chromosome.

The overly simplistic idea that only telomere length is relevant to aging is clearly incorrect, and as our understanding of telomere biology grows, so do the implications of therapies aimed at improving telomere health.-----

So, back in 1999 when the first regenerated cells were made the lengthening of the telomeres was incidental. I wonder if Aubrey de Grey will feel vindicated in some way as he didn't think telomere length was the big deal.

 

I certainly don't wish to die, but damn I could do with a Doctor Who regeneration.
The bones get creaky.

 

A lil something from earlier this year

And a lil more recent

A new biotech start-up Celularity is mining the human placenta for stem cells to use in new applications, including helping cancer patients and extending human life.

 

There's a classic sci fi goldmine - the world's richest million people essentially become immortal due to access to state of the art eternal youth therapy. The other 10 billion people as usual can go **** themselves/are as ****ed as always.

But that's still a better scenario than everyone having access to immortality therapy with no one dying except by accident or illness.

It's also possible that with a long enough lifespan, the cancer mortality rate approaches 100%

 

Well, let's just use greed:

"Indeed, the global anti-aging market was worth $127.9 billion in 2015 and is expected to be worth $237.8 billion by 2022, according an August 2017 report from Orbis Research. And the global market for cancer immunotherapy treatments was valued at $40.7 billion in 2016, according to an October 2017 report from Grand View Research."

In other words, there is a huge amount of money to be made for allowing people the option of living longer and the rich are not going to pass it up. There probably are some that would love to be the only "immortal", but all of them? No. Not every rich person is evil.

As far as better scenario, if you do not wish to live longer, then don't. No one is going to force you.

 

I'm just saying. Population growth = births minus deaths. Increased human longevity benefits individuals, but there's not much evidence it has benefited the species. A big and sudden jump in the human lifespan would cause even more enormous population pressures within a very short time. Even modest longevity gains over the last century have hurt us badly - a full doubling of the population in less time than I've been alive. It's hard to imagine what things would be like if people regularly lived to be 120 or older.

 

No. Overpopulation with current and near term numbers is a fallacy. Starvation around the world is an economics and political problem, not a population problem. I had the most wonderful link explaining as such but it is no longer available and I won't just grab anything off a google search until I have read/seen it. Done correctly, and we are already starting to do so, this world can hold a rather large sum of people numbering in the hundreds of billions before we have to start worrying about extra heat from all those bodies. I personally don't think we'll ever have that issue as people are not just going to keep having babies just because they are alive longer.

 

From what I understand, I mean from what some of Aubrey has said, curing cancer is more or less an essential development in any sort of plan to avoid death from aging. It seems almost for sure that aging is a major factor in cancer. Of course, I'm not saying we don't have a number of cancers that affect young people, too, but the cancer rate skyrockets among the older population. It's definitely a side effect of aging in many cases, as cells wear down, become more susceptible to errors, etc.

I had a random thought because of some article I read on this human trial that finally started with a "silver bullet" cure to cancer, that basically attacks only cancer cells and not any healthy cells. The FDA was so alarmed by the animal trials success, they actually ordered it back to more animal trials, delaying the human trials for several years, but they got the same results without even really understanding the mechanism of success. That's the funniest part, it's like this seems to "work," but they're not entirely sure WHY it works. Ignoring that, though, because as the article mentioned nobody gets their hopes up too high -- we've all heard of these things before and they seem not to go anywhere, sadly -- I started thinking about the thing nobody really thinks about (or should think about). Everyone is rightly like, "Wow that would be amazing, what if we could cure cancer in one fell swoop just like that!" Of course, it would be like the greatest day in human history in some ways, it would seriously be amazing. Imagine the unspoken other side of that, though, where how many tens of thousands (hundreds?) of researchers worldwide are suddenly wondering what to do with their lives now. There are people who have spent decades trying to cure specific types of cancer, and had varying degrees of success. I guess they'd all be polishing their resumes

My family runs a small lab (actually right next door to the lab pictured in my short film, that's how I got the access) working on breast cancer solutions, because my mom died of breast cancer, so in her name we started a fairly well funded lab at OHSU. Call me an optimist, or a cynic of some of the research being done, but I actually find it much more likely that cancer is cured with a silver bullet. I just think a lot of the labs get so focused on their own dilemma and their results are frankly not worth much. Ok, so you developed something where people on this drug now live an average of 17 months instead of 11 months, wow! I'm sorry, but that's not significant. It would only be significant if a FULL cure was right around the corner and you helped someone last that extra 6 months and that was enough to give them the ultimate cure. But that basically means your lab is completely dependent on smarter, better researchers doing superior work to bail out your mediocre results. I always hear the same refrain, "Oh yeah? Try telling that to the family that got an extra 6 months with their loved one!" Umm, ok? Yeah, I would have enjoyed another 6 months with my mom, but in the bigger picture, it wouldn't have made a huge difference. She would still be LONG gone, still wouldn't have seen me make my first feature, still wouldn't have seen me meet my dream girl, or anything else. Again, it's hiding behind unexciting results.

The reason I think it'll be a silver bullet is because I think we have such advanced medical technologies that if we could completely cure individual cancers one by one, we'd already be doing that with more success. It's obviously not easy, and it's because it's so difficult -- ironically -- that I think it'll be the silver bullet method. I wouldn't be surprised if it's when we have massive advancements in nanotechnology and what ends up happening is you can introduce "smart" nanobots into a person's body and these things attack and kill cancer cells wherever they are found, and all of us are at all times coursing with nanobots, not only cancer-killing ones but ones that fight the flu, viruses, whatever. I'd be more impressed with a cancer research path that upped the 10-year survival rate from 10% to 20% or something like that, because that IS a huge difference, it basically means that twice as many people actually survive a substantial length of time (maybe not even dying from that cancer at all), rather than just saying, well everyone died of the cancer still but it just took a few months or a year longer.

 

Within 5 years the world could accept that we are within reach of a post-aging world

They are performing aging reversal trials on dog this year and next year. Human trials would be in 2019-2022 and about 2025 before they are done.

They have a pipeline of more than 60 different gene therapies, which they tested on old mice, alone and in combinations. The Harvard group now plans to publish a scientific report on a technique that extends rodents’ lives by modifying two genes to act on four major diseases of aging: heart and kidney failure, obesity, and diabetes. According to Church, the results are pretty eye-popping.

And more.

 

Longevity escape velocity here by 2030

David Gobel was the first to put forward the concept of longevity escape velocity, or LEV. How far are we from LEV, assuming the current pace of research and no serious showstoppers?

Twelve years, or 2030, is David’s best guess based on what is known today. He anticipates that within 3 years, some interventions will be available via safety trials and that people who are treated will receive benefits that put them on a path toward LEV. He believe things will accelerate from there, as vastly more attention is triggered by early advances. We are seeing the first glimmers of this already.

 

"Ten+ years" is speculative science speak for "**** if I know."

 

Except that human trials are to be attempted by George Church in the next couple of years and Aubrey de Grey raised a separate fund for specifically starting his own in 2021. Unlike the fusion power 20 year joke life extension never really had much in the way of "in ten years" jokes. The closest thing was Aubrey saying if he had 30 million per year he might be able to have true rejuvenation in a decade but has to make do with the 4-5 million a year he has.

 

This isn't a field specific thing, anyone telling you "X technology in ten-ish years" is as wrong as often as they're right, if that. To say nothing of the fact that these same folks guessed "2020" back in the mid-2000s (oh, and Kurzweil guessed 2013 in the early 2000s, but then guessed 2028 in 2013, because Kurzweil).