Mental Health

Researcher S. Jay Olshansky will be the guest at the next Sunday chat hosted by the Immortality Institute:

Sun December 2nd
- 4:30 Pacific
- 5:30 Mountain
- 6:30 Central
- 7:30 Eastern

You can look back in the archives here for much more on the Longevity Dividend:

• Pitching Healthy Life Extension as the "Longevity Dividend"
• Criticizing the Longevity Dividend
• The Longevity Dividend: A Call for Endorsements
• From the Longevity Dividend Symposium
• Update on the Longevity Dividend

As far as I can see, Olshansky is in the camp of "metabolic re-engineering and slow but solid progress in slowing aging is the way ahead, but it'd be wonderful if things that worked far better were demonstrated to be plausible." Which is hopefully a transitionary stage on the way to "I always thought that the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence was a great idea." We'll see.

One of the constants of our present age of change and progress is that biology is always more complex than first thought. It's a given. Evolution is under no constraint to produce designs that fall within the bounds of complexity we feel comfortable taking in at one sitting.

The scientific community will still master our biology - reverse-engineer it, replicate it, and ultimately greatly improve on it - but we shouldn't be surprised when hoped-for simplicities in biological mechanisms fail to materialize. That's all the more reason for greater support and funding for efficient, goal-driven medical research.

MIT: Stem-cell therapies for brain more complicated than thought:

"In the stem cell field, it is generally thought that the main limitation to achieve brain repair is simply for the new neurons to reach a given brain region and to ensure their survival. Once there, it has been assumed that stem cells will ‘know what to do’ and will become the type of neuron that is missing. It seems that is not the case at all. Our experiments indicate that things are much more complicated."

The Immortality Institute volunteers are upgrading; always a painful process with a large forum and a content management system extensively customized over the years. If you haven't stopped by the Institute forum in a while, you should do so. Where else are likely to be able to participate in a discussion on the first recorded practitioner of calorie restriction - and noted author of the Renaissance - with researcher S. Jay Olshansky and other noteworthies?

A noble idea is a noble idea, and we shouldn't be surprised to find people from the past with constructive contributions to make on the topic of healthy longevity - taking into account the state of scientific knowledge in their time:

To take a contrary point of view, however, is this really any different - important names of centuries past aside - from the standard mainstream media coverage of centenarians today? The form requires the journalist to ask for the centernarian's thoughts on longevity, but living for a long time doesn't make you an expert on how to live for a long time. Everyone has an opinion on how it is they've lived so long, but opinion isn't science.

When you're wandering through the vast libraries of writing on the topics of aging and longevity, remember that the scientific method is how progress is made. Opinions can be good, can be well-thought, can even be right as it later turns out, but opinions alone are not the foundation for a path forward.

This caught my eye while I was meandering my way through PubMed; a nice turn of phrase in this way of looking at the mechanisms of aging and the future of aging in a world shaped by human action.

Senescence Viewed through the Lens of Comparative Biology:

Humans are the only species capable of exploiting the loophole in the biological contract of life (bodies that are not designed to fail). Human ingenuity (science, medicine, public health) has produced interventions that manufacture survival time by delaying death, and in so doing, has created a phenomenon never before seen in the history of life - population aging (and all the societal and health consequences that go with it).

Aging and individual death might well be the inevitable consequence of evolutionary pressure on cellular life, but it's far more noteworthy that we have the capacity to do something about it. Intelligence and technology are a loophole big enough to created physical immortality - given enough resources and time. The big question is whether the first stages on the road to the repair of aging and greatly increased healthy life spans happen rapidly enough to benefit you and I, or whether cryosuspension will be our only opportunity.

The choice is ours; how much do we want healthy longevity and how much are we prepared to work towards that goal?

Mice lacking the gene to create the protein adenylyl cyclase 5 (AC5) live longer. This was accidentally discovered during research into potential heart therapies, and published earlier this year:

Like many longevity mutations of this magnitude, this is thought to invoke the beneficial mechanisms of calorie restriction in some way. Researchers are still working on clarifying the action of the AC5 mutation, as illustrated by the latest paper on the topic:

Adenylyl Cyclase 5: A New Clue in the Search for the "Fountain of Youth"?

A fair number of bases covered there. "We don't really know yet, but have some places to start looking" would have been fine. Metabolism is complex; there's no end to the resouces we can productively sink into understanding the space of potential beneficial alterations to mammalian metabolic processes. Those same resouces, I feel, would be better directed to understanding how to repair the metabolism we have. After all, if you can repair age-related metabolic damage once, you can come back in ten years time and do it again - and again and again, for so long as you care to continue. If developing that possibility is on the table for the same sort of cost as developing a one-time manipulation that slows the accumulation of damage by 30%, I know which route I'd choose.

This is exactly the choice facing us today, and for some strange reason the mainstream of medical science is headed down the inferior, more costly, less effective path of metabolic manipulation. Comparatively little attention is given to the more effective strategies of repair. Changing this reality is one very good reason to support the work of the Methuselah Foundation.