Do you actually believe that we can "reverse aging" -- become young again?
I read David Sinclair's book recently : "Lifespan - why we age and why we don't have to" , and I must say that the way I look at aging now is very different than the way I was looking at it a couple of month ago .
He restates the four words : "Aging is a disease" over and over again and he also elaborates the way that the medical sector tries to "CURE" the mainly driven diseases by aging process such as : heart disease , dementia , etc ..
by instead telling people to move more , lift heavies weights , eat healthy , doing it by spending money on pharmaceuticals that eventually putting havoc on their bodies .
In here : Lifespan Expanded: The Scientific Quest For A Fountain Of Youth - YouTube , he and other scientists that are in the leading research to how to reverse aging or even prevent it , explains all about it .
One of the intrensting things that I saw there is cellular reprogramming . David is working on it right now and already shown that by reprogramming the cells in a blind mouse's eye , the eye started to work again .
What are your thoughts on it ? Wouldn't it be cool to "go back in time" to the younger years of ourselves and being healthy again (and possibly lift heavy squats and dealifts) ?
If the reprogramming really will work in humans , hell , the possebilities it will open for humanity are mindblowing !
Do you actually believe that we can "reverse aging" -- become young again?
Yes .
In the book he describes a theory called : "The mathematical theory of communication" - it explains in general how information transforms between a transmitter and a reciver . Due to noise , a lot of information is getting lost in the process , so there must be a backup copy of the original information , so that the reciver can retrive the lost information from there . Its analogous to our epigenomes losing information with time that needs to be retrived . He and his collegaus might found the way to retrive back that lost information .
This is from April 8 : Old skins cells reprogrammed to regain youthful function: Findings could lead to targeted approach for treating aging. -- ScienceDaily
This is the experiment that he led (reprogramming damaged mouse's eye nerves) : Research | The Sinclair Lab (click on research tab and they have the explenation about it) .
Keep us posted.
Aging is inevitable; senescence can be inhibited. But current treatments work by inhibiting mTORC1 signaling - you know, that key driver of building and maintaining muscle. This probably* harms your actual in-vivo life. In any case, the market of wealthy, weak, unmotivated, and easily convinced people remains tantilizingly large, so investment proceeds unabated.
* This paper claims that inhibiting mTORC1 is “overwhelmingly” protective against sarcopenia, since it purportedly becomes too high as you age. But their actual results show that mTORC1-inhibited mice had less lean mass, less overall mass, and worse proportions of fast/slow twitch fibers. They just ran longer and had faster metabolism. Strange that sophisticated, high-quality cellular research misunderstands basic exercise concepts.
The question by the OP may be based on the fear of death.
People have capitalized financially on that since the beginning of time.
When you are free of the fear of dying you learn to live deeply. You won’t confront it however unless you are forced to, it is not a process undertaken by choice.
However I do like the engineering concept of entropy, the unavoidable decay in all systems.
You are born, you live , and you die.
What am I missing exactly?
(Shiva your posts rock.)
There used to be a place by me as a kid called "Aging Alternatives". One day I was riding in the car with my Grandpa, and seeing the sign for the place he said, "The only alternative to aging is dying young".
This isn’t the Joe Rogan Experience .
The link to the Harvard page mostly shows us (unpublished, non-peer-reviewed) work focused on slowing, not reversing senescence. The big exception is the ICE mouse, which is a model of aging based on epigenetic changes, which they liken to scratches on a CD. So they have the scratched CD model of epigenetic aging, sure. An important initial step. And they say they are "looking for the polish."
Good luck to them. They'll need it. I have no doubt that molecular and mitochondrial medicine can slow aging processes, perhaps quite dramatically, and turn us all into Methuselah ("where are we gonna park?")*, but on the actual reversal of aging you have to color me skeptical. Per QM, information is never destroyed, but it can be effectively lost, to the extent that the work and increase in entropy involved in restoring a disordered information-rich system makes such restoration by information retrieval physically impossible. And this all assumes that the restoration of a hard drive will reverse all the practical consequences of original failure--and I think we all know that is not the case. The Arrow of Time is a real bastard.
But hey. If we are going to conquer the Second Law--which I doubt--I wish those Harvard guys would hurry up about it. I'm gonna be 62, for fuck's sake.
*Don Henley, "Building the Perfect Beast."
David and his team using the Yamanaka factors - discovered first by Shinya Yamanaka - and those are Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc . They first used all 4 of them to retrive the lost epigenetic information from the mouse's eye cells , and the mice got a number of tumors and died .
In the second experiment , they took off the c - Mys and tried it again , and the blind mice has gotten the vision back (and by their calculations , the cells in the eye got young again - god knows how) . It's greatly astonishing .
By the way , there are studies in the process right now about NMN (Nicotinamide mononucleotide) coupled with Resveratrol that wants to figure out if those two can actually help fight aging by increasing the NAD levels in the cells of the body , and thus making them work better so old people can do regular stuff again (moving , going outside , lifting weights better etc .. ) .
Its not a question of if it will happen , its the question when it will happen . Yes there are a lot of stuff to figure out in the way , but hey , the technological advancement is going so fast in the last decade and Super computers powered by AI will help those guys to make this process a reality sooner that we are capble to imagine .
This at least are my thoughts .
If humanity wins aging , humanity wins it all .