Live to be 1000

[Matabiri]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4003063.stm

Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000. Here, he explains why.

Of course, this is fascinating. However, I mainly mention it because, wow; that's a beard.

 

[Yaotl]

We will still die, of course - from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera - but not in the drawn-out way in which most of us die at present.

Why wouldn't his magic aging cure work with snake bites and the flu? He's pretty enamored with medical science, yet he doesn't think it can cure a virus or make people immune from snake bites?

 

[Matabiri]

Why wouldn't his magic aging cure work with snake bites and the flu? He's pretty enamored with medical science, yet he doesn't think it can cure a virus or make people immune from snake bites?

Viruses adapt pretty quickly, so while it may be possible to do much, it's quite hard to eliminate all of them. Fatal snake bites, I'd guess, generally occur in out of the way places where anti-venom is hard to come by quickly.

 

[Art Vandelay]

Each of these things is potentially fixable by technology that either already exists or is in active development.

Translation: we're working on it. How does he go from this to "it's just around the corner"?

If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000.

Wow, this guy really is rather ignorant for someone who claims to be an expert in medicine. How can he solve ageing [sic ] when he doesn't even understand probability?

 

[Matabiri]

Wow, this guy really is rather ignorant for someone who claims to be an expert in medicine. How can he solve ageing [sic ] when he doesn't even understand probability?

I noticed that: if you've got a 1/1000 chance of dying every year, there's a 1/3 chance (roughly) that you'll live to 1000. In his defence, he does say "well under one in a 1000"; to have a 50% chance of surviving to 1000 the correct odds should be about 6 in 10,000. Close enough.

 

[drkitten]

Why wouldn't his magic aging cure work with snake bites and the flu? He's pretty enamored with medical science, yet he doesn't think it can cure a virus or make people immune from snake bites?

If you read the description of his "magical aging cure," then, no, it won't work on viruses or snake bites; his proposed cure is fixing a few particular kinds of age-related damages -- "here are seven major types of molecular and cellular damage that eventually become bad for us - including cells being lost without replacement and mutations in our chromosomes."


Snake bites don't induce mutations, and they don't typically result in "cells being lost without replacement." Cobra venom, for example, is neurotoxic and results in your breathing centers (and heart) being paralyzed. No genetic damage -- you merely asphyxiate.

Sure, there's probably another form of magical cure -- I think it's usually called "antivenin" -- that will treat cobra bites. But you can't expect it to come out of the same causes and treatements as a method of reversing mutations....