So maybe I am too much a layperson here, but even without any direct therapetutic effects, it is pretty remarkable to have an easily scalable mechanism to get self-replicating agents into tumors, but nowhere else, is it not?
Yes it is amazing! Solid tumors tend to be poorly oxygenated, as they don't have a good network of blood vessels to supply them. The bacteria in these experiments can only live in low oxygen environments, so they will multiply in the tumor and die in any other part of the body they end up in. It's a clever idea, hopefully it will be successful.
Even lay-er person, but maybe the specificity is not that impressive in mice? Perhaps when you scale to more complex animals it is inevitable to see false positives (detrimental effects to healthy cells)?
The answer is type-safety. LLMs produce errors, as do humans. A language with carefully designed semantics and a well-implemented safety checker (or maybe even a proof assistant) will help express much more correct code.
I've had the most success running Claude iteratively with mypy and pytest. But it regularly wants to just delete the tests or get rid of static typing. A language like Haskell augmented with contracts over tests wouldn't allow that. (Except for diverging into a trivial ad-hoc dynamic solution, of course.)
Just another round in the decades-long battle of who owns your device: Industry or state. It's never you, mind you, who owns your device.
The perversion is that you are legally responsible for what happens with your device, but you are unable to prevent others from using it as they wish. An app like this is automation for putting people into jail. Just upload some illegal content and then "detect it". There's literally nothing you can do to defend against this attack, and it will work until it's overused.
Is there a rich caste of doctors or pharmaceutical shareholders that don't need to work and live off these dividends? Or is the system so inefficient that most people in it aren't contributing to actual health care?
If you want to understand where the money is actually going then this Peter Attia Drive podcast episode with Dr. Saum Sutaria is the best high level overview that I've heard. Seriously it's worth listening to and will clear up a lot of the misconceptions that many people have.
Nearly all of it goes to grifters who hang on to the system but don't contribute anything. The obvious ones are all the insurance company employees who don't provide any healthcare, just push paperwork to try to find ways to deny coverage. And all the oberpaid administrators, and of course those multi-million bonuses to all executives involved need to be paid somehow.
If that sounds overly cynical, consider a primary care doctor visit. I get about 15 minutes of the time of a nurse assistant (some searching suggests average wage 50K) and 12 minutes with the doctor (searching suggests average wage of 250K).
So the cost of salaries to the people that actually provided me healthcare that day, is $6 + $24 = $30. Even if we double the salaries of both nurse and doctor, it'd be a $60 visit.
Of course, there's office overhead like rent, utilities, etc.
But I get billed $500 for that visit. SO where is all that money going? Obviously not to the health care professionals.
If we simply removed all the grifters from the system, health care would be quite affordable.
That does not match your earlier statement about administrators or health insurance, though. Or does your primary care doctor work in a big hospital that takes a 400% margin?
I don't know where the majority of the money goes, if you're looking for a precise breakdown.
The point I'm making is that only a very very tiny fraction of the bill goes to the people actually providing healthcare (the nurse and the doctor).
Of course some overhead is inevitable, but there is very clearly a vast amount of waste here that could be eliminated. A nurse + a doctor provide $30 of their time, and $470 of overhead is tacked on to that. That's why healthcare is so insanely expensive in the US.
Doctors are by far the highest paid professional occupation in America. The AMA is the most powerful trade union in history and restricts the number of new doctors, pushing up prices.
Specialist doctors are one of the highest paid professions in almost all countries. There are hardly any jobs more important than those of say a heart surgeon or a neurosurgeon.
Later releases of U8 fixed jumping so it was less pixel-precise. It was still a clumsy mechanic, and the game still felt unfinished. But TBH I had a much worse reaction to Ultima IX, which capped off the series with a giant steaming turd. When I managed to get U9 to run at all after several years, I bounced out after a couple hours of playing. Still the only Ultima game I never finished.
U.S. law. It's pretty obvious that neither Amazon nor Google are good options for serious actors that are not the U.S. government. So if they want to make business outside the U.S., they need to dance around the fact that in the end they bow to the will of Washington.
> Why is Microsoft so eager to also be able to know this?
A database of pretty much all Western citizen's faces? That's a massive sales opportunity for all oppressive and wanna-be oppressive governments. Also, ads.
Examine your assumptions. There is no inherent reason that there has to be a catch. We are all from a long line of cellular reproduction that has lasted billions of years. There is no inherent reasons why cellular mechanisms can't keep maintaining/replacing a collection of those cell lineages...our relatively short lifespans are probably the products of evolutionary fitness functions acting on more fruitful strategies for reproductive success than staying off aging.
When the upside is extraordinary, it’s very reasonable to expect some downside, just based on experience of, like, everything ever.
As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes. Human bodies are adapted to environments with harsh constraints about injuries, pathogens, temperature, energy usage, etc. The only catch to counteracting those adaptations is that it makes you worse at being a hunter-gatherer.
> Biology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes
Good example is vitamin supplementation. There isn't a downside. It's just a fuck-up we can't synthesise vitamin C. (There may be path-dependent benefits, e.g. our jaw muscles getting smaller thereby permitting a larger brain. But we don't need to be vitamin C restricted anymore.)
Catch is perhaps a strong word. Trade-off would be more accurate.
Every action in the known universe (and surely in some unknown ones too) results in a trade-off. This is maybe the only precept on software architecture that doesn't "depends" on anything and is closer to natural law.
Sure, but there's usually plenty of other tradeoffs in any system of notable complexity. This is certainly a system of notable complexity. We may find that there is mental degradation that's not covered by this. We may discover that cancer is practically unavoidable if you live long enough, and the problem compounds even further with age than we can anticipate now. There's never just one lever being pulled in isolation.
I mean, if you gain +20 years of longevity to most of the body, but not to mind? That's still 20 extra years of lifespan if you're lucky. And if you aren't, it's still better health in general, until your mind goes.
There are old people who remain lucid and active well into their nineties, not getting dementia or cancer - through some combination of good luck, good genes and good lifestyle choices. They live a good life - until a stroke cripples them, or the heart fails them, or a very mundane illness like flu puts them in bed and they never quite recover from it. If that couldn't happen to them, how many more good years would that buy them?
Any treatment that addresses the aging-associated systematic decline in bodily functions should be extremely desirable. Even if it wouldn't help everyone live longer, it would help a lot of people live better lives nonetheless.
My personal thought on the "catch" (of "curing death") is that we seriously don't understand how removing or slowing evolution in the equation at the population level plays out over time. Evolution seems to be a fairly robust and complex subsystem of reality.
My assumption is, there are lots of rich people who want to live forever and lots of people who want their wealth and breakthroughs with anti ageing were quite rare or rather non existent as far as I know.
My assumption is that I'd feel more certain if this science had been conducted in the U.S. or Europe, but your assumptions is a little too conspiratorial for me.
The title is overblown. This just improves certain biomarkers that are associated with aging. This might improve healthspan but there is no indication that these monkeys will live any longer than the natural range.
"The super stem cells prevent age-related bone loss while rejuvenating over 50% of the 61 tissues analyzed." (including the brain).
What do people die of when they die of 'old age'? There's the 3 pillars: cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative. These are often (but not always) metabolic diseases; i.e. cardiovascular death often arises from kidney insufficiency. If you can regenerate the liver, kidney, etc. indefinitely, a large vector of metabolic disease is probably diminished or disappears.
In the paper, monkeys restored brain volume. They reduced the levels of senescent cells to youthful levels. They increased bone mass. This reduces or eliminates many of the threats that inflict casualties among the centenarian population.
Sure, something else could come up that the monkeys start dying from instead. But, given the way humans and monkeys die of old age—by reducing or eliminating all known threats—it's hard to see how this wouldn't extend lifespan.
This paper doesn't prove that it extends lifespan. So to speculate on that extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence to back it up is useless. It would be far easier to prove this out on a species with a much smaller lifespan like mice, not to mention cheaper, but so far we're unable to make a mouse live longer than 5 years.
Yes, I'm certainly speculating. It certainly seems that this could be a path to extending lifespan. I think the claim is less than "extraordinary" though. Many teams are working to figure out how to extend lifespan in many species—it seems likely that there will be meaningful progress in the coming years or decades.
Monkeys are not humans, anti-aging is imprecise and does not necessarily translate into longer life expectancies for people, and promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too.
The implanted stem cells, however, were human. (The fact that that the treatments did not cause "fever or substantial changes in immune cell levels (lymphocytes, neutrophils, and monocytes), which are commonly monitored for xenograft-related immune responses," is itself surprising.)
> promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too
Correct, though I'd say because this is early-stage medical research. Not because it's targeting longevity. I'd be similarly sceptical of an N = 16 early-stage drug trial for the flu.
16 primates is not small when it comes to primate studies. In any case, knowing how expensive and rare primate research is to conduct, I doubt this is the first animal model used on this approach.
In terms of replicatability, it is also not always the sample size, it is the effect size. Small samples do affect ability to generalize, but the point is that sample size isn't everything.
Oh, absolutely correct. Small study doesn't mean shit science. It just means there is plenty of room for randomness and hidden variables to create havoc on the way to a treatment.
I skimmed the article looking for a lifespan plot. Didn't see one. Instead it is replaced by a "proprietary multidimensional primate aging clock measurement". Take it as you will...
Or maybe not. Some species are very resistant to cancer. For example, bats basically never get it, even though they live up to 40 years.
Would they get cancer if they lived for 400 years? Maybe not either. Their immune systems are very good, better than ours.
(We humans don't really want to acknowledge that some other animals may have better immune systems, or any other systems, at their disposal.)
On the other end of the scale, mice die of cancer while not even three years old, because their immune systems are really bad at fighting cancer cells.
Cancer in mammals seems to be a function of failing immune systems rather than raw age in numbers. In some species, including us humans, weakening of the immune system goes hand in hand with aging. But in others it does not.
Peto's paradox - and the existence of whales in particular.
If cancer really is an inevitability, then whales, who have both livespan limits longer than that of humans, and enormous bodies with a staggering amount of living cells, would be full of cancer. They aren't.
Clearly, humans must have better innate cancer suppression than mice, and whales must have better innate cancer suppression than humans.
There are some hints that this may come down to programmed cell death and DNA repair mechanisms (i.e. the p53 pathway) more than the immune system tweaks - with immune response being the "last resort" of cancer suppression. But we also don't know enough about the immune system to be able to examine it the same detail we can examine the DNA repair pathways.
The correct way to phrase this is that humans have a level of cancer that does not greatly impede the fitness of the species in having offspring. We didn't hill climb into other evolutionary protective mechanisms because they either were not discovered or did not convey appropriate fitness benefits.
Our evolutionary biology doesn't "care" if we get cancer. Just that we have healthy children and can rear them for one or two generations. That was a (locally) optimal algorithm.
We have plenty of in-built checks and protections in our molecular biology, and they are sufficient to expand the species.
So the best way to get induced pluripotent stem cells is through the Yamanaka factors, which are proteins coded for by genes which are not expressed in mature cells. Using all four Yamanaka factors is a one-way ticket to tumor town. But, as it turns out, using three of the four still gets you IPSCs without the elevated cancer risk.
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