Longevity News

Why Don't People Ask the Right Questions?

posted on June 22, 2010

More than half the people I introduce the extreme life extension concept to fire back objections to people living longer. I used to react with amazement and disbelief until I realized how deeply ingrained these deathist memes are in most minds. Once I understood the psychology behind these knee-jerk reactions, I realized it was better to simply answer the objections and slowly educate the uninformed as to the realistic possibilities of age-reversal in our lifetime. So that’s why I devoted a section in Life Extension Express to answer common objections. And there are an amazingly wide variety of them.

They vary from such mundane matters as to where all these extra people will live, how pension plans will pay for them and what they'll do with their time. But Aubrey de Grey says the questions are not the right ones. We should balance out these against the waste, heartache and tragedy of 100,000 people a day getting very sick and staying that way a long time… and then dying.

Technology will eventually reverse aging, and technology will solve the problems related to most of the objections I get so tired of hearing. But if you want to get anything done in this field, in most others, and in life, you need to listen. You need to listen to your customers, audience, husband, wife, your children, and especially from people with opposing views.

Sometimes, the best way to answer objections is with questions such as: “Don’t you think if we’re smart enough to extend lives dramatically, we’ll be able to grow more food?” “Do you think letting millions of people die unnecessarily in order to preserve the status quo is a good thing?” “Why do you suppose people focus more on hypothetical problems created by extending lives than on the benefits of doing so?”

Getting people to focus more on longevity than on wringing their hands over potential problems could very well get them to live longer and healthier lives and maybe avoiding being part of the last generation to be done in by aging.

Long Life,
David Kekich
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LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

AUTOLOGOUS STEM CELL REPAIR FOR DAMAGED CORNEAS (June 18 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4774
From BusinessWeek: "Patients blinded in one or both eyes by chemical burns regained their vision after healthy stem cells were extracted from their eyes and reimplanted. The tissue was drawn from the limbus, an area at the junction of the cornea and white part of the eye. It was grown on a fibrous tissue, then layered onto the damaged eyes. The cells grew into healthy corneal tissue, transforming disfigured, opaque eyes into functioning ones with normal appearance and color. The stem-cell treatment restored sight to more than three-quarters of the 112 patients treated. The key to success is to be certain that when the stem cells extracted from the limbus are grown in culture they have the right mix of stem cells and the differentiated cells that form the corneal tissue. If there are too few stem cells in the transplant, the improvement won't last because there will be no reservoir to form the new corneal cells needed with the normal recycling of cells over time. Depending on the depth of the injury, some patients regained sight in as little as two months. Others with deeper injuries needed a second procedure and waited a year before sight was restored."

BONE SCAFFOLDS TO ORDER (June 16 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4771
Researchers continue to make progress in scaffolding materials that enable the body to regrow missing bone: "In contrast to long-term solutions based on titanium, degradable implants are intended to replace the missing pieces of bone only until the fissure closes itself up. That may last months or even years, depending on the size of the defect, the age and health status of the patient. A new implant improves the conditions for the healing process. It emerged from the "Resobone" project of the federal ministry for education and research, and is sized-to-fit for each patient. Unlike the conventional bony substitutes to date, it is not made up as a solid mass, but is porous instead. Precise little channels permeate the implant at intervals of just a few hundred micrometers. The porous canals create a lattice structure which the adjacent bones can grow into. The Resobone implants will primarily replace missing facial, maxillary and cranial bones. Currently, they are able to close fissures of up to 25 square centimeters in size. The patient's computer tomography serves as the template for the precision-fit production of the implants. The work processes - from CT imaging, to construction of the implant, through to its completion - are coordinated in such precise sequences that the replacement for a defective zygomatic bone can be produced in just a few hours, while a five-centimeter large section of cranium can be done overnight."

MORE TISSUE ENGINEERED SKIN
(June 16 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4770
From the Sydney Morning Herald: "A full thickness artificial skin which should dramatically reduce the pain and scarring associated with skin grafts is being developed by Sydney researchers. Burns experts from the University of Sydney and Concord Hospital have started animal trials of a living skin that is grown outside the body and is completely functional when grafted on to the body. Unlike traditional skin grafts, which involve only the thin outer layer of the skin known as the epidermis, the new skin will be able to replace the crucial second layer of skin called the dermis. It takes the body weeks to grow into a skin graft and in that time a lot of excess elastic fibres and collagen will be produced that will then turn into a scar. The scar contracts and it can get so tight that patients lose the movement of their mouth and can't talk, or they can't bend their fingers. Initial testing of the artificial dermis in mice has found it does not scar and contract when it is transplanted. The research has been so successful that a new foundation has been created to centralize the burns research being done at three Sydney hospitals. They hope to create scaffolds that can individualize the skin, allowing it to be different colors."

A FIVE YEAR TIMELINE FOR TISSUE ENGINEERED LIVERS (June 15 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4769
From the Telegraph: a new methodology "could be used to recycle thousands of donated organs which are at present considered too old or damaged for transplantation. Many livers have to be discarded because they are too old or too damaged to be of any use. The new technique works by effectively chemically stripping the old liver down too its basic 'scaffold' or exoskeleton in a process of called 'decellularization'. Onto this frame of connective tissue and blood vessels, they then regrow the new liver using stem cells from the patient. Stem cells from embryos could also be used. The effectively brand new liver is then transplanted back into the patient. At the moment the technique will require donor organs but it is hoped that eventually pig's livers or artificial scaffolds can be used instead - effectively avoiding donors altogether. This scaffold retains for the most part the detailed microarchitecture of the liver, including essential structures such as the blood vessels. We take advantage of this remaining structure to repopulate the scaffold with liver cells to recreate a functional liver. As we have shown this re-engineered liver performs the most essential liver functions in the lab and can be transplanted into rats and stays intact, with the cells able to survive."

CALORIE RESTRICTION SLOWS ASPECTS OF BRAIN AGING (June 14 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4767
More data from primate studies: "Caloric restriction (CR) reduces the pathological effects of aging and extends the lifespan in many species, including nonhuman primates, although the effect on the brain is less well characterized. We used two common indicators of aging, motor performance speed and brain iron deposition measured in vivo using MRI, to determine the potential effect of CR on elderly rhesus macaques eating restricted and standard diets. Both the CR and control monkeys showed age-related increases in iron concentrations in globus pallidus (GP) and substantia nigra (SN), although the CR group had significantly less iron deposition in the GP, SN, red nucleus, and temporal cortex. A diet x age interaction revealed that CR modified age-related brain changes, evidenced as attenuation in the rate of iron accumulation in basal ganglia and parietal, temporal, and perirhinal cortex. Additionally, control monkeys had significantly slower fine motor performance on the Movement Assessment Panel, which was negatively correlated with iron accumulation in left SN and parietal lobe, although CR animals did not show this relationship. Our observations suggest that the CR-induced benefit of reduced iron deposition and preserved motor function may indicate neural protection similar to effects described previously in aging rodent and primate species." You might recall that iron buildup is associated with lipofuscin accumulation in our cells, which damages the process of autophagy, which in turn leads to degeneration.

STEM CELL TOURISM (June 14 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4766

PopSci examines medical tourism for stem cell therapies, an entirely rational response to the unnecessary costs and delays imposed on medical development by the FDA: "The FDA thinks all stem-cell procedures should undergo clinical trials for safety and efficacy before companies begin selling them as therapies. Its formal review process, the agency maintains, is the only way to protect patients from treatments that are ineffective or downright dangerous. But with multistage clinical trials lasting up to five years and costing as much as $100 million, a growing number of doctors and patients have started pursuing other options. In a controversial move in 2005, the FDA reclassified autologous stem cells that are manipulated by growth factors or other compounds as drugs. This criterion holds whether the cells are derived from a patient's own body or from someone else's. Many believe that the policy change gives the agency more authority than Congress ever intended it to have. Grekos's theory is that pharmaceutical companies are pressuring the FDA to treat autologous stem cells as a drug in order to secure their own future profits."  Clinical trials are taking place overseas, as the article notes. The quality of therapies offered varies widely, as is true whether or not a market is regulated: this means you have to do some legwork to find out who is well regarded. But at least the option is available - there has to be freedom to experiment and to choose if there is to be rapid progress.

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