I do wonder how the psychology of humanity will change once you can't wait for someone to die, and conversely, you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Without going in to spoilers, the recent season of the Revolutions podcast about a future fictional revolution on Mars touches on this a fair bit. Someone about to die seizes power for himself, but no one cares much because he was already in charge and extending his reign a few more years till he dies was no big deal, until he extends his life and lives another 75 years.
The risk of death per year increasing with number of years lived is aging.
Without that people have lived longer are more likely to have lower risks of death per year. And thus older people in such a society would on average live longer.
Unless it also cures cancer the most likely outcome is that people who get the treatment will just stay young until they get cancer and die. Also, as I understand it cancer also slows down in old age, so staying younger could mean faster cancers possibly negating some of the gains from the decreased aging.
I don't think that the assertions are nonsense, but I don't understand how this works.
I have heard variants on this assertion:
"Two of the most prominent purported underlying causes of aging are chronic inflammation and senescent cells."
One thing that surprises me is that telomeres aren't mentioned.
I also don't understand how this is happening (is apoptosis somehow triggered?):
"Now, the Academy researchers demonstrate that SRCs reduce senescent cells, measured using a blue dye called SA-β-Gal, in multiple organs, including the brain, heart, and lungs."
The main mechanism of action appears to be:
"The therapeutic efficacy of MPCs is largely attributed to their paracrine actions, with exosomes playing a pivotal role in mediating these effects."
The researchers do not appear to fully understand how this is happening:
"Among the diverse geroprotective functions of SRCs in the brain and ovary, the restorative effect of SRC-derived exosomes on aged cells and their surroundings emerges as a key mechanism. Rejuvenation of aged cells by exosomes likely involves multiple pathways and targets."
“To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
If you had asked me how I reckoned they reversed aging in Monkeys, I honestly would have said "stem cells". But then again, my answer to a lot of questions these days is "stem cells".
No more new generations, no more change. Just immensely powerful old people who look young grabbing ever more tightly onto power.
Right now generational wealth fizzles out due to idiot heirs eventually appearing. Imagine if someone could ride a thousand years of exponential gains.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
It would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology. Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
If that doesn't cool your jets, let's say the treatment is so cheap it can be widely available to everyone. Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries. It's madness. I don't think we've evolved enough, ethically speaking, as a species to wrestle with such long lifespans.
>Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
What makes the current lifespan any more correct than 2x or 3x, or 0.5x of a century or two ago? Given that life expectancy was much shorter a century ago, should we start randomly executing people to keep "the uber-wealthy and powerful" from living too long? That would probably have kept "the current American president" from being in power.
Life expectancy was shorter a century ago because infant mortality, disease and injury pull the average down. We've done an amazing job of a society pulling up that lower end, but lifespan associated with normal aging is actually fairly stable. For example, Plato lived to be roughly 80 years old.
Iiuc it wasn’t a comment about what the perfect lifespan is. It’s expressing a concern about how people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power.
Or put differently: it’s a request, given limited resources let’s expend effort on a fairer society, not one with longer lived people.
> people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power
Sure. One of which would be broadly granting access to it.
Like, if a country tried to restrict such technology to its leaders, you could probably trigger regime change by simply promising to share the technology in the event of deposement. Every party member who barely missed the cut would become your revolutionary.
That’s possible, I suppose. I think @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that. For example: labor camps.
> @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that
Nihilistic Luddism. It works against any argument for making the world a better place.
> For example: labor camps
...what's the connection between longevity and labor camps? Empirically, as life expectancies (at birth and in adulthood) have risen, the prevalence of labor camps has gone down. We can see this both longitudinally and between countries.
Uber rich have means of extending their power to the next generation anyway. Look at North Korea. It's stagnant and hardly changed despite changing hand 3 times.
Whereas if you live a super long life, you can't afford to be risk averse and hope for a dictator to die of old age and hope that will somehow magically change thing.
Anti aging is not just about living long. Having a good quality of life as long as you live is essential. The world population is ageing and costs of caring for them will be huge cost for humanity.
I feel like the point mostly comes down to “our current society sucks so we shouldn’t want to live longer in it,” but that could be improved and you can always just, ya know, dip out.
I want this longevity to be real. I have to stick around long enough to see if people respond differently to me when they are older.
'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain' Nobody seems to agree on who actually said that.
Your comment appears to be based in fear, without presenting any reasonable argument against extended lifespans. The idea that a naughty president, or a prisoner, would live hundreds of years is not a longevity problem, its a politics problem.
I would expect it to shift power dynamics quite dramatically, and probably in ways that can't be accurately predicted. What happens when raising a family no longer occupies the bulk of adults' healthy lives and lived experience and wisdom is no longer dragged down by the gradual descent into senility? What if age didn't inversely correlate to neuroplasticity? What if as a young person, your runway to get where you want to go is 80+ years after graduating high school instead of 30-40? All sorts of assumptions and social structures would be upended.
This study appears to have used "human embryonic stem cells (hESCs)" [1]. We haven't tested this with iPSCs [2].
Even if it only works with hESCs, if the part of the population that thinks blastocysts are people wants to live a third or a quarter as long as the part that doesn't, I don't see a problem with that. We're basically going in that direction with vaccination anyway.
Thank you for the details about this article but that's not quite what I meant.
I meant where do you get enough stem cells to make the procedure widely available to the developed world? Stem cells are kinda scarce, as far as I know, so it may gate such a thing.
Embryonic stem cells are rare in America because of religious types. They're not particularly difficult to manufacture or extract--the limit is really human eggs, and we can make those in the lab [1]. (Human sperm are not, for many reasons, difficult to secure.)
I'd actually guess hESCs would be the cheapest route. If we insist on iPSCs, then this turns into a personalised medicine treatment. But in that, it's no different from e.g. oncology.
I'll just grant you that most societies are wholly unequipped to deal with long lifespans, and there will be tons of murder, exploitation, and suffering if we fixed our biology. First, how is that any different than the current situation? Second, do you expect societies to quickly evolve to fix all of these problems (or at least tame them), much like societies had to do after the invention of fire, agriculture, steel, gunpowder, or steam?
In today's regulatory environment, I don't even think the CEO of the immortality service provider would know if their service were safe. But you can guarantee it will have personalized pricing calculated right at the edge of the immense wealth required to have that service. And it's a high priced subscription too, you betcha.
The next problem would be overpopulation - OTOH, if people could live naturally for 1000 years or so, manned space travel to habitable planets would be a lot more feasible.
You're welcome to die if you'd like, but I'll take my chances on living longer with any unknown repercussions.
The technology would have to be accessible to everyone, otherwise "the wealthy" would be murdered. And no, some futuristic sci-fi bullshit isn't going to save them.
> Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries.
I don't really understand this line of reasoning at all. Slaves exist, and slavery is miserable, therefore nobody on the planet should live beyond current human lifetimes? If a slave or exploited person is going to get healthcare for something that might otherwise cause them to die, are you arguing healthcare should be withheld?
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
The odds of this actually happening are about about zero anyway, so this is not something to be concerned about. I am more optimistic, if it were to happen ,in unlocking economic potential. Why would we not want some of society's most productive people to live longer. Think of all the careers derailed by illness, lives separated by death.
> Picture a world where a slew of today's despots get to live for two, or three human lifespans
Uprisings or outright assassinations would become much more common.
Seriously. Every senior government official or sniper in Russia who isn't happy with Putin is placated by telling themselves "everybody dies sooner or later". Take that away and you'll force people to do something instead of just waiting out the clock.
Wake me when you have J. Fred Muggs[11] riding a horse on TV and asking his doctor if stem cell injections are right for him. Until then, I'll remain skeptical, thanks.
>Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever
since the end of monarchies autocracy has been impersonal and institutionalized. You can think of the Pope or Dalai Lama as software, the latter literally being rebooted when the last one kicks the bucket, the substrate doesn't matter much.
In the words of Jung: people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Big Brother is a program, not a person and so physical death doesn't help you much in that regard.
Did nobody notice that this is a spam blog designed to sell NAD+ supplements?
I'd love the current generation of POSs in power to die off naturally before those advancements will be applied, thank you.
I do wonder how the psychology of humanity will change once you can't wait for someone to die, and conversely, you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you.
Without going in to spoilers, the recent season of the Revolutions podcast about a future fictional revolution on Mars touches on this a fair bit. Someone about to die seizes power for himself, but no one cares much because he was already in charge and extending his reign a few more years till he dies was no big deal, until he extends his life and lives another 75 years.
> once you can't wait for someone to die, and consequently, you can't expect to die before consequences catch up to you
People will still die, even in a world without ageing, which this treatment doesn't promise.
The risk of death per year increasing with number of years lived is aging.
Without that people have lived longer are more likely to have lower risks of death per year. And thus older people in such a society would on average live longer.
Unless it also cures cancer the most likely outcome is that people who get the treatment will just stay young until they get cancer and die. Also, as I understand it cancer also slows down in old age, so staying younger could mean faster cancers possibly negating some of the gains from the decreased aging.
The Altered Carbon universe is a manifestation of this.
I'm certain, at some point in the not so distant future, Neuralink will create an arm of the company to build "sleeves".
Anyone have an ETA on Curious Yellow?
https://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)
h/t HN user cstross
Consequences seem to not matter so we’ll just get a bunch of meths like from altered carbon.
cf. Palpatine
Wishing harm on someone is not acceptable behavior on HN. Ideological warfare is not acceptable behavior on HN. Please do not do this here.
This article, like most about medical breakthroughs, is probably nonsense.
And that's good because, for my part, I plan to shuffle off this mortal coil in time not to see America elect Nick Fuentes as President.
I don't think that the assertions are nonsense, but I don't understand how this works.
I have heard variants on this assertion:
"Two of the most prominent purported underlying causes of aging are chronic inflammation and senescent cells."
One thing that surprises me is that telomeres aren't mentioned.
I also don't understand how this is happening (is apoptosis somehow triggered?):
"Now, the Academy researchers demonstrate that SRCs reduce senescent cells, measured using a blue dye called SA-β-Gal, in multiple organs, including the brain, heart, and lungs."
The main mechanism of action appears to be:
"The therapeutic efficacy of MPCs is largely attributed to their paracrine actions, with exosomes playing a pivotal role in mediating these effects."
The researchers do not appear to fully understand how this is happening:
"Among the diverse geroprotective functions of SRCs in the brain and ovary, the restorative effect of SRC-derived exosomes on aged cells and their surroundings emerges as a key mechanism. Rejuvenation of aged cells by exosomes likely involves multiple pathways and targets."
“To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
If you think the next generation will be any better, I have bad news for you...
> love the current generation of POSs in power to die off naturally before those advancements will be applied
These treatments aren't panaceas. The benefit would almost certainly accrue inversely with age.
To make room for a new generation of POSs?
Enter a generation of spoiled nepo babies with AI Terminators to put them in power and medical immortality to keep them in power.
In 200 years, we're going to look at our lack of checks and balances against gerontocracy as naive as trusting monarchy in the middle ages.
Too late... Putin is already all over this. No need for organ transplants :)
150 is the new 70
This is in reference to recent events: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/05/healthy-living...
Tell them it's an anti-aging vaccine.
Contrariwise, neither Hitler nor Stalin died of old age. Societies have ways of dealing with tyrants.
Trite, and wrong. Stalin died of a stroke at 74. To take just two more examples, Mao and Franco both died at 82, also of natural causes.
Fundamental attribution error. It's the system which requires people be POSes to maintain their position.
There are a million problems that will arise if people won't be able to die and that's just another one of them.
I'm not clear why they didn't continue the treatment to see if it prevented the monkeys from dying at all?
Interesting. Appears that we'll sooner solve ageing than ageing of societies.
If this ever goes mainstream, I'll head off to live on Mars - provided that is solved beforehand.
If Larry Ellison outlives me so help me god
If you had asked me how I reckoned they reversed aging in Monkeys, I honestly would have said "stem cells". But then again, my answer to a lot of questions these days is "stem cells".
It the same with CRISPR. If you see a headline about "curing" this or that, good chance you'll see the word CRISPR in the article.
At the time of this writing, the link does not work.
504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
So the only way to get rid of humans will be to kill them?
No more new generations, no more change. Just immensely powerful old people who look young grabbing ever more tightly onto power.
Right now generational wealth fizzles out due to idiot heirs eventually appearing. Imagine if someone could ride a thousand years of exponential gains.
Open exploration of space and let the cubic volume of effectively infinite space absorb them.
Oh there’s a movie about that, I think they grow a beard and you need to cut their heads
You'll slip in the shower sooner or later.
Anti-aging breakthrough: Shower mats increase life expectancy in monkeys
wow dude, what's wrong with you?
If we cure aging, life expectancy is 9000 years at current accident rates
The break even point on this is when it costs less than just replacing one of the infinite monkeys working on the Shakespeare project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
So a question to the experts here: What's the catch?
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.
Same to be said about the solution for hunger, pain, sadness, madness. I guess we better stay where are just in case.
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.
The only tradeoff that's truly enforced is "you need to spend energy to get anything done".
Human body isn't exactly bottlenecked by energy availability. Calories are getting cheaper and cheaper, with obesity rates as a testament to that.
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.
How many breakthroughs have there been so far in anti-aging research that turned out to be real?
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.
That might not be true, if you look at the paper:
"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.
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...
It delays that sweet eternal rest
gotta be cancer
> gotta be cancer
"Notably, none of the cell transplant recipients developed tumors (n = 16)."
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
If a subset of the population stops dying, and that group grows, you've just invented cancer again on a different scale.
When you extend human lifespan long enough, cancer becomes close to inevitable anyway.
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.
See Peto's Paradox for discussion of different cancer rates among species:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox
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.
Personally I’m holding out for something a bit more interesting like some even more macabre Picture of Dorian Gray type thing.
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.
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.
> Monkeys are not humans
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.
> its the effect size
Which effect size do you find lacking?
I was responding to the idea that listing a small sample size automatically means its shit science.
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.
But they sure ain't mice, either. This is a LOT closer than results in mice.
Is there another, better animal that is used in late stage testing for other drugs you are aware of?
It's really adrenochrome.
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
It would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology. Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
If that doesn't cool your jets, let's say the treatment is so cheap it can be widely available to everyone. Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries. It's madness. I don't think we've evolved enough, ethically speaking, as a species to wrestle with such long lifespans.
>Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
What makes the current lifespan any more correct than 2x or 3x, or 0.5x of a century or two ago? Given that life expectancy was much shorter a century ago, should we start randomly executing people to keep "the uber-wealthy and powerful" from living too long? That would probably have kept "the current American president" from being in power.
Life expectancy was shorter a century ago because infant mortality, disease and injury pull the average down. We've done an amazing job of a society pulling up that lower end, but lifespan associated with normal aging is actually fairly stable. For example, Plato lived to be roughly 80 years old.
Iiuc it wasn’t a comment about what the perfect lifespan is. It’s expressing a concern about how people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power.
Or put differently: it’s a request, given limited resources let’s expend effort on a fairer society, not one with longer lived people.
> people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power
Sure. One of which would be broadly granting access to it.
Like, if a country tried to restrict such technology to its leaders, you could probably trigger regime change by simply promising to share the technology in the event of deposement. Every party member who barely missed the cut would become your revolutionary.
That’s possible, I suppose. I think @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that. For example: labor camps.
> @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that
Nihilistic Luddism. It works against any argument for making the world a better place.
> For example: labor camps
...what's the connection between longevity and labor camps? Empirically, as life expectancies (at birth and in adulthood) have risen, the prevalence of labor camps has gone down. We can see this both longitudinally and between countries.
Uber rich have means of extending their power to the next generation anyway. Look at North Korea. It's stagnant and hardly changed despite changing hand 3 times.
Whereas if you live a super long life, you can't afford to be risk averse and hope for a dictator to die of old age and hope that will somehow magically change thing.
Anti aging is not just about living long. Having a good quality of life as long as you live is essential. The world population is ageing and costs of caring for them will be huge cost for humanity.
I feel like the point mostly comes down to “our current society sucks so we shouldn’t want to live longer in it,” but that could be improved and you can always just, ya know, dip out.
Picture the inverse of what you are saying.
“Everyone can live 500 years but I think we should set up a program to randomly murder them at around 60-90 years old.”
Do you still want this longevity to be real?
I want this longevity to be real. I have to stick around long enough to see if people respond differently to me when they are older.
'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain' Nobody seems to agree on who actually said that.
The author of that quote only proved that those two qualities aren’t mutually exclusive.
Your comment appears to be based in fear, without presenting any reasonable argument against extended lifespans. The idea that a naughty president, or a prisoner, would live hundreds of years is not a longevity problem, its a politics problem.
I would expect it to shift power dynamics quite dramatically, and probably in ways that can't be accurately predicted. What happens when raising a family no longer occupies the bulk of adults' healthy lives and lived experience and wisdom is no longer dragged down by the gradual descent into senility? What if age didn't inversely correlate to neuroplasticity? What if as a young person, your runway to get where you want to go is 80+ years after graduating high school instead of 30-40? All sorts of assumptions and social structures would be upended.
> would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology
If by uber-wealthy you mean most people in rich countries, sure. Otherwise, I don't see why this would progress in a way all other medicine has not.
Where are the stem cells coming from?
> Where are the stem cells coming from?
This study appears to have used "human embryonic stem cells (hESCs)" [1]. We haven't tested this with iPSCs [2].
Even if it only works with hESCs, if the part of the population that thinks blastocysts are people wants to live a third or a quarter as long as the part that doesn't, I don't see a problem with that. We're basically going in that direction with vaccination anyway.
[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell
Thank you for the details about this article but that's not quite what I meant.
I meant where do you get enough stem cells to make the procedure widely available to the developed world? Stem cells are kinda scarce, as far as I know, so it may gate such a thing.
> Stem cells are kinda scarce, as far as I know
Embryonic stem cells are rare in America because of religious types. They're not particularly difficult to manufacture or extract--the limit is really human eggs, and we can make those in the lab [1]. (Human sperm are not, for many reasons, difficult to secure.)
I'd actually guess hESCs would be the cheapest route. If we insist on iPSCs, then this turns into a personalised medicine treatment. But in that, it's no different from e.g. oncology.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/30/nx-s1-5553322/ivg-human-eggs-...
I'll just grant you that most societies are wholly unequipped to deal with long lifespans, and there will be tons of murder, exploitation, and suffering if we fixed our biology. First, how is that any different than the current situation? Second, do you expect societies to quickly evolve to fix all of these problems (or at least tame them), much like societies had to do after the invention of fire, agriculture, steel, gunpowder, or steam?
In today's regulatory environment, I don't even think the CEO of the immortality service provider would know if their service were safe. But you can guarantee it will have personalized pricing calculated right at the edge of the immense wealth required to have that service. And it's a high priced subscription too, you betcha.
The next problem would be overpopulation - OTOH, if people could live naturally for 1000 years or so, manned space travel to habitable planets would be a lot more feasible.
So the argument is essentially "8 billion people dying is a problem, that is worse than whatever the result of longevity is". I'm not sure that it is.
You're welcome to die if you'd like, but I'll take my chances on living longer with any unknown repercussions.
The technology would have to be accessible to everyone, otherwise "the wealthy" would be murdered. And no, some futuristic sci-fi bullshit isn't going to save them.
> Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries.
I don't really understand this line of reasoning at all. Slaves exist, and slavery is miserable, therefore nobody on the planet should live beyond current human lifetimes? If a slave or exploited person is going to get healthcare for something that might otherwise cause them to die, are you arguing healthcare should be withheld?
You just need a Prime Radiant
This is one of these scientific endeavours I cannot get behind. Sure, in theory, it would be amazing to live a thousand years -- but it reeks so strongly of the genie's bottle, I don't think we should pursue it.
The odds of this actually happening are about about zero anyway, so this is not something to be concerned about. I am more optimistic, if it were to happen ,in unlocking economic potential. Why would we not want some of society's most productive people to live longer. Think of all the careers derailed by illness, lives separated by death.
> Picture a world where a slew of today's despots get to live for two, or three human lifespans
Uprisings or outright assassinations would become much more common.
Seriously. Every senior government official or sniper in Russia who isn't happy with Putin is placated by telling themselves "everybody dies sooner or later". Take that away and you'll force people to do something instead of just waiting out the clock.
Maybe after this we can figure out how to reverse entropy.
Edit: The Last Question reference seems to have not hit. My bad.
We already figured that out a while ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...
Link doesn’t work?
I'm annoyed to have been born early enough for biological life extension to not be available, but late enough to actually consider it a possibility.
Hugged to death. But I think it refers to this study: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
and a write-up: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1088662
Wake me when you have J. Fred Muggs[11] riding a horse on TV and asking his doctor if stem cell injections are right for him. Until then, I'll remain skeptical, thanks.
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Fred_Muggs
Eternal life would be disastrous for humanity. Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever, utterly bored, with no hope in sight.
>Imagine all the elderly autocrats got to rule forever
since the end of monarchies autocracy has been impersonal and institutionalized. You can think of the Pope or Dalai Lama as software, the latter literally being rebooted when the last one kicks the bucket, the substrate doesn't matter much.
In the words of Jung: people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Big Brother is a program, not a person and so physical death doesn't help you much in that regard.