Fri 5-6 Group 3
103001051林維國103001058曾子源103001093李彥勳
103001157李偉瑩
Outline

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Our focus
Why defeating aging is desirable?
Why should we be more active on this?
Feasibility
Why we are fatalistic about doing anything about
aging?
6. How we might prove fatalism is wrong?
Our focus

elimination of the relationship between age
and chance of dying in the next year
30 years life extension after middle age
Why Defeating Aging is
Desirable?

 malaria is a bad thing: because of a trait of malaria
that it shares with aging: it kills
 only real difference: aging kills more people than
malaria does
Why Defeating Aging is
Desirable?

 comparison with foxhunting: banned after a long
struggle by the government
 It's good for ecology: stops the population explosion
of foxes
 However, it is something that should not be
tolerated in a civilized society
Why Defeating Aging is
Desirable?

 human aging shares all of these traits
 About healthy life
Why Defeating Aging is
Desirable?

 Question is: Do risks of doing something about aging
outweigh the downside of doing nothing?
 Do these outweigh causing 100,000 people a day to
an unnecessarily early death?
Why Defeating Aging is
Desirable?

 If we do nothing, then we are hindering many
people from an indefinite life span
Why Defeating Aging is
Desirable?

 Some reasons to postpone aging:
 (Source: Old People Are People Too: Why It Is Our Duty to Fight
Aging to the Death by Aubrey de Grey “Lead Essay December 3, 2007”
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/12/03/aubrey-de-grey/oldpeople-are-people-too-why-it-our-duty-fight-aging-death)
1.
2.
3.
4.
to live longer
to let others live longer
to avoid weakening/disease/dependency in later life
to let others avoid weakening/disease/dependency in
later life
Why Should We Be More
Active on This?

 It is sensible to cope with the inevitability of aging
 The pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks and
It's actually a sensible way of coping with the
inevitability of aging.
 However, it is what stops us from agitating about
these things.
 Therefore, we have to really talk about this a lot to
get people's attention.
Feasibility

 Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first
place, which is to say, metabolism.
 Aging happens to us because our self-repair
mechanisms are not perfect.
 Metabolism has side effects that accumulate and
eventually cause pathology.
There are two ways to
postpone aging

 gerontology approach
- seems better, but unfortunately we don't understand
metabolism very well.
 geriatrics approach
-The geriatrician will intervene late in the day when
pathology is becoming evident and trying to slow
down the accumulation of side effects.
Robust human
rejuvenation

 If we acquire the ability to confer 30 extra years
of healthy life on people who are already in
middle age, let's say 55. How long people of
various ages today would actually live?
 They will mostly survive long enough to receive
improved treatments that will give them a
further 30 or maybe 50 years.
 The therapies will be improving faster than the
remaining imperfections in the therapies are
catching up with us.
Longevity Escape Velocity
(LEV)

 I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to
live to 1,000 or more.
 I'm saying that the rate of improvement of those
therapies will be enough.
 we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of,
before we have any 200-year-olds, and the same for
300 and 400 and so on.
Longevity Escape Velocity
(LEV)

Way to Live to 1,000 Years Old

 O: There will be many therapies that can make
people live longer, and the new ones solve the old
ones’ problems.
 X: There will be a therapy that can eliminate aging
Robust Mouse Rejuvenation

 Do nothing until the mice are already two years old.
 With the therapies, the mice succeed to live for 5
years.
Speculation of RHR

 50/50 chance
 15 years after reaching RMR milestone
“Damage” Caused by
Metabolism

 “Damage” itself is caused throughout life, starting
before we're born
 Gerontology: inhibit the rate at which metabolism
lays down this damage—losing battle
 A third approach, "engineering approach“: repair the
damage periodically
engineering approach

 It's something that we are within range of being able
to do
 repair all of these various types of damage
periodically
 repair them quite a lot(not completely) → keep the
level of damage down below the threshold
The seven deadly things

 Metabolism → Damage → Pathology
1.Junk inside cells 2. Nuclear mutation
3.Protein crosslinks 4. Junk outside cells
5. mtDNA mutation 6. Cell loss
7. Death-resistant cells
Discussion from biology

 1.damage can accumulate in long-lived molecules
 2.short-lived molecule undergoes damage, and then
the molecule is destroyed
 3.For example, protein being destroyed by
proteolysis → the damage is gone, too.
20 years is extremely long to find
nothing out
Damage rising with age
Extracellular junk

Proposed to contribute to aging by
Alzheimer(1907)
Extracellular crosslinks
Monnier and Cerami(1981)
Cell loss
Brody(1955) or earlier
Cell senescence
Hayflick(1965)
Intracellular junk
Strehler(1959) or earlier
mutations in the mitochondria
Harman(1972)
Nuclear mutation
Szilard(1959) and Cutler(1982)
conclusion

 We can probably achieve the goal in about 10 years if
we can actually get enough money, but we do need
to get serious about it.
Thanks for your listening!
