Is anyone currently DOING anything to try and reverse aging/stop death?

Is anyone currently DOING anything to try and reverse aging/stop death?

If for some reason you don't want to share it on this forum, then message me, we should talk.

Also a blog on this topic some might find interesting:

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  • "What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger"

    That article blew my mind.
  • There're team of professional scientists working on it I think. This is way too big for any amateur grinders to grapple in my opinion. 
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  • edited January 2015
    I agree with your comments but I think we are at least partially WRONG in our assumptions. 

    Aside from Googles Calico, Aubrey Degrey, Craig Venter and maybe a handful of others, there aren't many people working on reversing aging/stopping death or anything even close. 

    Of the ones working on it there are no results of any real value to speak of. 

    It's easy to think in a world of 7,000,000,000 people some other "experts" are working on it or that maybe no one is working on it because it's impossible.

    But this is not the case. 

    Peter Theil covers this false thinking in his book Zero to One. In it he says all great business's (monopolys) are built on secrets. 

    Great book I highly recommend it.

    Like the Wright brothers I think major breakthroughs in reversing aging will come from DIY experimenters not the "professionals" who are blinded by the assumptions they think they know.

    Once again if anybody would like to join me for the first steps to immortality and maybe even the worlds first trillion dollar company feel free to message me. I'd like to talk to you.


  • edited January 2015
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  • I've been using supplements for mitochondrial health fairly often.

    A while back, I also picked up a gram of NAD+ from a research lab. It requires IM injection-- I did it a few times, but the hassle of preparing safe daily injections (sterilizing, mixing solution, needles, etc) was time consuming enough that I didn't continue beyond about a week.
  • Let me ask a more specific question:

    Is there anyone trying (or has tried) to activate telomerase in cells to extend their telomeres?
  • Telemorase extension via supplementation is still fairly unproven. There are arguments on both sides.

    Testing for this type of thing would take some pretty hefty hardware.

    If you're asking about rna activation, the methods used only work in immortalized cell lines, as far as I know. I'd be happy to look into this more tho.

  • If such a discovery were to be found then it should be kept very secret for obvious (to me, since I've read arguments by academics against that kind of thing) reasons since if it's too open then so many people would want it done, exacerbating overpopulation.  If it's known but the method is kept secret then accusations of elitism from the general public and academics (especially ethicists) would prop up and shame whatever group discovers it and keeps it.  The can of worms that could be opened by such a discovery is enormous and therefore people with the power to enact policies and argue against it to congress (congress is a useless sack anyway) should be kept out of the loop as much as possible. 

    Many of these scenarios I imagined playing out if someone were to discover time travel (I personally think it's impossible), ethicists going to the government or UN arguing that xyz power is too much for one person to have and such a power would either be banned or highly regulated, or they may keep all the power for themselves and change history in a way you wouldn't want.  I am not a believer in Dr.Pangloss' (from Voltaire's Candide) best of all possible worlds philosophy, if certain things in the past happened our present could be vastly greater than today. 

    What if fire or writing were discovered 1,000 years earlier?  We'd either be 1,000 years ahead of today (assuming a similar rate of progress, a big if but still) or events shift in a way where nuclear war wiped out humanity 1,000 years ago (remember we'd likely be 1,000 years ahead.)  Religions and languages would be radically different than our timeline and so much potential is there.  I'm assuming our timeline doesn't get overwritten but creates parallel timelines.

     All that would be for another post entirely however but the principle is the same: many people that influence public policy would think that both time travel and immortality would be too much power for one group or person to have and seek to severely restrict it or outright ban it due to philosophical (e.g., why does one guy get to decide who "deserves" immortality or influencing the future, this restrictive mindset people want to impose on this group for far less consequential things even) and other reasons, so information on such needs to be tightly controlled by their discoverers so the government (or other groups) doesn't restrict them. 

    I'm typically for open communication, but let's not shoot ourselves in the foot in case someone finds something. 
  • I think that space travel would significantly benefit from biological immortality. If we fill up earth, why not move to Mars? Making hundred year journeys to other star systems would become a non-issue. And of course, if people start complaining about elitism, we can always disappear, wait for them to die off, and then resurface.
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  • I'm pro-immortality myself but am greatly aware of anti-immortality academics whose opinion policy makers highly value.  People would still be able to die due to the laws of physics however, just not from old age anyway.  Not being able to die would suck, imagine being given that kind of immortality as a punishment then thrown onto the sun to feel its immense heat and gravity until it blows into a red giant, then a black hole.  Would not be fun at all. 
  • Anyone have any information on the question at hand?
  • Perhaps if we have a detailed look at the life cycle of an immortal cell line, we can determine what grants it its immortality.
  • Step one - Be cancer
    Step two - ?

    I'm serious. The lines we use for research are almost always derived from cancers.

    This is something that comes up every once in a while, that research lines on a 2d substrate are really not like normal healthy living cells at all. It sometimes makes it difficult to tell if the work being done is applicable to normal cells.
  • ya all the "lets just use some mutant telomerase" translates to "we now have cancer". Biological imortality isn't hard from a biological perspective, it is just incredibly complex. you need incredible amounts of control to make sure that your special protective enzyme only do what they are needed for or you end up with all kinds of super cancer. Which is even more shitty than regular cancer. I have full intentions of cracking this in coming years. But there are other things that need my attention first. This is to complex for the state of things at the moment, but all in good time. That said, philosophy wise I don't think it'll be an accesible tech for everyone. I see it being very expensive to pull off. Or you quickly give it to everyone and trigger a massive war. It's delicate to say the least. 
  • What about certain genes from the immortal jellyfish?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

    They used jellyfish genes in mammals before with glow in the dark pigs and cats so immortality could have potential. 


  • edited May 2015
    So, the telomerase protein used in HeLa cancer cell lines, for example, is different than the telomerase used in human cells? 

    From what I've read, there are a few cells in the human body already express telomerase. If we could determine whether or not the cells which do encounter the same problem that cancer cells do, and, if they possess one, whatever method they use to mitigate said problem, we might have something. 

    There appeared to be 2 relevant journals cited for that jelly. The only one that would load was behind a paywall (Link1). If I've understood the information correctly, the jellyfish can revert to a state prior to sexual maturity, and then remature, an indefinite number of times. 

    The process by which cancer cells, which are relatively simple beasts when compared with the way that other human cells must work together to sustain themselves, are made immortal hints at how difficult it would be to pull it off in regular cells. The active telomerase production by itself wouldn't be of much use. Excepting outside intervention, your cells would continuously multiply, basically creating an unsustainable system. 

    Perhaps if one compiled samples of all the necessary chromosomes and nuclear DNA, triggered Telomerase production  throughout  the body, suppressed cell mitosis throughout the body, periodically did a "re-install" of the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA by way of a viral vector, and found a way of dealing with the junk floating around in the intercellular fluid (crosslinked molecules, free radicals, damaged proteins, and the like),  you'd have something. Force all of your cells into a regeneration and maitenance state, instead of a division state. Of course, if you were injured, you'd have to locally introduce a plasmid or something that would re-enable cell division, to allow the healing process to occur, but it might work. Except for the skin. We'll have to figure something else out for that.
  • the immortal jellyfish is a horrid example of how we could achieve immortality. It is a very simple organism and the changes it undergoes would be largely useless to us. There are better model organisms for this. Flat worms and lobsters are the first to come to mind
  • I'm completely in love with pluripotent stem cells at the moment. I must admit that I tend to get like this when I'm learning something new and then my love tends to fizzle when I hit a roadblock or see something else shiny. Right now they look really awesome though.

    So taking your own cells, making them pluripotent, and then making a serum to reintroduce them back into the body is doable. I have no idea what happens after that. Haven't read that far yet, sorry. :D

    A side note, there is this phenomenon: http://www.nature.com/news/ageing-research-blood-to-blood-1.16762
    I guess I could try it out and re-purpose some of those things handcuffed to the radiator in my basement...
  • the "make them pluripotent" part is the hard bit in this or it could be very viable. Since they have this nasty habit of become cancer. Also you need some gene mod tools to do it. That said you could set up a lab to do this and do it on order if you were so inclined.
  • How do you supress the cancer bit? There has to be some gene we can attach or chemical we can introduce which mitigates that danger.
  • ehhh. not really at this point. all our skills at making things pluripotent/immortal/etc are basically "hey look, we learned how to cancer". We try to ignore that while we are doing various tests on these cells in labs, but on a test subject level... not so much.

    Cancer-y action is just.. well it's just so good at being cancer. Messing with things usually adds to it as opposed to mitigation.

    Honestly, the best research that I've seen on reversing/reducing aging is about straight up injecting young blood. Anyone have a type o neg younger sibling? :D
  • I have an O+ younger sibling >.>
  • So, pull a vampire, basically?
  • Electric you don't happen to have a big lemon juicer do ya?
  • A lemon juicer? What would you need a lemon juicer for?
  • No juicer, but I do have a food processor
  • >put sibling through oversized lemon juicer
    >stop aging process

    XD
  • @Cassox found a great link for me on inducing pluripotent stem cells: http://www.stembook.org//node/720

    As far as cancer goes, I'm researching this. I was under the impression that this was something that was commonly managed. It seems like an in vitro oncolytic virotherapy would handle all of the sick cells while the good cells escaped infection. Is this sound reasoning?
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