I don’t look at myself in the mirror. Yesterday, I did. My eyebrows had turned grey.
In two and a half months, I’ll be 75.
Silicon Valley billionaires, many in their thirties and flush with all the money they’ll ever need, are now obsessed with the inevitability of their own death. Many lost a parent at an early age.
Since money can solve anything, it must be able to prolong life. Hence, they’re pouring millions into ways to extend their lives. Tad Friend, in the latest issue of New Yorker, has chronicled their progress.
For those of us with limited patience, the keys are simple: Give up smoking, wear a seat belt, exercise more and … wait for this … give up sex. At extreme, become a eunuch.
You have to live a little (actually a lot) longer to read Friend’s article. since it’s long. It’s called:
SILICON VALLEY’S QUEST TO LIVE FOREVER.
Can billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech research succeed in making death optional?
Here are some excerpts. (The URL for the entire article is at the end.)
The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. …
After Moby put in a plug for being vegan, Dzau called on Martine Rothblatt, the founder of a biotech firm called United Therapeutics, which intends to grow new organs from people’s DNA. “Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional,” Rothblatt said. (She has already commissioned a backup version of her wife, Bina-a “mindclone” robot named Bina48.) …
For decades, the solution to aging has seemed merely decades away. In the early nineties, research on C. elegans, a tiny nematode worm that resembles a fleck of lint, showed that a single gene mutation extended its life, and that another mutation blocked that extension. The idea that age could be manipulated by twiddling a few control knobs ignited a research boom, and soon various clinical indignities had increased the worm’s life span by a factor of ten and those of lab mice by a factor of two. …
For us, aging is the creeping and then catastrophic dysfunction of everything, all at once. Our mitochondria sputter, our endocrine system sags, our DNA snaps. Our sight and hearing and strength diminish, our arteries clog, our brains fog, and we falter, seize, and fail. …
The scientist said, “This is as self-serving as the Medici building a Renaissance chapel in Italy, but with a little extra Silicon Valley narcissism thrown in. It’s based on the frustration of many successful rich people that life is too short: `We have all this money, but we only get to live a normal life span.’ ” …
The reigning view among longevity scientists is that aging is a product not of evolutionary intent but of evolutionary neglect: we are designed to live long enough to pass on our genes, and what happens afterward doesn’t much matter. …
Aging doesn’t seem to be a program so much as a set of rules about how we fail. Yet the conviction that it must be a program is hard to dislodge from Silicon Valley’s algorithmic minds. If it is, then reversing aging would be a mere matter of locating and troubleshooting a recursive loop of code. After all, researchers at Columbia University announced in March that they’d stored an entire computer operating system (as well as a fifty-dollar Amazon gift card) on a strand of DNA. If DNA is just a big Dropbox for all the back-office paperwork that sustains life, how hard can it be to bug-fix? …
For those frustrated by the stately progress of research up the animal chain, from worms to flies to mice to dogs to monkeys, speculative treatments abound. In Monterey, California, a clinic will give you young plasma for eight thousand dollars a pop-but you have no idea what it’s doing to you. Peter Nygård, a leonine seventy-five-year-old Finnish-Canadian clothing designer who got rich making women look slim in modestly priced pants, has had injections with stem cells derived from his DNA. He believes that the process has reversed his aging. In an interview a few years ago, he proclaimed, “I’m the only guy in the world today who has me, in a petri dish, before I was born.” …
The advent of crispr, a gene-editing tool, has given researchers confidence that we’re on the verge of the gene-therapy era. George Church and his Harvard postdocs have culled forty-five promising gene variants, not only from “super centenarians”-humans who’ve lived to a hundred and ten-but also from yeast, worms, flies, and long-lived animals. Yet Church noted that even identifying longevity genes is immensely difficult: “The problem is that the bowhead whale or the capuchin monkey or the naked mole rat, species that live a lot longer than their close relatives, aren’t that close, genetically, to those relatives-a distance of tens of millions of genetic base pairs.” The molecular geneticist Jan Vijg said, “You can’t just copy a single mechanism from the tortoise,” which can live nearly two hundred years. “We’d have to turn our genome over to the tortoise-and then we’d be a tortoise.” …
David had long suspected that the epigenome was central to longevity. If the genome is our cellular hardware, then the epigenome is its software: it’s the code that activates DNA, telling a cell to differentiate-to become a macrophage or a neuron-and then how to remember its identity. The epigenome itself is controlled by agents that add or subtract chemical groups, known as marks, to its proteins. Biologists suspect that when the epigenome accumulates too many marks, over time, the signals it sends to cells change dramatically-and that those new signals produce the effects of aging. This process could explain, for instance, why an old person’s skin can refresh itself with new cells every month and yet continue to look old. …
But this is very promising.” Modifying cells’ software was less dangerous than tampering with their hardware, he said, and, as with software, “there will always be a better version of our program next year.” …
To repair tissue, you need to rejuvenate stem cells. But stem cells need to divide to do their job, and the division process invites random mutations-which drive cancer. …
A great many longevity papers end with mystified hand-waving in the direction of unknown “systemic factors.” Solving aging is not just a whodunnit but a howdunnit and wheredunnit and a whyohwhydunnit. Tom Rando suggested, “It’s not A causes B causes C causes D causes aging. It’s a network diagram of nodes and links-all subject to feedback loops where consequences become causes-that gradually becomes more and more destabilized.” …
So far, the most powerful interventions you can make to extend your life are the kinds of low-tech things that your doctor has already told you in a droning voice. Quit smoking (ten more years) and wear a seat belt (two more). Assuming you’ve already done that, exercise regularly and watch your diet. …
Both caloric restriction and exercise appear to dampen mTOR, a signalling pathway that regulates cellular metabolism. Under strain, the body realizes that it’s a bad time to reproduce and a good time to repair cells and increase stress resistance. Scientists believe this is nature’s way of responding to famine: hunker down and wait for better times to procreate. There seems to be a link between forgoing sex and extending life, since what the French call the little death apparently hastens the big one. The immune suppressant rapamycin makes mice live longer, yet shrivels their testicles. Likewise, the most proven way for a man to live fourteen years longer than average is to become a eunuch. Good news/bad news. …
All the leading immortalists started out in tech, and all had a father who died young (as Ray Kurzweil’s did when he was twenty-two), or absconded early (as Aubrey de Grey’s did before he was born). They share an early loss of innocence and a profound faith that the human mind can perfect even the human body. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, lost his adoptive mother to cancer when he was in college-and later donated three hundred and seventy million dollars to aging research. “Death has never made any sense to me,” he told a biographer. “How can a person be there and then just vanish?” …
The Meat Puppets, fighting off old age, must contend with evolutionary contingency. Jan Vijg, who co-authored a recent paper arguing that our life span is basically capped at a hundred and fifteen, told me, “Yes, our bodies are information-processing systems. But to fix the body-as-computer requires an in-depth understanding of what’s going on in your cells at a molecular level. And we don’t even know how many types of cells there are! Creating a human is not nearly as easy as creating an A.I., because we’re so very confusingly and unintelligently designed by random changes acted upon by natural selection.” …
And yet. Last year, the geneticist Nir Barzilai hosted a screening of a documentary about longevity, and afterward he posed a question to the three hundred people in the audience. He told me, “I said, `In nature, longevity and reproduction are exchangeable. So Choice One is, you are immortalized, but there is no more reproduction on Earth, no pregnancy, no first birthday, no first love’-and I go on and on and on.” He laughed, amused by his own determination to load the dice. ” `Choice Two,’ I said, `is you live to be eighty-five and not one day sick, everything healthy and fine, and then one morning you just don’t wake up.” The vote was decisive, he said. “Choice One got ten or fifteen people. Everyone else raised their hands for Choice Two.” …
You’ll find Tad Friend’s entire article here.
I get emailed travel photos.
This is Busan, South Korea’s second largest city. The photo blew me away.
Michael, my son, has been there many times for business. He says there’s tons to like:
+ Great infrastructure. Super modern.
+ Fastest internet around (although this is all of South Korea)
+ Welcoming people
+ Good food
+ Mountains right in town
+ Nice beaches
+ Clean air
More on Intel and its abysmal takeover record.
BREAKING NEWS
Michael Flynn wants to talk to congressional investigators examining the Trump team’s ties to Russia. But first he wants immunity.
Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, has offered to be interviewed by House and Senate investigators who are examining the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in exchange for immunity from prosecution, according to his lawyer and a congressional official.
But the congressional official said investigators were unwilling to broker a deal with Mr. Flynn — who resigned last month for misleading White House officials about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States — until they are further along in their inquiries and they better understand what information Mr. Flynn might offer as part of a deal.
Please buy me one
The tray can be angled. One question remains: Who’ll bring me my breakfast in bed? Only $185. Click here. Oops, the tray has no power outlet for may laptop. Back to the drawing board.
Old but still fun.
A man wakes up in the hospital bandaged from head to foot.
The doctor comes in and says, “Ah, I see you’ve regained consciousness. Now, you probably won’t remember, you were in a huge pile-up. You’re going to be okay, you’ll walk again and everything, however, your penis was severed in the accident and we couldn’t find it.”
The man groans, but the doctor goes on, “You have $9000 in insurance compensation coming. We now have the technology to build a new penis. They work great but they don’t come cheap. It’s roughly $1000 an inch.”
The man perks up.
The doctor says, “You must decide how many inches you want. But you have been married for over thirty years and you should discuss this with your wife. If you had a five incher before and get a nine incher now she might be a bit put out. If you had a nine incher before and you decide to only invest in a five incher now, she might be disappointed.”
The man agrees to talk it over with his wife.
The doctor comes back the next day, “So, have you spoken with your wife?”
“Yes I have,” says the man.
“And has she helped you make a decision?”
“Yes” says the man.
“What is your decision?” asks the doctor.
“We’re getting granite counter tops.”
Harry Newton, who’s on his way to Australia tomorrow for three weeks with friends and family.
Though they have the Internet Down Under, I may be less regular with postings. I do want to report on how Australia has managed its quarter century economic miracle — no recession in 25 years! The only country to achieve that feat!
The Australian dollar is holding up. Maybe there’s a nice residential syndication, I can find?
George Burns, the comedian, lived to 100. He had two wonderful quotes:
+ Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
+ Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman — or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle.
He was once asked him what his doctors thought of his lifestyle of cigar smoking, boozing and chasing young women.
He replied, “My doctors? They’re all dead.”
Have a great weekend.
How many people received immunity from the FBI and Justice Department during the investigation into Hillary’s e-mail server? So many that if certainly hampered the investigation.
GIVE MILE FLYNN IMMUNITY!!!
……let’s find out everything about US-Russia involvement.
……Evelyn Farkas must be subpoenaed!!!!
When Liberals want to use science, they first have to first filter it through their agenda filter.
Never mind the real science of Global Warming that doesn’t fit the agenda of governments to tax people on carbon, which has been thrown under the buss, and never mind that we have the globalists that are doing everything in their power to push their communists agenda, but N. Korea threatening the world just isn’t quite bad enough to make an issue out of because it might shed a poor light on Communism.
Harry you go on and on about the threats of global warming, and then show us an amazing photo of Busan without a word about the very real existential threat from N. Korea. What will that incredible city look like after even a crude N. Korean nuke is detonated there? What is the liberal solution to the N. Korean problem? Here’s my solution: declare a total and complete trade embargo on China until they have “neutralized” the N. Korean threat. How many millions of lives are worth cheap shit from China?