World’s first anti-ageing drug could see humans live to 120
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
> Scientists think the best candidate for an anti-ageing drug is metformin, the world’s most widely used diabetes drug which costs just 10p a day. Metformin increases the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell, which appears to boost robustness and longevity.
Metformin actually inhibits cellular respiration by poisoning the mitochondria. The saturated fatty acid palmitate is an antidote for the effects of Metformin [1].
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005272812...
More seriously, what would happen if the average number of children per family was 3.5, rather than 2.5 [1]? Probably nothing absolutely catastrophic, and that's roughly what would happen in a pessimistic scenario of an ageless society- instead of simply generating a batch of new people that will later reproduce, there's a batch of new people and the original parent. Maybe some outliers will just keep having children constantly (until they just physically give out- that would be an extreme strain), but I'd think most people would allow a decade or two between families.
More more seriously, birth rates are declining drastically in highly developed countries, to the point that many places are worried about population decline. Overpopulation is a problem in developing nations, but realistically, anti-aging won't make a big difference there- they're already typically dying of more preventable things than old age.
[1] Source; that old apocryphal statistic we all know from the 90s or something. Its probably different now, but I'm too lazy to look it up.