Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine if one of the cures to aging is safely removing senescent cells from the body? I'm not going to say its easy by any means, but it does seem straightforward in an unexpected way ("right under our noses"). Very exciting times in biomedical research. My hope is that anti-aging quickly accelerates into an industry instead of basic research (requiring checks, balances, all that jazz to keep the snake oil salesman and quacks at bay), which should allow for orders of magnitude of funding to flow into finding protocols for treatment (from an aging populace).

Eagerly awaiting reasonattlm's take on this.

View on HN

You have to be careful not to cause cancer in the process.

From what I read, a lot of the things the body does, which have aging as a side effect, are intended to block cells from becoming cancerous.

For example a senescent cell - it might be damaged, and if it dived it might become a cancer, so better stop it from dividing. But we still need it, so don't kill it off.

Now you might think - actually, let's kill it and let some other cell divide and replace it. But that creates more cell division, which are more opportunities for cancer.

Basically, it's a delicate balance.

I suspect a different balance is also possible (there are animals without cancer for example), but the hard part is you must change all the parts at once (into the new balance), and simply stopping one part of the process will cause cancer.

This is going to make the research very hand without truly understanding all the moving parts, and joining all the different treatments into a single working whole.

What's needed is a fast-living animal, that ages, and gets cancer, in the same way humans do. Then you can just experiment without understanding.

> What's needed is a fast-living animal, that ages, and gets cancer, in the same way humans do. Then you can just experiment without understanding.

A simulated human?

Sadly, no. Cells are very complex. Whole multicellular organisms are even more complex. We don't have models nearly good enough to replace laboratory experiments with E. coli, much less good enough to replace medical trials with humans.

Do we need to understand anything about how a multicellular organism works, if we have 1. a working model of biology on the intracellular level, and 2. a working model of stereochemistry outside the cell, and use these to just "play out" cell division from an initial gamete within a simulated womb?

(I know that's A Lot of computing power, but maybe an algorithm like HashLife could make this possible by, say, 2100?)

If it's possible to do something like this at all, I think it must be based on techniques largely yet-to-be-discovered. To accurately model biology on the intracellular level, you need a "map" of the cell down to the molecular level, plus fast, general, highly accurate methods for simulating molecular-level chemistry.

For the chemical simulation side of things, it would take many centuries of continued Moore's Law progress to make today's most accurate algorithms for fully quantum chemistry run fast enough. And the wild ride of Moore's Law already appears to be closer to its end than its beginning. We'd need fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs to make it feasible without relying on better simulation hardware solving the problem. That might be possible, but I don't when/how/if such algorithms may appear.

On the problem of getting a ground-truth molecular map of a cell in the first place, we know that there are many gaps in current models. We're not sure where all of them are. Even if you had the fast, efficient, vast molecular simulation capacity I sketched above, it would still take a lot of experiment/simulation comparisons to be sure that all the biologically relevant features had been captured in the original model.

Even now I'm probably badly understating all the problems on the biology side. I worked at the interface of chemistry, biology, and chemical physics, but I was more familiar with the software/physics side of things. I learned just about enough biology to be useful in my role and to be grateful that even my most complicated debugging sessions didn't involve 3 billion years' worth of undocumented legacy code running on wet nanotechnology.

I'm pretty sure that we're very far from that. We can't even simulate relatively simple processes in timely manner.

And all the much-heralded advances in AI still produce email notifications that are kind of like those old Ad-lib games where the blanks get filled in by gobbledygook.

And after listening to one sleep-inducing waterfall video for a single long night of sleeping the next day about 2/3 of my Youtube homepage's suggestions are about soothing, meditative, nature videos... what a laugh.

>>Can you imagine if one of the cures to aging is safely removing senescent cells from the body?

At a minimum it seems that we are on the right track. Pretty exciting times.

> Can you imagine if one of the cures to aging is safely removing senescent cells from the body?

Very rarely are things in biology so simple. Everytime we thought something was useless in the past (junk DNA, appendix, tonsils, ...) it turned out that removing it causes damage somewhere else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com