Last weeks article was 130. Clearly take this all with a grain of salt, and realize that bioengineering is having an explosion that will redefine everything we think about medicine and the human body.
I think mRNA production will help in quite a few rare genetic diseases, but also that we’re far away from being able to safely make the myriads of subtle changes needed to make otherwise healthy people live longer.
I compare it to heart surgery. It is quite a miracle that we can do it, but the risks are so high that we only do it when people’s hearts have lost significant portion of their pumping capacity. You don’t see cross-country skiers who are just not good enough get heart surgery to make it to the olympics, for example.
They were big in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s. A Brazilian band, but resonated with Central European metalheads a lot.
Edit: adding from a comment below, there are real world instances of lab grown tissues being transplanted into patients. That is also in the early stages, but has evidence of real world progress.
The point is that if we made the effort, there’s likely easy things we can do to extend life beyond 100.
Studying Blue Zones, for example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
We really haven’t made an effort to study aging.
Why do some people live well into their 90’s and appear to be in good health?
Unlike modern developed countries where we have pretty good records of the exact moment of birth for people, in a lot of areas in the past, there could be a lot of guesstimating about the actual age of someone.
To me, that looks pretty damning to the theory that blue zones somehow are good for longevity.
We haven't? Just 2 seconds of googling "study aging" brings up results from places like Harvard, the NIH, RAND and hundreds of other universities where people study aging all day everyday.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benzodiazepine-use-may-r... 2014 - People who had taken a benzodiazepine for three months or less had about the same dementia risk as those who had never taken one. Taking the drug for three to six months raised the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by 32%, and taking it for more than six months boosted the risk by 84%.
https://www.aarp.org/health/dementia/info-2019/dementia-slee... 2019 - The study, released today at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference 2019, included a racially diverse group of 3,068 people, ages 70 to 79, who were cognitively healthy when the study began. Researchers questioned the participants about their use of sleeping pills and culled information about them from medical records and tests of brain function over a 15-year period.
I’m sure it’s getting some research but compared to other medical research I don’t think it amounts to much
[1] https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fy-2020-justification-b...
[2] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-natio...
Through traffic is physically constrained in each case - due to them being islands or peninsulas or mountain villages.
Better make do with what we have! Life is short, even if you make it to 130. Take advantage of it before you’re dead.
We’ll just consume the chemical cocktails that normalize us: https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg