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Comment by dado3212 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone with a scientific background chime in on why this is nonsense that will never come to viability?

Reading the abstract for the paper (thanks to skybrian for providing the link) it seems that the phrase "anti-aging vaccine" is a gross exaggeration in this context rather than the science itself being flawed.

Broadly, the abstract seems to be describing a particular cell-surface marker found to be associated with senescence ("seno-antigen") which can be targeted by a therapy ("genetic ablation") which accelerates removal of cells with that marker. Doing so improves the lifespan of mice so treated.

Thus, as the abstract concludes, "...vaccination targeting seno-antigens could be a potential strategy for new senolytic therapies."

It's very hard to critique an article that has the quality of GPT-3 generated blogspam and doesn't contain a link to better sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong ?

I take offense at your implication that GPT3 generates poor quality articles.

I usually look to r/science for this sort of skepticism. This particular thread doesn't seem especially negative...

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ren6cc/japanese_sc...

Senescent cells are only one factor in aging. You've also other mitochondrial DNA damage, accumulating nuclear DNA damage leading to cancer, gunk building up inside lysosomes, gunk building up elsewhere, etc. If I were to try to rank them senescent cells would probably be second or third on the list. Potentially a really big deal but not at all synonymous with aging in general. That is, if this actually pans out.

Killing senescent cells is one thing.

Making sure they actually get replaced with new cells instead of scar tissue is another.

Until that’s resolved, killing the wrong kinds of senescent cells will kill you much faster than leaving them alone, so even highly targeted killing of senescent cells can’t “rejuvenate” all your organs.

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(20)...

Shouldn't science be the standard? Why implicitly be doubtful?

History?

Given N "advances" that you hear touted based on mouse trials, how many turn into real human therapies? (Curing aging in mice isn't really the advance we're looking for.) How many turn into real human therapies that live up to the breathless announcements that were made based on the mouse trials? I don't have hard evidence, but my gut estimate is 10-20% actually deliver.

So, yes, while waiting for the science, there is some empirical grounds to have a default stance of doubt (or, if you prefer, skepticism).

1) The original linked article is not a link to a scientific work. Therefore it's credence should be taken with a grain of salt as news articles need clicks more than they need boring sounding article titles.

2) In science often abstracts or intros open with grand ideas before settling into a much smaller scope.

3) The rise of predatory journals, not to mention people citing pre-print arXivs means even if something looks likes a reasonable article, it's good to get the opinions of other experts.

4) Just because something works doesn't imply how practical it is for actual deployment. (I've been to plenty of chemical talks about fantastic polymers, I've only ever seen one turn into anything of value.)

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