The quest for longevity.

in aging •  13 days ago 

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This is part of a recurring theme of aging research, because too many people including a lot of biochemists and physiologists look at the body as an engineered construct rather than an evolved construct. Every single long-lasting physiological phenomena, whether or not it's originally part of some entropic process, inevitably becomes co-opted by evolution to become more and more useful. I've seen over the course of my life this happened many times with everything that people have proposed, free radical damage, DNA fragmentation, phytotoxin exposure, nutritional deficits, hormone reduction, senescent cells, epigenetic errors and on and on. I'm not saying anti-aging engineering is impossible, but it is always super humanly complex. You can isolate points of intervention to those harmful agents that are evolutionarily novel. This includes things like highly processed foods, novel environmental pollutants, sedentary lifestyle, disruption of circadian rhythm, prolonged stress, disruption of the microbiome, propagation of disease from crowding and travel, etc...

Seeing some of these so-called treatments of aging, looks laughably crude and barbaric to me. It's like some hack finds out that heart attacks are caused by clogged vessels in the heart and so they decide to carve out the heart. Yes it is actually that crude and stupid if you understand what's really going on in evolutionary biochemistry. People are literally proposing epigenetic tag blocker drugs and free radical scavengers. It's not the process that's the problem, it's where the process is going wrong.

The other thing that you need to take into account is individual variation. Every person has genetic defects but they are not copies of one another. These genetic defects are extremely low frequency and extremely wide in variety. Every individual is most likely suffering from several non-acutely lethal genetic diseases that are shared by almost nobody in this planet except for very close blood relatives. A customized approach to fixing these common rare genetic disorders at a personalized level is potentially low hanging fruit in the quest for longevity.

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