The Scientist Longevity Article

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Edit: Since The Scientist now requires registration, here is a direct link to the text of the article (from a different site) that is listed in a later post in this thread.
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Ok, so we were discussing this over in the 60 Minutes and Aubrey thread, but I thought this needed its own thread.

The Scientist has an article in its March 2006 issue entitled "In Pursuit of the Longevity Dividend". As of the moment, it is not currently displayed on the website (on the front page of the website it still shows February as the current issue), but I am thinking that is going to change sometime in the next day or so, because the section that is for the March issue just started displaying the articles (it was blank up until a few hours ago). If you click on the articles, it still gives you an error because they haven't put the content on there yet, but hopefully they will put it up soon.

The summary for the articles that are in the same section as the above mentioned ones perhaps all go together? It appears so, here is how they read right now:

IN PURSUIT OF THE
LONGEVITY DIVIDEND direct link to article
What should we be doing to prepare for the unprecedented aging of humanity?
By S. Jay Olshansky, Daniel Perry, Richard A. Miller
and Robert N. Butler
Your Money for Your Life
How one company carved itself a piece of the anti-aging industry pie
By Alison McCook
Plugging the Mitochondrial Leak
By Nick Lane
The Trouble with Markers
Michael O'Neill


At least the first two look to be related.

I was planning on (when it becomes available) submitting the story to Slashdot.org, and if anyone else was able to submit it as well they might display it, which would up the traffic dramatically (sometimes when they display stories on Slashdot, the site they talk about goes down for a little while because of the dramatic increase in traffic). Are there any other sites that would be good for us to submit it to? I figured it might be helpful to talk about it before it came out, the more we can spread it and the faster after initial release, the better IMO.

Edited by liveforever22, 09 May 2006 - 05:29 PM.

Oh, also digg.com might be a good one to submit to. If it could get enough diggs to be featured on the front page, that would be spectacular.

IT'S HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(opales, celebrating true Christmas)

Awesome. I posted a bulletin to my 40 friends on myspace directing them to read the article and support anti-aging research.

As a side note, everyone should get on myspace, amass a ton of friends, and then spam them with life extension bulletins like I do. Great way to get the word out.

edit: seriously, Myspace is like the borg, and everyone is being assimilated. 20% of my graduating class of 1998 is already on there and more of them sign up every day. You may as well join now and get yourself established.

Edited by funkodyssey, 07 March 2006 - 07:36 PM.

The article is now on digg.com

If you have the time to digg it (to help get it to the front page)

Here is the search I did to find it:
http://digg.com/sear...y&submit=Submit

It was the first one earlier.

Other good high traffic sites include boingboing.net, fark.com, and metafilter.com

Here are some other places to submit the story (or any other life extension ones you have in the future):

NPR Submit a Story
TechDirt Submit a Story
Morons.org Submit a Story
ThreadWatch.org Submit a Story
TheWorldForum.org Submit a Story

Some major News outlets:
CNN Submit a Story
BBC Submit Story
MSNBC Submit Story
FoxNews Submit Story
ABC News Submit Story
CBS News (have to go down to bottom, "Contact Us")
USA Today Submit

...and Dr. Olshansky has stated that there will be a ""formal" and high powered recommendation to Congress" later this year, so if you would like to contact your represetative:
Contact your Senator
Contact your House of Representatives Representative


Plus there are probably a lot of other places out there. This may be our best opportunity to get some really important information out (we may not get another opportunity like this). Let's try to make the most of it.

All-in-all a remarkable piece..

I wonder how much Aubrey's outspoken advocacy helped stir this article to life. It's hard to tell as he isn't even mentioned and the only reference to SENS is as "biological immortality best left to science fiction novels". I can't help but get the feeling that this article would not have emerged had it not been for some sabre-rattling and can only look forward to what happens next!

This is an evolution.. and a welcome development... and as always, today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact.

Thank you Jay, as the most prominent critic of Aubrey's SENS, your supportive words likely carry more weight among the public at large. Obviously, I welcome any progress that results from this advocacy.

My favorite part of the article is "The Recommendation" at the end.

From the article:

We are calling on Congress to invest $3 billion annually to this effort, or about 1% of the current Medicare budget of $309 billion, and to provide the organizational and intellectual infrastructure and other related resources to make this work.

...and then they get into specifics of where the money would go. Wow!, if the US started giving $3 billion annually, think of all that research could accomplish. Aubrey is always saying that if he had $100 million a year for 10 years he thinks that he could produce mice that had tripled remaining life span (for middle aged mice). Think what $3 billion a year could do!

They are evidently making a proposal before Congress later this year, so hopefully that pans out, and increases funding.

Wow is an understatement. Well done SJO.

Think what $3 billion a year could do!

At the federal level, it could do a lot or it could do jack squat. I believe the budget for researching/fighting cancer is more than double this amount.

At the federal level, it could do a lot or it could do jack squat. I believe the budget for researching/fighting cancer is more than double this amount.

It's 3 billion more than Jay's recieved for this cause than last year. (as far as I know anyhow)

I'd hope that every single administrator would be more motivated to help delay aging than do any other project; so that might encourage efficiencies (since everyone benefits).

In a lot of government projects, the workers are not benefited, except by paycheque

I'd hope that every single administrator would be more motivated to help delay aging than do any other project; so that might encourage efficiencies (since everyone benefits).

In a lot of government projects, the workers are not benefited, except by paycheque

Thats a great point. Is there a more compelling reason to work than for your own survival? The effort ought to bring out the very best of people.

Yes! That saved a few lives :-)

Technically, I find one main argument kind of weak though. In order to "produce [...] a "Longevity Dividend" [...] that would begin with generations currently alive", longevity treatments would obviously need to be effective when begun at adult or indeed elderly stage. However, the evidence that the life-long or germ-line interventions in short-lived animals cited to support this will be effective at adult onset in long-lived animals is not all that great, let alone the evidence that the same effects can be achieved by "intervening pharmacologically". This kind of logical jumps somewhat remind me of past anti-cancer enthusiasm.
In order to overcome part of this criticism and add force to their argument, the authors might consider doing some experiments based on conditional gene knockout technology to assess the potential of adult-onset treatment in various "classical" genetic models of invertebrate and mouse life-extension. Inducible cre/loxp technology could be used to either knock-in or knock-out a target aging or longevity gene at arbitrary points in life.

Minor criticisms:
The scenario of an intervention capable to postpone age-related pathology by precisely seven years at whatever age seems unlikely to me. Since age-related pathology seems to derive from the accumulation of molecular damage over time, I would predict that such interventions should on average extend life by more years the earlier they are initiated, and thus postpone their economic returns, but that idea needs more data.

It might be mentioned that clinical trials to assess interventions that would slow the progression of age-related pathology only by a little are thought to be very tedious and difficult[1], and this has the potential to cause multi-year if not decade long waits until such treatments can become available.

1 Hadley EC, Lakatta EG, Morrison-Bogorad M, Warner HR, Hodes RJ. The future of aging therapies. Cell. 2005 Feb 25;120(4):557-67.

Well, at least we're at the stage where people start harumphing and claiming that they knew this was it all along. Now it's just a matter of degree.

Well, at least we're at the stage where people start harumphing and claiming that they knew this was it all along. Now it's just a matter of degree.

Hmm, it might not be bad idea to maybe bring up more of the immediate relevance to baby-boomers retirement bomb. People and politicians need foreseeable, at maximum medium term, scenarios.

thank you for making my evening a very pleasant one liveforever22, [thumb]

I read the article and it almost seems like yesterday that mainstream magazines where having great difficulty descibing living to 100, and now this. My aspirations reach beyond the stars We will eventually come to subject even time itself to our whims and fancies. But for now we can live with the few scraps from the masters table. To me it's all very exciting and frightening at the same time. I imagine the scenarios evolving when granddaughters compete with their grandmothers for boyfreinds. [:o]

Or when fathers are always in competition with their sons [:o] because they are both in perfect health and optimum ambition.

These ramblings may see like science fiction fodder to many, but time will prove them authentic.

A utopia seems to defy the decrees of nature herself when she mandates that every living organism be in competition with one another for opportunities and succession. Probabilities and numbers rule the cosmos, not a divinity.

I want to thank all of you for your comments and support. There were a number of interesting and useful points raised here, including one very important issue about how one targets an intervention to yield exactly a 7-year delay. The answer to that is important. The 7-year delay was chosen because it will be possible, using methods available to us in science, to gauge whether it has been achieved (as opposed to different goals that are not amenable to verification in a reasonable time frame); we believe it is a realistic target for the time frame chosen; and it is easy to understand and defend since the elimination of one doubling time yields a straightforward reduction by half in everything undesirable about aging. Naturally, it will not be possible to identify an intervention that produces exactly a 7-year delay -- and no more or no less -- the interventions may yield smaller or greater benefits. The point is that with such a target, if approached or achieved or even exceeded, we will then know whether our strategy has been a good one. The rationale for pursuing the Longevity Dividend is overwhelming in my view, and I will discuss this at the World Forum meeting next week. Since this will be broadcast live on the web, I would encourage you to watch the entire session. Here is the link to the World Forum webcast.

http://www.martinins...006 Webcast.htm

With regard to the origin of these ideas, they go back more than 20 years to my dissertation and why I came into this field to begin with (so no, it didn't begin with my friend Aubrey -- the suggestion of which I find rather humorous since he was a teenager at the time), and the idea was presented at GSA a few years ago. However, what Aubrey did do was stimulate the need for articulating the Longevity Dividend by failing to do so himself in any of his publications, at our debate in Montreal last year, and during the GSA session last November (where Dan and I hatched the idea behind this effort). In fact, part of my presentation at the Montreal debate contained the seeds of this idea -- I told Aubrey then that someone needed to articulate why there is justification for pursuing the scientific means to slow aging in humans. I know some of my colleagues disagree with me on this, but that is exactly why I think we need Aubrey participating in this debate. That doesn't mean we have to agree on these issues (we don't), but I hope we certainly agree on the need to pursue the Longevity Dividend -- and in the final analysis I believe we all have exactly the same thing in mind -- the extension of healthy life and reductions in the fraitly and disability that often accompanies old age.
S. Jay Olshansky

I want to thank all of you for your comments and support.  There were a number of interesting and useful points raised here, including one very important issue about how one targets an intervention to yield exactly a 7-year delay.  The answer to that is important.  The 7-year delay was chosen because it will be possible, using methods available to us in science, to gauge whether it has been achieved (as opposed to different goals that are not amenable to verification in a reasonable time frame); we believe it is a realistic target for the time frame chosen; and it is easy to understand and defend since the elimination of one doubling time yields a straightforward reduction by half in everything undesirable about aging.  Naturally, it will not be possible to identify an intervention that produces exactly a 7-year delay -- and no more or no less -- the interventions may yield smaller or greater benefits.  The point is that with such a target, if approached or achieved or even exceeded, we will then know whether our strategy has been a good one.  The rationale for pursuing the Longevity Dividend is overwhelming in my view, and I will discuss this at the World Forum meeting next week.  Since this will be broadcast live on the web, I would encourage you to watch the entire session.  Here is the link to the World Forum webcast. 

http://www.martinins...006 Webcast.htm

With regard to the origin of these ideas, they go back more than 20 years to my dissertation and why I came into this field to begin with (so no, it didn't begin with my friend Aubrey -- the suggestion of which I find rather humorous since he was a teenager at the time), and the idea was presented at GSA a few years ago.  However, what Aubrey did do was stimulate the need for articulating the Longevity Dividend by failing to do so himself in any of his publications, at our debate in Montreal last year, and during the GSA session last November (where Dan and I hatched the idea behind this effort).  In fact, part of my presentation at the Montreal debate contained the seeds of this idea -- I told Aubrey then that someone needed to articulate why there is justification for pursuing the scientific means to slow aging in humans.  I know some of my colleagues disagree with me on this, but that is exactly why I think we need Aubrey participating in this debate.  That doesn't mean we have to agree on these issues (we don't), but I hope we certainly agree on the need to pursue the Longevity Dividend -- and in the final analysis I believe we all have exactly the same thing in mind -- the extension of healthy life and reductions in the fraitly and disability that often accompanies old age. 
S. Jay Olshansky

I didn't realize that it would be broadcast on the web. That is great!
Jay, it looks like you are in the 8:45am - noon? group on Wednesday.
Which (if I did my math right) for those of us in the US be beginning at 3:45am Eastern, 2:45am Central, 1:45am Mountain, and 12:45am Pacific.
Looks like I am not sleeping that night! [lol]

M-Prize's take on The Scientist article (warning: not very flattering)

I saw this when it was first posted. At one level it's not surprising, for to some anything short of immortality just isn't enough. I understand this and do not think it is possible to persuade those who hold this view that a concerted effort to slow aging in humans will not follow when immortality is held up as the target. This is shortsighted in my view -- the target must be something we can measure and aim for in a reasonable time frame. The funding level we propose is extremely ambitious -- far more ambitious than anything proposed even by those pushing the immortality argument. If we succeed, then in the end the result will be a documented extension of healthy life in humans that results from a deceleration in the rate of biological aging. Unless I'm mistaken, all of us share this same vision. That's why I'm a bit surprised that anyone involved in this area would not fully support the pursuit of the Longeivty Dividend.
S. Jay Olshansky

To critics of the Longevity Dividend: this is an enormous step forward in getting some traction with the more intractably skeptical elements who view the conclusions of SENS - no matter how scientifically defensible in the theoretical dimension - as science fiction. It is, after all, a marketing exercise just like the MPrize is but targeted towards engaging a more intellectually inert demographic.

I say bravo and thank you to S. Jay and his associates and I wish you all to graciously join me.

To all those - myself included - who looked for and saw no mention of Aubrey's name in all this, remember: just as the award of Nobel prizes is often far out of synch with the time when the great advance was made, so too can be recognition.

Our thanks to Professor Olshansky.

sjayo wrote:

With regard to the origin of these ideas, they go back more than 20 years to my dissertation and why I came into this field to begin with (so no, it didn't begin with my friend Aubrey -- the suggestion of which I find rather humorous since he was a teenager at the time), and the idea was presented at GSA a few years ago.

Certainly packaging the goal of extended lifespans and healthspans in a politically palatable form is valuable, and if the "Longevity Dividend" catches on, Jay will deserve great credit. As to intellectual precedence of the ideas that longer lives are both scientifically possible (in principle) and socially beneficial, such ideas go waaayy back. I don't claim to be an authority on this, but Benjamin Franklin wrote to Joseph Priestly in 1780 that eventually with science disease would disappear and "our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard." In 1936, C.C. Furnas wrote in his book, "The Next Hundred Years: The Unfinished Business of Science"

The expectancy of life for the average American at birth is now a little less than 60 years.  Even the most meager education and training for a professional career can hardly be completed in less than 30 years.  We are not ready to begin our work until our physique has begun to weaken.  If we accept the view that "life begins at forty" then we agree that it takes 40 years to learn enough to begin enjoying life.  But there are only 20 years left.  We spend most of our life preparing for a short-lived party.

....It takes about 55 years to make a president, but only 15 to use his talents and put him into permanent discard.  If one learns anything out of a presidency-- and one surely must --he should be an invaluable addition to the nation's citizenry after he retires to private life.  Yet death is waiting for him at his old home, almost on his doorstep.  Sociologically it is unfair and inefficient.

Galileo the scientist and Edison the invetor were pioneers with almost limitless fields before them.  Though both lived to a notable age according to our present standards, they had only begun their possible activities when death took them.  If their active lives could have been doubled, their usefulness would have been many times more than doubled, for the period spent on their apprenticeship would have been required but once and the increasing background of experience would have increased the net efficiency as a cummulative function.

In all discussions of the advantages of longevity it is of course understood that what is desirable is not mere longevity but a lengthening of the period of full physical and mental, especially mental, powers.  After all, a doddering old man is a burden to everyone, including himself.  There have been brains that were lucid and active at 90, but they are very exceptional.  A large proportion of the minds at 70 are probably a good way downhill.  Sociologically, senility is just as undesirable and probably more dangerous than death.

There is a better reason for postponing death than any given above.  It is a purely personal one.  People should live longer because most of them want to; very badly.  There is no better reason than that.  Even the would-be suicide who attempts death by drowning usually tries to swim out as soon as he finds out how chilly the grave may be.  The leaps from the twentieth story probably produce a desire to turn back by the time the tenth is reached, but there is no way to determine the fact.

Curiously periods of prosperity seems to be more fatal than depressions.  The depression that started in 1929 brought with it a decreasing trend in the death-rate.  The same thing occurred in the mild economic lapse in the early 1920's.  Some contend that the death-rate lowers in spite of the depression because there is a longtime downward trend in that direction; others say that we are naturally healthier in a depression because we tend to stay at home nights and eat simple foods.  There seems to be good logic in the latter reasoning.... There seems to be no doubt, however, that enforced frugality of living within reasonable limits does add to the average length of life.

So there you have in outline form, the longevity dividend, classical Immortalism, and life extension by CR, 70 years ago!

---BrianW

I echo Harold's (prometheus) sentiment.. bravo to Olshanky, Perry, Miller & Bulter.

Reason at FightAging! is correct:

I'm very enthused by these signs of progress. This is not support for the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or similar full-on engineering, damage-control approaches, but it is a large departure from the position of public silence on healthy life extension. The sea change in public opinion and awareness brought on by advocacy is creeping up on us, and factions within the scientific community are adjusting the cut of their sails in expectation of funding. REF

Thank you for this Brian. Actually, I was informed the other day by my friend and colleague Robin Holliday that the specific suggestion that the time has arrived to actively pursue a deceleration in the rate of biological aging in humans first appeared in a publication in 1942 by the American Geriatrician Edward Steiglitz -- the title of his article was "The social urgency of research on ageing". I'm in the process of trying to get my hands on that article. Robin also apparently mentioned this in an article published in BioEssays in 1996 entitled "The urgency of
research on ageing". My guess is that the suggestion probably came before the Steiglitz article was published -- it'll take a bit of research to discover the origin.

My dissertation work on Simultaneous Multiple Cause Delay (SIMCAD) demonstrated how delaying total mortality by a given amount achieves the equivalent of the elimination of major fatal diseases -- a 5-year delay produces a gain in life expectancy that exceeds the elimination of cancer. This is not the same as the point raised by Brian. In turn, my work was an extension of the research of Manton et al. [Manton, K., Patrick, D., Stallard, E. 1980. Mortality model based on delays in progression of chronic diseases: Alternative to cause elimination model. Public Health Reports, 95:580-588]. The health and economic benefits of a "delay" as a strategy for improving public health was discussed at length in the book by Butler and Brody (reference # 22 in our article in The Scientist), and Jacob Brody told me the other day he got the idea for that from a manuscript he read some 15 years earlier.

Putting the two ideas together is what we have done collectively -- with each author contributing something unique. My guess is that once I read through the complete collected works of Luis Cornaro, he'll probably be the one who first came up with this idea. Several years ago I was in the British Library reading a manuscript by Roger Bacon, and discovered that he published a remarkable paper on the comparative biology and lifespan of different species -- preceding Buffon (and all the rest of us quite frankly) by several hundred years. Nevertheless, the point is well taken and appreciated Brian.
S. Jay Olshansky

M-Prize's take on The Scientist article (warning: not very flattering)

To be accurate, that's my roundup of other reactions; it's somewhat incidental that these things appear on the MPrize website - I'd still be writing them even if they didn't. My first reaction is here:

http://www.fightagin...ives/000779.php

Cornaro, yes, the original CR practitioner! I forgot about him. Thanks, Jay, for your response indicating that you are aware of the breadth of previous thinking in this field. Sometimes I get the impression that youngsters on Imminst believe that prospects of, and advocacy for, extended lifespans and biological immortality are new ideas. In fact there have been people agitating about these issues for a long time, just not getting much traction.

Here's just a smattering of books that came out during my youth

Extended Youth, Robert Prehoda (1968)
The Immortalist, Alan Harrington (1969)
Here Comes Immortality, Jerome Tucille (1972)
Man Against Mortality, Dean Juniper (1973)
The Immortality Factor, Osborn Segerberg (1974)
Get Ready for Immortality, Lawrence E. Lamb (1975)
No More Dying, Joel Kurtzman and Phillip Gordon (1976)
Prolongevity, Albert Rosenfeld (1976)
The Conquest of Death, Alvin Silverstein (1979)

Why no traction? Others have certainly noticed the contradiction between "The War on Cancer" that if completely successful would add only 5 to 7 years to life expectancy, and ambivalence toward research to slow aging. Such observations seem to fall on deaf ears. For any disease other than aging, saying "because it kills people" is generally sufficient to rally resources to combat it. Not so for aging, the conquest or even amelioration of which is seen as an attack upon humanity. If by articulating what should be obvious-- that by delaying the onset of certain deadly diseases you can create the same societal benefits as if the diseases had been cured --you can finally penetrate the thick skulls of policy makers, that will be a breakthrough. Go to it!

---BrianW

sjayo,

Despite my words of criticism, (and others not so critical), I recognize the effort it must have taken to put such a piece together was substantial, and with it a mold has indeed been broken and for that I thank you. I look forward to seeing the evolution of the issues over the coming years and hope that all involved might strive together towards the happy outcome we are all looking for. Really good work...

Kevin