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Link post: "One of my friends posted a link to a Russian project searching for immortality — personally funded by Putin. I couldn't resist, followed the link, read it — and now I'm sitting here laughing. A billion-ruble budget, mind you. Lots of pretty words — like bioprinting.
In principle, what they call bioprinting — i.e., growing cells of the needed specialization from precursor cells — already exists to some degree. The problem is that getting from the first successes in the lab to successfully applying this principle in medicine takes generations — and there's no shortcutting that path. Simply because along the way there are always a lot of failures — they happen in living patients — and not always immediately.
Actually, a colleague of mine works on exactly this kind of project — we co-teach a course, and in the process she let me in on all her sorrows. Together with the attending surgeon, they extract precursor cells from nasal tissue — there's a lot of interesting stuff in the nose — they tune them up the right way — and transplant them into the spinal cord — into patients who have back pain or even paralysis — and identified problems with the nerve cells there. And indeed, a couple-three of their operations went successfully — and then, several years later, they got a scandal in the press. The patient's pain started up again, by then she was being treated in Italy — and there an article came out tearing their method apart — headlined "A nose grew on her spine." The journalists, of course, hugely overstated it — no nose grew there at all. The essence was that these cells didn't fully differentiate into nerve cells and started growing in their original form — i.e., in the spinal cord, cells from nasal tissue formed and began dividing — and there in the spine they were a bit off the mark. And so my colleague and her co-author had both their trials and their funding shut down.
Stories like this — every university has a couple-three of them. Well, maybe without the newspaper hype — but failed methods for growing differentiated cells in the body — that's old hat these days. However, in about 50 years the thing will probably start working.
...Though so far this isn't about immortality at all — since nothing of the sort has yet been done with the brain — not even on mice, not even in the lab — not even close. It has a very complex organization and specialization that we haven't studied even remotely — so it's simply too early to take on reconstructing it."
New Batin's blogpost in Telegram about non-existence of the theory of aging:
Here's the translation:
There's an article by Vadim Gladyshev called "Disagreements on the Fundamental Principles of the Biology of Aging."
Its main conclusion is simple: on the most fundamental questions in the biology of aging, scientists have no agreement. What's more, there isn't even a consensus on whether such a consensus is needed at all.
The authors surveyed more than a hundred specialists — professors, postdocs, and other researchers — and asked them just a few basic questions:
On almost every question, opinions diverged.
But here a strange situation arises.
If physics fails to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, that becomes a central scientific problem. Enormous effort goes precisely into finding a theory that can resolve the contradictions.
In the biology of aging, almost the opposite happens. Each group keeps developing its own hypothesis, sees the future breakthrough coming precisely from its own direction, and rarely tries to figure out why different theories arrive at such different conclusions.
You'd think the disagreements themselves should become a separate, in fact a priority, subject of research.
Ideally, leading specialists should meet regularly and discuss not just new results but the main question: why do we still disagree so strongly, and what research could change that?
Maybe the problem is also that we're not asking good enough questions?
Let's try to take a step forward. I'll start:
I suggest readers come up with the ninth and tenth questions themselves — maybe with ChatGPT's help, that might even work better.
Link post: An Immortal Facepalm
https://anairos.livejournal.com/417332.html
A good blog post from anairos
"Once again YouTube recommended me yet another video on the theme of "Why eternal life sucks," and once again I sighed, because I no longer have the strength left to facepalm at the sight of this foolishness.
No, I get it — immortality isn't in the cards for us under any scenario. Even extending a full, active life by forty or fifty years is already far beyond our capabilities and understanding. So all that's left is to comfort ourselves with fairy tales — that the grapes are sour, that we didn't really want it anyway, and besides, be careful what you wish for.
But still. All these sermons revolve around two horrors that have nothing to do with immortality at all, because we already have them right now. These are old age and the impossibility of dying at will.
With the impossibility of dying, everything's clear. Death ends suffering. Take away from a person this last deliverance — and it's easy to imagine how an endless life would turn into endless torture. Abrahamism with its hell and Buddhism with its samsara play on exactly this fear of ours.
But old age — that's a far more interesting topic, because it seems to me that many "ideological opponents of immortality" don't themselves realize that what frightens them is precisely old age, and not immortality at all.
Old age must not be confused with the decrepitude of the body — it's a state of the soul.
In youth, you are becoming. You gradually figure out who you want to be, what place in the world to occupy, and you move in that direction as far as your possibilities allow. Or else you simply drift wherever life's currents carry you, until you arrive at the point where you'll remain.
Maturity begins with the realization that you've stopped. You will no longer become anyone else. The place where you are now — that is your home for the rest of your life. Of your own free will, you'll never leave this state again. From clay, capable of taking any shape, you've turned into something solid, and you can only be changed by breaking and gluing you back together. It's painful, it's not even certain you'll survive it, and the end result usually looks and functions far worse than if you had aimed for that very form from the start.
However, maturity is far from the end of life. On the contrary — now that you've stopped spending effort on becoming someone, you can direct that effort toward perfecting yourself in the form you've taken, and achieving something in the sphere where you've settled.
But old age — that's when everything is already behind you. You'll never again be able to repeat what you were capable of in maturity, let alone in youth. What's happening now evokes only a pale shadow of former experiences and emotions. All that remain are memories and dreams in which you return to former times. To immerse yourself in them, to share them with those around you — that's an old man's last consolation.
So then: the opponents of immortality always — and I emphasize, always — imagine it as an eternally enduring old age, even if in a physically young body.
Their constant argument is: "one day you'll outlive everyone dear to you." But think it over more carefully.
Every child at some point realizes that they're destined to outlive most of the people they've known since childhood. All their older relatives will one day be gone, and they'll have to accept that loss.
This may be frightening, this may be saddening, but is it really a tragedy and the end of life? No — life goes on, you'll have new family, new friends, new loves. They won't replace the old ones, but they'll be no worse.
Only an old man, already incapable of forming strong relationships, living in the past, feels the loss of each new piece of that past as a little death bringing him closer to total annihilation. You've outlived all "your people" and been left alone, because you'll never have new "people of your own."
This means it's easy to imagine an immortality stripped of both these flaws. In fact, we don't even need to invent anything — it's all been invented before us and goes by the name of eternal youth.
The immortal may look like wise elders, but they are always young. They're full of strength and desires. They do something because they enjoy it, and once it's done, they move on to the next goal. And this path will have no end, because the immortal will never tire of striving toward the new.
And no, the new will never run out, and novelty will never grow stale, because the essence of youth lies in change. Even if you take up something you've already done hundreds of times over the centuries past — it will still be thrillingly new, for you yourself are no longer the one you were the previous times.
Yes, those who surround you will leave in time. You'll mourn them and move on, toward new loved ones who will surely appear, for your capacity to form strong friendships and to love with your whole heart hasn't gone anywhere. And so what if this friendship or love, too, will one day end? Right now they exist, and that's what matters.
For the immortal, it never happens that everything is left in the past with nothing ahead to look forward to. On the contrary — the most interesting things are always ahead.
But if it should nevertheless come to pass that life becomes a burden to you, if you encounter suffering that doesn't end because it's not up to you...
Then the time will come for the last and final adventure.
Crocodiles don't age and don't have cancer. Their serum kills human cancers in mice.
Sera from Phylogenetically Related Alligators, Crocodiles and Domestic Chickens Exhibit Comparable Anti-Cancer Activity https://www.mdpi.com/3852192 #mdpicells via @Cells_MDPI