<story><title>Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/20/anti-ageing-human-trials?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gaius</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and &lt;i&gt;you would not believe&lt;/i&gt; the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus&amp;#x27;s performance at the VMAs (something I&amp;#x27;ve not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that&amp;#x27;s really all there was to it.&lt;p&gt;The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?</text></item><item><author>vilhelm_s</author><text>“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.”
 -Patrick Hayden</text></item><item><author>pvnick</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine
  dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age.
  The addition of this compound led to the radical reversal
  in the ageing of the mice.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
While this is pretty cool, it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), meaning more energy &amp;quot;currency&amp;quot; for the body&amp;#x27;s machinery to work with [1] [2] (someone please comment if my understanding is incomplete). Used as a general lifestyle drug †, grandma isn&amp;#x27;t suddenly going to look like a sorority girl, but she may feel like one - a scary thought indeed!&lt;p&gt;Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions; although, that doesn&amp;#x27;t quite seem to be the case in this specific instance since this compound will probably just improve the quality of the last couple decades of a person&amp;#x27;s life rather than drastically extend it. What&amp;#x27;s the difference between curing disease&amp;#x2F;prolonging natural life vs unnatural &amp;quot;anti-aging&amp;quot; technologies? At what point do we start grappling with the issues of immortality? Personally, I believe that the mentally-deteriorating effects of everyday life, including what one may call &amp;quot;sin,&amp;quot; will be too much for the modern human to retain his&amp;#x2F;her sanity after a certain point. I for one would rather face death.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?C00003&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.genome.jp&amp;#x2F;dbget-bin&amp;#x2F;www_bget?C00003&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00190+C00003&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.genome.jp&amp;#x2F;kegg-bin&amp;#x2F;show_pathway?map00190+C00003&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;† I say &amp;quot;lifestyle drug&amp;quot; here to denote elective treatment, although the effects of natural aging and death dying probably do not fit in the technical definition, which is to treat &amp;quot;non-life threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, impotence, wrinkles, erectile dysfunction, or acne&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that&amp;#x27;s really all there was to it.
The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;d be surprised. A lot of pulp philosophy is indeed crap.&lt;p&gt;But most peoples lives, and the systems we structure our everyday and working lives on, are analysed, to a T, from various angles, and found lacking and wanting.&lt;p&gt;And when you find you are being crashed by those systems (as people eventually do), or that they don&amp;#x27;t work properly, there&amp;#x27;s a philosophical explanation of their workings written 100 or 2000 years ago that&amp;#x27;s perfectly logical.&lt;p&gt;To put it in another way, reading into (good) philosophy, is like reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers among Java people struggling with Java EE in early 2000, and understanding things from 10 levels higher and also that there are far better ways to go about it.&lt;p&gt;Oh, and no, good philosophy is not just about technicalities of reality and understanding, like Hume or Kant or Quine etc -- the only kind some geeks will accept. Regular moral, political, ontological, existencial etc philosophy, with seemingly &amp;quot;imprecise&amp;quot; language, is just as isnightful in other ways, if you spend the time to understand it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/20/anti-ageing-human-trials?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gaius</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and &lt;i&gt;you would not believe&lt;/i&gt; the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus&amp;#x27;s performance at the VMAs (something I&amp;#x27;ve not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that&amp;#x27;s really all there was to it.&lt;p&gt;The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?</text></item><item><author>vilhelm_s</author><text>“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.”
 -Patrick Hayden</text></item><item><author>pvnick</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine
  dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age.
  The addition of this compound led to the radical reversal
  in the ageing of the mice.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
While this is pretty cool, it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), meaning more energy &amp;quot;currency&amp;quot; for the body&amp;#x27;s machinery to work with [1] [2] (someone please comment if my understanding is incomplete). Used as a general lifestyle drug †, grandma isn&amp;#x27;t suddenly going to look like a sorority girl, but she may feel like one - a scary thought indeed!&lt;p&gt;Anti-aging technologies are going to introduce many philosophical questions; although, that doesn&amp;#x27;t quite seem to be the case in this specific instance since this compound will probably just improve the quality of the last couple decades of a person&amp;#x27;s life rather than drastically extend it. What&amp;#x27;s the difference between curing disease&amp;#x2F;prolonging natural life vs unnatural &amp;quot;anti-aging&amp;quot; technologies? At what point do we start grappling with the issues of immortality? Personally, I believe that the mentally-deteriorating effects of everyday life, including what one may call &amp;quot;sin,&amp;quot; will be too much for the modern human to retain his&amp;#x2F;her sanity after a certain point. I for one would rather face death.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bget?C00003&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.genome.jp&amp;#x2F;dbget-bin&amp;#x2F;www_bget?C00003&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00190+C00003&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.genome.jp&amp;#x2F;kegg-bin&amp;#x2F;show_pathway?map00190+C00003&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;† I say &amp;quot;lifestyle drug&amp;quot; here to denote elective treatment, although the effects of natural aging and death dying probably do not fit in the technical definition, which is to treat &amp;quot;non-life threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, impotence, wrinkles, erectile dysfunction, or acne&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tesseractive</author><text>More accurately, professional philosophers don&amp;#x27;t have any particular standing to discuss &amp;quot;serious philosophical issues.&amp;quot; At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, &amp;quot;Well, what do the philosophers think?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;(I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)</text></comment>