You might also see the great short introduction to the conservative scientific view on aging here:<p><a href="http://senescence.info/aging_theories.html" rel="nofollow">http://senescence.info/aging_theories.html</a><p>You'll also find a good introduction to the modern "aging is damage" viewpoint in the SENS distillation of consensus positions from various per-disease research fields:<p><a href="http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research" rel="nofollow">http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research</a><p>That is one synthesis of which damage is primary and important. Another is the Hallmarks of Aging:<p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/</a>
It would be great to stay young.<p>I'm happy to report that scientists have been seriously testing if stuff actually works for over a century (Slonaker, 1912).<p>They typically try an intervention, like diet or exercise, on lab animals, and then see how long they live.<p>For what it's worth, I maintain the world's biggest spread sheet of these life span experiments.<p>It summarizes over 14,000.<p>One column is the intervention (diet, exercise, etc..) another is the change in lifespan (+10%, -2%, etc...) another is the species (human, mice, etc...) and so on.<p>It's interesting to see what works.<p>More info is at<p><a href="http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/doku.php?id=science:start" rel="nofollow">http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/doku.php?id=science:start</a>
Interesting and thorough article, very good read.<p>I've posted about some of the interesting stuff going on regarding stem cells, particularly around hockey legend Gordie Howe's rather miraculous recover from a stroke earlier this year. I'm really not sure why this isn't getting more news nationally, or even why on HN it isn't getting any traction/discussion:<p><a href="http://www.freep.com/story/sports/nhl/red-wings/2015/05/18/gordie-howe-stem-cells-detroit/27536175/" rel="nofollow">http://www.freep.com/story/sports/nhl/red-wings/2015/05/18/g...</a>
The more I read about aging, the more interested I become about the subject, especially after Google created Calico and after watching some talks by Aubrey de Grey.<p>Reversing aging seems like such a science fiction thing, but then you take a look at how things were 50 years ago and how things are right now and you realize that a lot of the things that seem impossible right now might very well be possible in 20, 30 or 50 years.
For anyone interested in why we age and what research needs to be done to cure it, I'd recommend this article<p><a href="http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v78/pdf/bcm_1061.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v78/pdf/bcm_10...</a><p>The most interesting part is that a relatively simple medical procedure called plasmapheresis or plasma exchange, might be used for rejuvenation. The process would be to exchange the blood plasma of an old person with that of a young person many times over a period of time.<p>The blood plasma contains signaling molecules and there is strong evidence that some of them are used to synchronize the current age throughout the body, perhaps to a master clock somewhere. This causes telomeres to be shortened, DNA repair mechanisms to be turned off, stem cells to stop dividing etc. If the clock could be reset with young plasma, the stem cells would be reset to a young state and can start dividing again to regenerate tissue. Experiments on rats suggests this is indeed happening and a number of academic labs and even a startup called alkahest is now working on getting this tested in humans.
I find the life expectancy vs. heart rate graph very interesting. The human point is the only one that lies well off the line of correlation, and it's tempting to see the distance as a result of our technological achievements. In other words, we're the only animal to have pushed ourselves to the right of that line by being able to fix at least some of what goes wrong.
I love this article! The author points out that as lifespan goes up the effect of aging on fitness goes down. So provided that an organism lives long enough, aging is not penalized by Natural Selection.
> <i>If you think about it, nearly all things age. Your car. Wine. Cheese. The electronic device you’re reading this on.</i><p>Actually, no. Those things don't 'age' like you age.<p>BTW, trying to answer existentialist questions with biological theories is futile.