In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!)<p>Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the population has it. What most people don't know, is that if we could otherwise have a life expectancy of 200 years, many of us would be dying from cytomegalovirus. (Simplified version: it takes up memory slots in our immune system, but at a slow enough rate, we die of other causes before that can happen.)<p>I suspect that "curing" aging will consist of extending the average lifespan a decade at a time, as we cure dozens of different conditions. Something as complex as a human body is always going to have some unforeseeable epiphenomenal mode of failure, given enough time. We know from thermodynamics and the Halting Problem that everything is bound to break down, and that we won't be able to predict all of the ways it can happen.<p>(For a given degree of complexity in any turing complete mechanism, maybe an overwhelmingly correct heuristic for the halting problem is a piece of paper with the word "Yes" printed on it.)
Here is the transcript for those who missed that easily-overlooked link:<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=408025154" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...</a><p>"Things that have only a 50 percent chance of happening in 20 years from now are supposed to sound like science fiction."<p>This interview with de Grey is one part of a longer piece with other interviews:<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/408023272/the-fountain-of-youth" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/408023272/the-fou...</a><p>Of which the one with Cynthia Kenyon is also interesting, particularly as a contrast on fundamental philosophy and strategy in the approach to treating aging as a medical condition:<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=408027400" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...</a><p>---<p>Aubrey de Grey is the cofounder of the SENS Research Foundation and coordinator of rejuvenation research programs. Cynthia Kenyon worked on single gene manipulations that extend nematode longevity back in the 1990s, efforts that arguably kicked off the modern wave of interest in slowing aging.<p>In these two short interviews you can see illustrated the most important division in the modern work aimed at intervention into the aging process: on the one hand the mainstream approach of altering the operation of metabolism so as to slow down aging, based on traditional drug discovery methodologies, and on the other hand the radical, disruptive approach of repairing the damage caused by the normal operation of metabolism, requiring the development of new biotechnologies. The strategy here is to avoid changing the operation of metabolism, because that is very hard and far too little is known of the important details, but rather periodically clean up the consequences of normal metabolic activity in order to prevent that damage from overwhelming and altering biological systems so as to cause degenerative aging.<p>I'm greatly in favor of the latter approach because all the signs suggest it should be far more efficient and effective at extending healthy life spans, not to mention producing actual rejuvenation in the old. You can't greatly help the old by slowing down aging: better technologies are needed. Rejuvenation is needed. You can't bring aging under medical control by working on metabolic alteration to slow aging. Repair is needed, not merely dialing down the pace of new damage.
Didn't know about this guy (Aubrey de Grey) but googling for him I just learnt that's he's 52.. From that vid I thought he was a sleep-deprived 30-something!
IIRC from my molecular biology class, the biggest (or maybe one of the biggest?) problems is about Telomeres[1].<p>I was impressed by this study[2]: "Lifestyle Changes May Lengthen Telomeres, A Measure of Cell Aging".<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2013/09/108886/lifestyle-changes-may-lengthen-telomeres-measure-cell-aging" rel="nofollow">http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2013/09/108886/lifestyle-changes-ma...</a>
One reason why we age and die - might be because we(any living being) want to evolve, and that pressurizes us to cross breed and give birth to new generation before we die and finally die and not hog up all the resources ourselves. And let the better generation live on.<p>That natural strategy might have become suboptimal since the progress in science.