I noticed there is no main forum topic for youthful longevity (or “youthful life extension”). Seems that might make a good sub-topic for quantified self.
After we gather data associated with human life, where it all leads is reliability testing. How long can we last?
Edit for clarity: We know about the Hayflick limit of cells, but we also know about stem cells. I like to visualize human life as a bunch of stem cells that send out cell cultures (that have a Hayflick limit) to form the main structure of our bodies and allow us to live our lives. Stem cells provide us with new life / new cell cultures continuously throughout our lives. Our fundamental task is to nurture our stem cells, and to maintain great form to all the cells, tissues, and organs in our body for best youthful longevity such that when new cell cultures are introduced, there is a great world for them to jump into (LOL).
Here’s an interesting quote from an article but bear in mind that “immortal” here does not mean the same thing as “an immmortal human being.” It means that the cells can continue to reproduce “forever” or at least for as long as they ran the experiment.
“more recently some mouse cells have been found to be immortal under certain culture conditions (Parrinello et al., 2003)”
Bottom line, it’s an amazing world we’ve been born into and there is a HUGE amount of knowledge we do not know. Gathering data and graphing it, correlating all the cause / effect relationships is how we discover the truth. Look to the old, ask them what they did to get there and graph the positive and negative adders. We can discover amazing things if we simply put ourselves to the task of gathering existing (historic) data, and the new data that comes in each day. On a scale of 100%, 100 being all data available to understand the truth of youthful longevity, we’ve probably gathered well below 0.1% of the data that is available for us to gather if all people had a philosophical foundation, a culture, to contribute to the data collection. Imagine having that data, and graphing it… wow.
On the front/top page of that site it says (quote):
“Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is medical biotechnology”
I don’t discard the cultural aspect like this website appears to do. I’m all for the technology aspect - the thing this site seems to most embrace - but the cultural aspect is what quantified self can actually put some intelligence to, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of collecting all data available, graphing it, and continuously improving our cultures to see the benefits.
[quote]I noticed there is no main forum topic for youthful longevity. Seems that might make a good sub-topic for quantified self. [/quote]I think the mindset that motivates that sentence illustrates the core problem in talking about longlivity. There little focus on actual reality.
Forum threads don’t appear because someone creates a new subforum. If there are enough longevity topics to warrant their own subforum, than it makes sense to speak about opening a subforum for them.
Talking about longevity is similar. Most of the time it’s probably more efficient to focus an existing health challenges thatn focus on the long term where you don’t know anything.
The problem with the goal of longevity is that we know very little about achieving it.
For a few years we thought that calorie restriction was a sure way to live longer. Now there’s a new study in which calorie restriction failed to make monkeys live longer.
[quote]Edit for clarity: We know about the Hayflick limit of cells, but we also know about stem cells. I like to visualize human life as a bunch of stem cells that send out cell cultures (that have a Hayflick limit) to form the main structure of our bodies and allow us to live our lives. Stem cells provide us with new life / new cell cultures continuously throughout our lives. Our fundamental task is to nurture our stem cells, and to maintain great form to all the cells, tissues, and organs in our body for best youthful longevity such that when new cell cultures are introduced, there is a great world for them to jump into (LOL).
[/quote]I don’t think that a good way of doing things. I see no decent way of using stem cells to replace a running brain without destroying it.
Using gene therapy seems to be much easier.
Cancer cells manage to go through the hayflick limit without problems. Going through the limit doesn’t even need the introduction of new genes. It’s just about shutting of some genes and activating a few others. The real issue is doing that in a way where that doesn’t cause cancer.
It’s no easy problem but I would predict that we manage to achieve it within this century. And I’m not the kind of person who does predicts the singularity the way Kurzweil does.
I understand the point about not having a sub-forum until enough people are chatting about it… absolutely. Maybe in times to come.
My goal is to collect data, graph it, and see how it contributes to enjoying our lives (great energy, appearance, etc), preventing common health problems, and achieving greater youthful longevity. We’ve only just scratched the surface of this data collection. There is a ton of data out there that people don’t collect.
You mention 100 years… I would suggest we could make amazing strides in just a few years if we developed a culture of data collection; imagine media aiding this effort. Again, there is so much data out there not being collected that if we just taught people about doing this, amazing answers would begin to pop out of the data and it would just be a continuous process of learning new stuff.
One example: Imagine looking to the oldest people to examine the positive and negative adders to their aging (they would have to be willing to tell the complete truth about their whole history, of course). There alone is a huge reservoir of data just waiting to be collected and graphed.
Excellent. I’m new to all of this so I’m getting the latest status of where everyone’s at. Looks like a lot of people are already tuned in to collecting all this exhaust, graphing it and finding the accurate correlations. I’m sure I’ll learn more about the status over the next few weeks. What really needs to happen is mainstream media needs to get on board; then everything will change very quickly.
[quote]You mention 100 years…[/quote]When it comes to aging there are different problems that we have to solve.
QS has it’s place but you don’t get throught the hayflick limit without molecular biology.
[quote]I would suggest we could make amazing strides in just a few years if we developed a culture of data collection; [/quote]Creating QS culture is the reason I’m here. For QS culture to work, it has to be about actually doing something.
If QS culture is primarily talking about the Hayflick limit, QS won’t do much for society.
Getting people to take action instead of just talking about abstract ideas is hard. It’s a hard cultural challenge.
[quote]What really needs to happen is mainstream media needs to get on board; then everything will change very quickly.[/quote]My name appears in a dozen mainstream media publications about QS. Mainstream media is useful but it’s not central. Mainstream media doesn’t have the power that it had 20 years ago.
Look the world is basically at a state where most of the old institutions have lost their power. Mainstream media can’t drive much people. Big Pharma has to lay off huge amounts of people because it runs against Eroom’s law. Breakthrough findings in cancer research have a replication rate of 11%. In the case of longevity, we thought we knew one thing about it. Calorie restriction increases it. Now we have results that the one thing we thought we knew probably isn’t even true.
For the most part we are at a place where we don’t know what we are doing. Human’s don’t like to feel that way. The tell themselves nice stories about shiny progress. At the point where you get real contact with empiric data you get into contact with how little you know.
Part of doing QS is about taking the red pill. Looking at the empiric data that shows oneselves one’s own ignorance.
In the beginning when you come to QS, don’t focus on what other people should do. Focus on yourself. Focus on trying to get a grasp at the data you collect. Try to interact with other QS people based on the experiences that you make with your data.
If we get a culture of a bunch of QS people who interact on that basis with each other, we will make progress.
Fact that this forum hasn’t much traffic illustrates the hardness of the problem of building a community that speaks about data driven empirical QS experiences. Is you want to help with the QS community building effort, be welcome on this forum. Participate in it.
As you are new to all this, ask questions to get more experienced people to help you get started.
Well, collecting all the data, graphing it, continuously improving how we eat and live and collect data and graph it will provide the answers… Let’s enjoy it!
[quote]I don’t think it’s possible to extend our lifespan through sheer self quantification alone but it will be useful data to biologists.
[/quote]It depends a bit on the amount of lifespan extension that we want to achieve.
QS on it’s own won’t allow a person to get 200. That however doesn’t mean that it can’t produce one or two decades of extra life.
I think Seth idea of taking vitamin D3 in the morning has the potential to be worth 1-2 extra years of life. The idea is very important and all those people in academia didn’t manage to examine the timing of taking vitamin D3 on their own.
If you look into Seth’s article on the topic you don’t find him being focused on life extension. If he would focus on life extension instead of focusing on markers such as sleep quality and cognitive improvement he couldn’t make his argument on taking vitamin D3 in the morning.
In that case Seth is not trying to get giga bytes worth of data. The thing Seth’s is doing differently is that he can start asking different questions and gather data according to those questions.
Seth example is also very reassuring because it shows that a single person can have a massive impact.
If QS helps people to avoid dying to cancer and heart disease it will also increase lifespan.
The stuff we do here matters. As a bioinformatics student I did come into contact with molecular biology. There’s a reason my personal chips are on QS instead of being on battling the Hayflick through molecular biology.
This is where I can make the bigger difference.
I’m a bit more optimistic. I think there are pathways of living that could achieve, let’s say, 150, without biotechnology. Since we’ve just barely scratched the surface of this data collection, perhaps that’s why I’m optimistic on that front. With regard to Hayflick the stem cells are key since they keep us alive by producing new cell cultures. So we need to learn to live in a way that best cares for the stem cells. I’ve read that neurons don’t reproduce. There are stem cells… The key is producing conditions that cause them to transform into a particular kind of cell and I doubt we know everything about that from the perspective of how we live / eat / move / socially interact / etc.
[quote]I’m a bit more optimistic.[/quote]I think Bruce Sterling said that being optimistic or pessimistic makes you a bad futurist.
[quote]I think there are pathways of living that could achieve, let’s say, 150, without biotechnology.[/quote]Even if the max life span would be 150, the average probably won’t be.
[quote]With regard to Hayflick the stem cells are key since they keep us alive by producing new cell cultures. So we need to learn to live in a way that best cares for the stem cells. [/quote]Do you know of any research that showed that people who somehow have “healthier” stem cells have lower mortality?
[quote]The key is producing conditions that cause them to transform into a particular kind of cell and I doubt we know everything about that from the perspective of how we live / eat / move / socially interact / etc.[/quote]We don’t know everything and we won’t know everything in 100 years. I think the problem of switching a bunch of genes in a controlled way on and off to get around Hayflick is an easier problem then wanting to know everything.
Despite an explosion in the amount of knowledge we have about what gene does what big pharma rather rebuys their own stock than investing that money into researching new drugs based on the new knowledge created in the last ten years.
In the last years there was a lot of failed optimising in how new technology produces big changes. On the paper, the amount of information that we have rose dramatically. In practice not much happened.
Several antioxidants, such as flavonoids, vitamin E, and curcumin, increase neurogenesis in rodent brains. […] Flavonoids, found in cocoa and blueberries, are chemicals that increase neurogenesis in the hippocampus of stressed rats, possibly by increasing levels of BDNF (Stangl and Thuret, 2009), and/or by improving blood flow to the brain, which can increase hippocampal neurogenesis (Spencer, 2009). Vitamin E, abundant in vegetable oils, nuts, and green leafy vegetables, aids neurological performance in aging mice (Gómez-Pinilla, 2008). Curcumin, found in yellow curry spice, may increase neurogenesis in the hippocampus of rodents by activating certain cell signaling pathways known to increase neurogenesis and decrease stress responses (Stangl and Thuret, 2009).
Another antioxidant, found in green tea, goes one step further than the others. The chemical (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (called EGCG) promotes neurogenesis in the hippocampus (Yoo et al., 2010), and has been shown to reduce the damage from oxidative stress in other neurodegenerative diseases (Ehrnhoefer et al., 2006).
In addition to antioxidants, other nutrients have also been shown to play a role in neurogenesis. Omega-3 fatty acids, present in fish and flaxseed, might also promote neurogenesis, and have been shown to decrease cognitive decline seen with aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s (Yurko-Mauro et al, 2010). […] Zinc, a vitamin essential for normal brain development, promotes the survival and proliferation of neural stem cells, which are the main cell type capable of generating neurons (Adamo and Oteiza, 2010).
The toned-down conclusion of the Stanford article:
Altogether, research on diet and neurogenesis is not conclusive. It is difficult to study nutrients effectively: studying a nutrient in isolation ignores many of the complex interactions the nutrient may have in the body. However, there are a few relatively consistent messages that emerge. A vitamin-rich, low-fat diet aids neurogenesis in experiments with rodents, and a low-calorie diet mitigates the effects of neurogenerative disease in mice. As for humans, this diet has not been shown to directly help neurogenesis or ameliorate the problems of HD (Huntington Study group, 2008; Block et al., 2011), but healthy diets have a vast number of other physical and mental benefits: longer life, elevated mood, and higher energy levels, to name a few. In conclusion, eating healthy might promote neurogenesis – but even if it does not, a healthy diet certainly will not hurt.