There is a greater fool at the end of many paths of research and development, the wallet or collection of wallets that indirectly bankrolls the work. Early for-profit investment occurs because investors believe they can sell their stake at a higher price down the line. Other reasons exist, such as the desire to do good in the world, but are entirely secondary. Most investors, and certainly the wealthier ones, have a fiduciary duty to turn away from world-saving in favor of making money. The market for early for-profit investment in turn indirectly steers research interests and the ability to raise funds from other sources: whatever is presently hot is much more likely to receive grants and philanthropic sponsorship. The state of the market at the end of the development process thus reaches back to influence every part of the long chain of research and development. The predicted inclinations of the greater fool are the tail that wags the dog.
The greater fool of interest here is the one indirectly funding the ongoing construction of a grand catalog of human metabolism, an exhaustive accounting of the fine details of how our cellular biochemistry operates and ages. This is understood in outline, but beneath that outline lies an enormous unexplored space of protein interactions, causes and consequences, and the relationship of various states in the system to health at every level. The greater fool is told by various parties that the goal is to enhance healthy longevity, but that isn't really happening via these explorations of metabolism, and in truth doesn't have much of a hope of happening via this research strategy. Look at the past fifteen years of sirtuin research in connection with the calorie restriction response, wherein the greater fool was - collectively - the GlaxoSmithKline shareholder community following the Sirtris acquisition. Well-managed hype sputtered out quite quickly after that liquidity event into nothing more than a slightly greater understanding of a few very narrow areas of mammalian biochemistry. This process happens over and again for each new potential calorie restriction mimetic, or other methodology claimed to slow the progress of aging by altering the operation of metabolism. Yet there is always a greater fool willing to buy.
Even if a drug was developed to completely mimic the beneficial effects of calorie restriction, so what? That is a convenience device, no more. Those practicing calorie restriction have somewhat better health and somewhat less age-related disease, and might live as many as five years longer. It's a larger effect than any currently available medical technology can provide. Nonetheless, the large majority of those people do not and will not live to see 90 years of age in the environment of today's medical technology. They still live the last years of their lives in frailty and pain. Why spend billions on striving to create a convenience device to recreate some of this marginal effect, tiny in the grand scheme of things? Because some people can get rich doing it.
The recent history of medical development related to slowing aging is that some folk have found they can do very well thank you by promising the prospect of enhanced longevity, while delivering nothing of value beyond scientific knowledge. In different circumstances I might be inclined to praise this as a great hack on investment community culture: direct more funding into life science research rather than cat pictures on the internet, and take a deserved cut as the individual who manages to make that happen. There are certainly far worse things for the greater fool to be talked into doing with his or her money.
Today, however, this business of making hay while the sun shines, based on ways to slightly slow aging largely emerged from calorie restriction research, is a distraction from the prospect of real progress. Messing with metabolism in this way cannot even in principle produce meaningful rejuvenation: aging is damage, and slowing down the damage does nothing for people who are alr...
Probably Reason says that there will never a pill against aging, because aging is a complex process and it cannot be solved by a quick and dirty trick.
(I am just trying to summarizing, not giving my own opinion)
I think the better summary would be "there will never be a pill against aging that works through altering metabolism, ultimately mimicking calorie restriction". The reason is simple: even calorie restriction is not a solution to aging, so calorie restriction mimic can't be. I think this is obviously correct.
I think Reason is neutral about other ways against aging which is not through metabolism.
> anyone who starts talking about “detoxification” and “toxins” is likely to be a quack. It’s a buzzword, something that plays to peoples’ mistaken ideas about medicine and biochemistry, that there are all these toxins from the environment that have to be flushed out somehow for you to be healthy.
Is this true? Waste products need to be transported out of the cells and their environment, right? And they can be toxic. Why is this a controversy?
The word "toxins" induces guilt by association because most who use it are quacks. However, there definitely are substances that are toxic and get stored e.g. in adipose tissue and only removed under specific circumstances. But we have to find new names for those substances and processes because of that guilt by association.
But there's a whole scientific field called "toxicology".
Anyway, I don't like the phrase "anyone who ... is likely to be ..." in the linked article. It's basically an ad hominem attack, and not very scientific in itself (unless you take it literally, but in that case the author should have been more explicit imho, to avoid confusion/insinuation).
If you have a functioning liver, then you're fine. There are also some popular "detox" methods that can themselves be harmful [0]. Legitimate detoxes are done for people who are opiate-dependent, and a few others (who probably have a malfunctioning liver from their substance abuse and are consuming large quantities of substances that are toxic) [1].
Because of the wording of the marketing? As soon as the author sees the word detoxification, he is triggered?
While seeing the word "detox" in marketing materials might be a good heuristic if you need to make a snap decision, there is enough time to evaluate the scientific claims and make a decision based on that. If you're going to put a substance in your body on a daily basis for the rest of your life, one would hope you would use more than a heuristic when making that decision.
This paragraph summarizes the theory behind the pill.
> The theory behind Basis is in part an evolution of the theory behind drinking red wine: One of its main ingredients, pterostilbene, is considered a more powerful version of resveratrol, with a more convincing track record in the lab. As for NR, by increasing NAD levels in our cells, it in turn appears to reverse mitochondrial decay. In a 2013 scientific paper, Sinclair announced that a single week of injections of an NAD precursor into elderly mice had made their muscles look young again, though without restoring their strength. Both compounds aim to activate sirtuins, and the hope is that together they might amplify what each does individually.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 56.5 ms ] threadThe greater fool of interest here is the one indirectly funding the ongoing construction of a grand catalog of human metabolism, an exhaustive accounting of the fine details of how our cellular biochemistry operates and ages. This is understood in outline, but beneath that outline lies an enormous unexplored space of protein interactions, causes and consequences, and the relationship of various states in the system to health at every level. The greater fool is told by various parties that the goal is to enhance healthy longevity, but that isn't really happening via these explorations of metabolism, and in truth doesn't have much of a hope of happening via this research strategy. Look at the past fifteen years of sirtuin research in connection with the calorie restriction response, wherein the greater fool was - collectively - the GlaxoSmithKline shareholder community following the Sirtris acquisition. Well-managed hype sputtered out quite quickly after that liquidity event into nothing more than a slightly greater understanding of a few very narrow areas of mammalian biochemistry. This process happens over and again for each new potential calorie restriction mimetic, or other methodology claimed to slow the progress of aging by altering the operation of metabolism. Yet there is always a greater fool willing to buy.
Even if a drug was developed to completely mimic the beneficial effects of calorie restriction, so what? That is a convenience device, no more. Those practicing calorie restriction have somewhat better health and somewhat less age-related disease, and might live as many as five years longer. It's a larger effect than any currently available medical technology can provide. Nonetheless, the large majority of those people do not and will not live to see 90 years of age in the environment of today's medical technology. They still live the last years of their lives in frailty and pain. Why spend billions on striving to create a convenience device to recreate some of this marginal effect, tiny in the grand scheme of things? Because some people can get rich doing it.
The recent history of medical development related to slowing aging is that some folk have found they can do very well thank you by promising the prospect of enhanced longevity, while delivering nothing of value beyond scientific knowledge. In different circumstances I might be inclined to praise this as a great hack on investment community culture: direct more funding into life science research rather than cat pictures on the internet, and take a deserved cut as the individual who manages to make that happen. There are certainly far worse things for the greater fool to be talked into doing with his or her money.
Today, however, this business of making hay while the sun shines, based on ways to slightly slow aging largely emerged from calorie restriction research, is a distraction from the prospect of real progress. Messing with metabolism in this way cannot even in principle produce meaningful rejuvenation: aging is damage, and slowing down the damage does nothing for people who are alr...
(I am just trying to summarizing, not giving my own opinion)
I think Reason is neutral about other ways against aging which is not through metabolism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Mechanisms
I'll pass.
Is this true? Waste products need to be transported out of the cells and their environment, right? And they can be toxic. Why is this a controversy?
Anyway, I don't like the phrase "anyone who ... is likely to be ..." in the linked article. It's basically an ad hominem attack, and not very scientific in itself (unless you take it literally, but in that case the author should have been more explicit imho, to avoid confusion/insinuation).
[0] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-detox-scam-how-to-spot-...
[1] internal medicine fiancee who sees a lot of those patients
While seeing the word "detox" in marketing materials might be a good heuristic if you need to make a snap decision, there is enough time to evaluate the scientific claims and make a decision based on that. If you're going to put a substance in your body on a daily basis for the rest of your life, one would hope you would use more than a heuristic when making that decision.
> The theory behind Basis is in part an evolution of the theory behind drinking red wine: One of its main ingredients, pterostilbene, is considered a more powerful version of resveratrol, with a more convincing track record in the lab. As for NR, by increasing NAD levels in our cells, it in turn appears to reverse mitochondrial decay. In a 2013 scientific paper, Sinclair announced that a single week of injections of an NAD precursor into elderly mice had made their muscles look young again, though without restoring their strength. Both compounds aim to activate sirtuins, and the hope is that together they might amplify what each does individually.