[venus]

I don't understand these old bilionaires. It seems there's so much work to be done, and possibly a great deal of low-hanging fruit, in anti-aging research. Who's to say what Aubrey de Grey et al would have been able to deliver by now if given a few billion ten years ago?

You can't take it with you. Give it to science, FFS.

[tokenadult]

From the text of the article kindly submitted here: "Karl Albrecht established the Elisen Foundation to support cultural causes, and his Oertel trust, which controlled a portion of Aldi Sued, also donates to medical research."

Any working scientist who is actively involved in anti-aging research can tell you that Aubrey de Grey is not going to deliver with his approach. The current Wikipedia article on de Grey is largely written by de Grey and his close friends, and the article there about his approach to anti-aging research is written mostly by fans of his research. Wikipedia is currently a biased source. But I have been going to the complete journal subscriptions of a large research university with a medical school, with updating Wikipedia in mind. The general approach advocated by de Grey (and pursued by other researchers) is interesting, and was worth looking at when it was first mentioned, but it is not panning out as a general approach to reduce risk of aging-related health problems. I think the billionaire mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, who lived into his nineties, knew more on a practical level about how not to age too soon than de Grey does. (Aubrey de Grey has no medical training, after all.)

[venus]

Mea culpa. I didn't read the article. Glad to hear he was supporting medical research.

And I didn't really mean to say de Grey had all the answers - I'm by no means a fanboy. But I think his approach deserves a lot more attention and research dollars than it's getting. It's far too premature to write it off as "not panning out" - with respect, the medical establishment's efforts aren't "panning out" either, with orders of magnitude more budget.

I am not a doctor either, but I am a student of history, and history is replete with established fields of study resisting disruptive (and correct) new ideas until the very last. I'm not saying this is the case, but it is something we need to consider when you write of the dismissal of all these "working scientists", with their educations and investment in the status quo. It seems extremely plausible to me that a maintenance-based approach will win in the end, and de Grey's work, while not perfect, is at least a decent first effort.

And I doubt this 94-yr-old had any specific knowledge. 94 is on the upper end of a normal lifespan, given healthy lifestyle and the best medicine money can by. It's a little disingenuous to claim that by pure dint of that longevity he knows more than de Grey, who has spent years studying the matter, doctor or not.

[bellerocky]

> Mea culpa. I didn't read the article

But then you commented anyway, with a lot of conviction and assumptions and no mention of you not having read the article. Why?

[venus]

Well, because it's 1am, and as you say, assumptions. My bad.

But less assumption than you might imagine. If there had been massive investment by billionaires in "alternative" approaches to anti-aging like deGrey espouses, I probably would have heard about it. Of course it's possible that it's happening in secret, but unlikely.

I guess I also just have a different mindset. Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire, but it just seems so conservative. I mean, forget anti-aging if you like. A team in Japan reckons they can build a space elevator for $8B. You're dying, you've got $20b, fuckin' give it to them! If they succeed, you go down in history as the man who enabled the space elevator. If they don't - well who cares, you're dead. Whose kids need $20b?

Like I said, maybe this mindset changes, but shit, at age 90 and with that much money, I'd certainly be prowling the VIP section of kickstarter for some big ideas to make a dent in the universe.

I don't mean any disrespect by all of this. He seems a very decent man. But I think the reason Elon Musk gets so much love around here is that he's a billionaire who's actually willing to make some crazy bets, and that's so very, very rare.

[bellerocky]

> Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire,

I've always thought the rich man who doesn't want to die and is desperate to beat it with wealth as a cliché actually, a sign of the ultimate hubris of being wealthy. Desperate to forestall death while others are having a hard time living. Death is the great equalizer, rich and and poor die alike, but in the future I guess the rich will even escape death while some of us cheer them on.

[venus]

Are you talking about yourself? Living in a first world country, access to first rate medical care, not dying of malaria in sub saharan africa?

Because you could be.

If wanting to live a very long time makes me hubristic then hell yes I'm hubristic. But I think your definition is way off. What's hubristic about wanting to live? Are thousand-year old trees "hubristic"?

[exratione]

You are overly dismissive of de Grey's approach, and if you're going to Wikipedia for the details of SENS then you are in the wrong place. It is documented in far more detail elsewhere.

The standard response to your viewpoint is to point to the SENS Research Foundation advisory board, which includes George Church, Anthony Atala, Judith Campisi, Maria Blasco, and so on and so forth for a list of luminaries in subfields of medical research relevant to aging:

http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board

It is also worth looking at the ongoing research collaborations, which involve noted labs at institutions such as Wake Forest, the Buck Institute, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Cambridge University, and so on and so forth.

http://www.sens.org/research/extramural

I'm not sure why you think this research work is not panning out when it has barely even started. This is early stage work, creating the building blocks and foundations. The most advanced of the necessary lines of research is ablation of senescent cells, which has been shown to work in accelerated aging mice and is current in studies in normal mice. That is a few years away from technical possibility in humans, further once you add in the regulatory issues, and everything else is further into the future.

[onion2k]

From the article;

Karl Albrecht established the Elisen Foundation to support cultural causes, and his Oertel trust, which controlled a portion of Aldi Sued, also donates to medical research.

It's quite possible that he did exactly what you suggest.

[logicallee]

Sure, blame the victim. How is old age not literally every single person's problem who hasn't committed to suicide by a certain age?

It would be completely justified to spend 1% of world GDP on aging research - that is something like $700 billion per year, $7 trillion by 2025.

It's free money, too, as if you increase life expency from 70 to 90 I'm sure the people choosing to keep working from 65 or 70 up from 56 or 60 would more than account for a 1% increase in GDP. It's just free cash for the economy.

[bmelton]

Until we can get more people's retirement plans solvent enough that they can live until 120 and be reliably not poor, I disagree with your assertion that it's free money.

[logicallee]

we're not doing the analysis similarly, I don't mean research to make someone old and decrepit for an extra 30 years, I mean to keep people younger, longer. Just as a 60 year old rich venture capitalist might still be at the prime of their career today, maybe after 20 years of research the same will be true at 70. Those ten years, maybe 20% of their career after education, are free money. They would otherwise be unfit for or not interested in work.

[bmelton]

Fair enough, but that introduces the idea to me that you've just eliminated retirement.

Even if I'm fit and healthy age the age of 90, I can't imagine wanting to, y'know, do things beyond care for my grandkids and such.

[venus]

> Even if I'm fit and healthy age the age of 90, I can't imagine wanting to, y'know, do things beyond care for my grandkids and such.

So let me get this straight. If you had the exact same physical and mental ability as you do now when you are 90, you'd still want to do nothing except care for your grandkids? Nothing else at all? You wouldn't want to travel, work on interesting things, maybe try a new career? Why on earth not?

[bmelton]

Well sure, maybe I would want to travel, and/or try new things, and/or work on interesting things. Those things don't require employment, or profit-seeking as a way of life.

> you'd still want to do nothing except care for your grandkids?

And such. Y'know, the 'and such' part being the things that old people tend to do. Golfing, fishing, travel, vacation, that sort of thing.

Would I want to try a new career? Likely not. The career I have is a means to an end, and while I enjoy my work, and the company I work for, I don't want to be doing this when I'm 60. As a result, I cram every dollar I can into my 401k, and save aggressively, along with working on personally fulfilling side projects that maybe will one day become an alternative income stream.

In short, I'm preparing for retirement, and doing what I can to expedite its arrival, so that I can focus on more fulfilling things that aren't necessitated by rather unfulfilling things like "earning money for the mortgage".

If I have grandchildren, yeah, I'd like to spend a lot of time with them. No, that's not the only thing I'd like to do, exclusively, and I believe you misinterpreted my post to infer that I did.

[logicallee]

but if you're fit and healthy at age of 90, will you still choose to work for a few years at 70? Especially the most productive members of society. I didn't look into it, you can investigate, but there was a factoid floating around that the top 1% support 40% of all taxes. So if the top 1% - who might spend a lot of their time in education - work an extra 10 years at their option, this might create 25% extra value, or increase the take in terms of taxes by 10% (40 percent of 25%). So if you increase everyone's lifespan enough to increase the tax take by 10%, spending 1% of GDP to do so might be well worth it.

Also, as the richest spend a lot of their early lives in education, and afterward can experience certain network effects of experience, knowledge, networking, etc, perhaps those are ten of their most productive years. Think of Warren Buffett at 35 and 65.

This is a rather hasty, and incomplete analysis, and I haven't had the time to look at all the facts, but yes my line of reasoning is that as a practical matter that money can be "free".

[terhechte]

It may be that people are so accustomed to ageing and death, that even smart ones, especially if they were raised in the Western / Christian belief system, tend to accept death on such a fundamental level, that the idea of battling death simply doesn't compute for them. Or, is discarded as science fiction comic book hokum.

[fred_durst]

I accept death because I consider it the morally right thing to do. Others died to make room for me, and someday it will be my turn to make room for others.

[arrrg]

See, that’s exactly the kind of fucked up thinking that’s so creepy about this.

This acceptance of death is something I just cannot understand. The nonchalance with which the complete destruction of conscious minds is accepted is mind-boggling.

[psykovsky]

Dude, I really don't understand the downvotes. The most insightful reply... I'm speechless!

[Cthulhu_]

Pretty sure there's better causes to donate to than anti-aging if you're a billionaire. Funding disease research and whatnot will also increase the average lifespan, for example. Plus 94 is a very respectable age, I for one don't think I'd want to live for that long.

[orcdork]

Why?