There is a school of thought in anti-aging research that some of the mechanisms of aging, such as telomeres, are adaptations to prevent cancer. So evolutionarily there might have been a life span / cancer risk trade-off. This of course would have been optimized to maximize long-term reproductive success, providing a long enough life span to have, raise, nourish, and educate children while minimizing the risk of dying of cancer along the way.
It's likely that aging is a product of multiple such trade-offs. I very, very strongly doubt that SENS will be achieved by simply adjusting one or two knobs.
One possibility is that we just get really, really, REALLY good at detecting and zapping cancer, and then we turn off all the senescence-generating anti-cancer safety switches and decay mechanisms and just play whack a mole with the cancers when they arise. So you get to live two or three times as long but you're in for cancer removal at least once per decade.
"...maximize long-term reproductive success..." - where 'long-term' means 30 years based on observable health decline. We have to switch to metal bodies or something.
You left out the most important part of that statement: [citation needed]
The previous line actually sheds more light on this: "As with all immunosuppressive medications, in theory, sirolimus may decrease the body's inherent anticancer activity and allow some cancers that would have been naturally destroyed to proliferate."
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 for this post 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 already old and damaged. Yet there are other research strategies that can achieve this goal: the better approach is to repair the damage that causes aging, following the existing detailed research plans that aim to produce new rejuvenation biotechnologies. These can in principle restore youthful function for the old, extend healthy life indefinitely, and should not be any more expensive to explore and develop than a continued future of whatever the next replacement for sirtuin research might be. If billions are spent, then let it be in the pursuit of technologies that do offer the possibility for everyone to live to 90, and in good health, lacking frailty, pain, and disease.
It's a fight to make this case. It shouldn't be, but it is. Attention continues to be soaked up by marginal, ultimately pointless efforts such as the pursuit of mTOR-influencing drugs like rapalogs. It won't let you live to be 90 in confidence, it won't create rejuvenation in the old, and no foreseeable evolution of this strategy can in fact provide those benefits. It is just more of the same search for the greater fool to retroactively bankroll the continuing mapping of metabolism.
Obligatory link to SENS: http://sens.org/ I think SENS is probably the best expression of what you're looking for, but you probably already know about it.
Slowing the damaging processes of aging should probably be part of a proper anti-aging strategy IMO, as it's easier to fix things that are slightly broken in comparison to things which are radically broken. I agree that mTOR based technologies are probably a dead end (no pun intended) in terms of anti-aging research, but it's such a fundamental pathway that we'd be stupid not to investigate it more fully and learn as much as possible as we can.
That said, your objections to this line of scientific inquiry are spot on. Dreaming bigger isn't what gets Novartis paid, though. Incremental plays are the best they can work for, I think. Leave it to biotech startups or other do-big-or-die research groups (if any exist) to try tackling the harder problems.
And a provider of ultra expensive information terminals to wall street, and a TV channel and much more. And the founder, Michael Bloomberg, is worth over $36 billion.
I thought the same thing about the design (and magazine) cover as a whole. Looks like the internet in 1995: needs more BLINK tags and "Under Construction" GIFs.
It reminded me of Print Shop from the 80s. I felt an urge to print it out on colored paper to read. The web devs over at bloomberg must have plenty of cocaine.
"A Canadian medical expedition had collected the soil from beneath one of the mysterious stone heads on Easter Island, a speck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean."
I spent a few minutes trying to figure out whether there is any evidence for "Zermatism." I recommend others do not waste their time. It appears to be a completely crackpot theory. I don't believe the parent comment is serious.
There isn't any evidence for Zermatism, and it is a crackpot theory, but as of now there is also the possibility that this 'unknown species' is indeed the Yeti. We shall see!