YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Blood cells from 80-year-old donor become stem cells with molecular age under 20

89 points arunc 2 hours ago 50 comments

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

If something like this ever becomes a practical application on the organismal level, the octogenarian dictators of the world will rejoice.

moralestapia 1 hour ago | parent

To expand, we might find out the hard way that having an expiration date was a feature of our species, not a flaw.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

Indeed; the biggest reason is surely cancer.

dyauspitr 1 hour ago | parent

That’s a coping mechanism because we can’t change it.

hootz 1 hour ago | parent

Wasn't death a requirement for us to reach this current stage of human evolution? I don't think it is a good idea to stop it entirely.

jeremyjh 57 minutes ago | parent

Evolution of humans by natural selection is already over with - or at least proceeding at time scales irrelevant to our civilization.

card_zero 23 minutes ago | parent

"Contrary to popular belief," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

I don't think it matters, mind you.

bravoetch 25 minutes ago | parent

Not sure about death being required. It's more that life after reproductive success is not required.

idle_zealot 24 minutes ago | parent

Curing aging doesn't stop death entirely. There's still the attrition of living in the physical world. Some portion of the population will trip and break their necks every year.

suslik 46 minutes ago | parent

Of course it's a feature; it still doesn't mean it cannot be stopped or considerably postponed.

TedDoesntTalk 40 minutes ago | parent

I’m always fascinated by people who think death can be “stopped” (not postponed, but eliminated). Fascinating.

suslik 38 minutes ago | parent

Is there a reason why it can't possibly be stopped?

card_zero 18 minutes ago | parent

Well, accidents. Inconveniently close supernovas. Something is likely to get you eventually, some few millennia later.

TedDoesntTalk 15 minutes ago | parent

Everything we have witnessed that arises also passes away. Every living thing, every dead thing - even stars and planets - arise and pass away.

I feel it’s the ultimate hubris to think we can cheat death.

Moreover, why would you want immortality?

Many books of fiction and poetry discuss the curse of immortality.

Here are a few:

The Immortal, Jorge Luis Borges (1947)

A man discovers a source of immortality, but eternity eventually destroys the significance of individual experiences. When everything can happen infinitely, nothing feels particularly important.

The Mortal Immortal — Mary Shelley (1833) - also wrote Frankenstein

A man drinks an elixir and lives for centuries without substantially aging. He watches his wife grow old and die, and becomes increasingly alienated from humanity. Shelley focuses on loneliness and the psychological weight of endless time.

All Men Are Mortal — Simone de Beauvoir (1946)

An immortal man lives through centuries of history, relationships, and political upheaval. Gradually he discovers that even extraordinary achievements seem meaningless when time is unlimited.

The Makropulos Affair — Karel Čapek (1922)

A woman lives more than 300 years through an elixir. She retains her youth but becomes emotionally exhausted, cynical, and incapable of finding pleasure.

—

There are more. Sure, these are fiction. But use your imagination. Why would you want immortality, even if you could retain perfect health indefinitely?

jojobas 5 minutes ago | parent

Well if one can live to the heat death of the universe I'll count it as prevented, not postponed, death.

card_zero 30 minutes ago | parent

Walk me through it: in order to get dictators killed, because they defend themselves very effectively, we should put everybody on the planet under a biological death sentence, which will get the dictators too.

No, I cannot endorse this.

setr 16 minutes ago | parent

Science moves forward one death at a time

So at least two systems run better with the implicit time limit.

card_zero 13 minutes ago | parent

We should kill the dictators deliberately, improve our biology deliberately, and get stuffy old people like me to change their minds deliberately. No stupid use of death as a proxy, it's a horribly blunt instrument. "Let your ideas die in your place".

Besides, maybe it's the young people who are the most dogmatic. Studies are inconclusive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle#Rebuttal If we're going to go around killing people for having rigid ideas, perhaps concentrate on the young ones, for statistical reasons.

shrubble 14 minutes ago | parent

All it would take would be one billionaire who invested in long term bonds, à la Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…

yieldcrv 1 hour ago | parent

and the bourgeoisie, a temporary regulation would be needed in those areas of the world to separate the upper class from the capability of the rulers

in western nations where that’s not possible, I could see national bans, but one weak link globally and everyone wealthy will get their treatment there

SOLAR_FIELDS 1 hour ago | parent

The world of Altered Carbon seems more and more possible every day.

Bluestein 1 hour ago | parent

My goodness, what a show that was.-

walterbell 25 minutes ago | parent

Co-produced by David Ellison and James Vanderbilt.

Loughla 1 hour ago | parent

An undying trillionaire class definitely sounds like a possible future. Not an ideal one, mind you, but definitely in the realm of possibilities.

I'm calling it now, Qatar will be the place that allows these treatments once they're a real thing.

I have to imagine the Uber wealthy are pouring money into youthful longevity science.

selimthegrim 1 hour ago | parent

The Island of Dr. Ellison

EA-3167 1 hour ago | parent

I’d be far more worried about this causing turbo cancer than immortality in dictators.

King-Aaron 1 hour ago | parent

It might be beneficial if it gives turbo cancer to the dictators, of course.

deadbabe 39 minutes ago | parent

What if we cure cancer with AI very soon? Give it 10 years.

bitwize 25 minutes ago | parent

It turns out that if you trigger all four Yamanaka factors—yeah, turbo cancer. But if you trigger only three of the four, you can trigger a reversion to the stem cell state without the increased cancer risk.

torben-friis 1 hour ago | parent

Eh, we might see some benefit to leaders having a reason to care about stuff 10+ years from now.

axus 1 hour ago | parent

That'll be the commoners' problem; they'll be planning out how to survive the next 300 years.

deadbabe 38 minutes ago | parent

They cannot survive the next 300 years unless we all survive the next 300 years. A dictator is motivated by having power over others, not being some lone survivalist fending for himself in nature.

Waterluvian 28 minutes ago | parent

I feel like AI has opened a door of plausibility to Black Mirror or Twilight Zone concepts more than any other novel technology in my lifetime.

What if living 300 years meant the entire tempo of human living changes. That we all just slow right down because having control over our aging and when it happens. To be able to decide to extend your 20s… or not. To spend decades in your 30s. How would that change what’s important to us?

malloryerik 22 minutes ago | parent

Putin keeps talking about living forever, which makes his nuclear threats a bit less worrisome.

neom 13 minutes ago | parent

If you're listening just covered this the other day, they did a good job, worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQFE_3Mr4yQ (If you're listening is generally pretty good)

mullingitover 12 minutes ago | parent

An individual pancreas cell discovering the secret to immortality is a triumph for that cell, and a real bad thing for the body. This is like that, but for the entire human population.

m463 1 hour ago | parent

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sigh.

yieldcrv 1 hour ago | parent

I’m on a ton of lists and I still have tsa pre and global entry

OJFord 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting flex, is that a metric or an American tonne?

yieldcrv 1 hour ago | parent

there’s enough context to guess

inshard 1 hour ago | parent

Slightly tangential: Michael Levin’s work on bioelectricity and cell reprogramming is pretty interesting in context of emergent behaviors in groups of cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levin_(biologist)

sgnelson 49 minutes ago | parent

My nightmare is that we solve aging just in time for the Baby Boomers to live forever.

plutomeetsyou 8 minutes ago | parent

not if every other generation also lives long enough to become the baby boomers.

bitwize 23 minutes ago | parent

Because this is the worst timeline, we're getting cell reprogramming used to grow artificial brains to run AI workloads before functional aging remediation... let alone GTA VI.

ympb121 14 minutes ago | parent

It may be a dumb reason to do it, but recently I've started to focus on my health a bit more because of news like this (more exercise and healthier food).

The thinking is, if we find a way to massively extend the human lifespan/reverse aging I want to live long enough for that.

I'd be pissed if we as humanity solved aging and I die just before that, not taking any chances.

androiddrew 11 minutes ago | parent

lol, I am kind of in the same mode of thought but just kind of expect it not to happen.

There was a really shitty movie starring Jared Leto I think about the same problem. Being the last guy to miss out on being immortal

smotched 6 minutes ago | parent

Mr. Nobody is not a bad movie!

taneq 14 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like the immortal jellyfish solution. We squeeze entropy out of our DNA by creating a new fresh cell (ovum) that’s very sensitive to genetic defects, meaning if it survives it’s probably good. The jellyfish just shrinks back to a single cell (presumably with some mechanism for keeping the ‘best’ cell) to reset the damage. This is doing the same thing, but piece by piece.

Edit: And wow, that abstract appears to have eaten an entire thesaurus.