So you wanna build an aging company(librariesforthefuture.bio) |
So you wanna build an aging company(librariesforthefuture.bio) |
But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?
And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.
Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.
2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.
3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.
By comparison, a vaccine to prevent polio did little to help the many people who were already afflicted with it, and we never did develop a cure, but at this point the disease is nearly eradicated and there is little need for a cure. It would be cool if someone came up with a cure, but resources should logically keep being focused towards vaccinating the last of the vulnerable.
Adding a single healthy year of life to every American who lives to be over 70 would add about twice as many healthy person-years than reducing the US infant mortality rate to zero. Reducing the world infant mortality rate to zero would be equivalent to adding roughly two healthy years to the lifespans of those who make it over 70.
As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea.
For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.
Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to fiat wealth, engaged in vain wank.
And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.
From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.
prevents diseases of aging, ideally more than one;
preserves a healthy function that normally declines with age (like fertility, immune function, cognitive function, resilience, or physical fitness); or
reverses the course of at least one age-related disease."
I think a lot of the anti-aging companies out there would say that the real answer is a combination of the second and third - reversing the course of age-related decline.
Also, I think it's sort of contradictory to have two of these points focus on diseases of aging but in a subsequent section say that oncology isn't anti-aging. Cancer is in many ways a disease of aging (it's very clear from the numbers that increasing in age causes increases in likelihood of developing cancer, generally more than any other single factor). Curing cancer obviously isn't going to get you a general-purpose anti-aging treatment, but that's why it seems odd to say that reversing the course of an age-related disease is a successful aging treatment.
The anti aging solution that happens to solve cancer as a side effect is then to figure out how to repair DNA damage, and/or replace cells with damaged DNA with cells with intact DNA.
Many cancers have unregulated DNA repair pathways, which is one of the mechanisms by which they can sustain proliferation without succumbing to apoptosis. Common chemotherapeutic targets are actually DNA repair factors that can both help kill the cells and sensitize them to radiation. It's well known in the DNA repair field that cells maintain rather delicate balance between carcinogenics and death by regulating repair. The vast majority of research into DNA repair is aimed at solving problems treating cancer, with some peripheral voices (albeit ones that garner more publicity) working on anti-aging applications. I personally wouldn't sign up for any of these start-up nonsense treatments; traditional scientific orthodoxy may be overly reductionist, move slowly, and lack imagination but good god does it beat all of these people that treat grand problems in biology like some sort of app you just need to take the right angle on to figure out.
The "Is this aging?" article perfectly articulates the philosophy that drove us to start the company. We saw a huge disconnect between the longevity industry's focus on hype and moonshots, and what the science actually shows is effective for improving healthspan. The article's point about focusing on frailty and sarcopenia is spot-on ; functional health is one of the most powerful and evidence-based levers we have to improve quality of life as we age.
That's precisely why we built Ginkgo Active. We wanted to create a genuine "geroprotector" that was accessible to everyone, not just a theoretical treatment for the wealthy.
When we responded[2] to the recent CMS RFI[3] on the Health Technology Ecosystem, we outlined this exact approach. Our goal is to provide a practical solution to functional decline and chronic disease, which are massive burdens on the healthcare system.
Here’s how our thinking aligns with the article's main points:
Focus on Function, Not Just Biomarkers: Instead of chasing clocks, we focus on delivering personalized exercise prescriptions designed to improve strength, balance, and cardiovascular health. Our AI platform uses over 170,000 rules from authoritative sources like the American College of Sports Medicine to create these plans. Prevention and Healthspan: Our platform is built to help people before they get sick, preventing or delaying the onset of 18 different chronic condition risk factors. This is about adding healthy years to life, which is the core of a real aging intervention. Accessibility and Equity: We believe this kind of preventative care should be a right, not a privilege. We intentionally designed our platform so that it doesn't require expensive wearables or equipment. Our goal is to provide the same expert-level care to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live.
We believe the first real, scalable product of the longevity industry will be one that improves healthspan for the many. That's the problem we're dedicated to solving.
[2] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CMS-2025-0050-0264
[3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/16/2025-08...
Medications almost always come with some form of negative side effects for a portion of those prescribed to. I think part of it needs to come from awareness of what we're putting into our bodies in the first place. I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".
"Food is medicine," also means food is poison. Not all are created equal. This isn't to completely decry all advancements in food production, or even all processed foods... but there's definitely more that needs to be looked into.
we're not going to natural food our way to 150.
Is Sardinia an exception to this?
Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked proper they'd be making a killing in pharma trials and drug development
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10379674
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01073-0
[3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=digital+twin+health&hl=...
1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.
2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
3. Unlike other technological advantages, life extension is a _multiplier_ for inequality. The Undead pay no estate tax. The Undead never change their minds. The Undead never have to give up their bought-and-paid-for seats in Congress.
Death is the ultimate Chesterton's Fence.
To deny the possibility of breakthrough medical therapies that possibly save millions of families from the tragedy of prematurely losing loved ones just out of some half baked spite against the rich is grossly short-sighted at best. If anything is unethical, it's such a worldview itself.
I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
This broadly applies to a majority of new technologies or advancements as well. It's not unique to medical advances.
It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal.
The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict.
There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?!
The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin:
> To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair
> The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress
> The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people
> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish
In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good.
...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.)
If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?
I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
Edit: I suppose those are all called mutations. Somehow I thought mutation meant a small local change only.
He is wrong though.
The DNA damage that the parent was talking about would lead to cancerous cells which your immune system cannot handle, which is different from the ones that your immune system can handle
I don't think there is an "anti-aging agenda". Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of an ideological movement. But I do think that there is an unhealthy persistent cynicism underneath the current popular culture. This cynicism makes people not want to be optimistic/idealistic in fear of being wrong or looking naive. I am not suggesting we should all tint our lenses rose colored, but I do think allowing people to expand their optimistic ceiling is warranted; especially when it is so easy to imagine a dystopic future currently.
Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your sardonic reply.
We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.
That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.
What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.
People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.
Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.
Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.
Type 1 has been reversed through pancreas and islet transplants, recently in at least one individual by stem cell transplants, now he makes his own insulin.
For some type 2 individuals diagnosed early enough, blood sugar can be managed through diet and exercise, and insulin response can be normalized back to typical levels. This seems to work best when caught early, and when the person has the ability to make long lasting lifestyle changes. And the risk of relapse seems to remain much higher than in the general population.
Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)
LNT is useful because you work with an abundance of caution when it comes to radiation. It's difficult to know what type of radiation someone received and where. Both of these can dramatically change the risk of exposure. It's not hard to measure in a lab, but an accident isn't a lab and you can't just go placing sensors all over every radiation worker's body (at least yet. Small sensors embedded in clothing would change this).
So what do you do? You purposefully over estimate. Because if your estimate is wrong, the human is much more likely to survive if you incorrectly assumed they received more than they actually did than if you error by assuming they got less than they actually did. Failure analysis is a critical part to any engineering or safety plan.
Why not over estimate as much when higher dosages are received? Well that's because it matters a lot less. As dosage increases all those nuances of where and what type matter less (they still matter).
It's still all highly complex and what I'll say is that if you haven't spent at least a year studying this stuff you're more under water than you think. It's great that there's a lot of educational material out there but unfortunately when it comes to complex topics like nuclear many of them do more harm than good. Pro nuclear armchair experts tend to be as uninformed as anti nuclear armchair experts. So like the LNT, it is always good to work with an abundance of caution. Especially when talking about complex subjects on the internet
But seriously, we can detect levels thousands of times lower than what's dangerous. You can even get pretty good dosimiters for like $100 these days
You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this
Source: greenpiss?
Hormesis is more likely.
We no longer exist in a resource constrained environment and have access to massive amounts of energy from the sun which makes entropy a negligible concern. There is no good reason to not at least try to prevent or reverse senescence.
Humans are a pretty damn care-dependent species. They're not going to defend or feed themselves without years of support, so if they aren't surviving en masse into their 30s and 40s, the next generation is probably going to have a severe die-out.
Beyond that there's probably ongoing marginal benefits to species fitness with longer lifespans. If you can keep a few generations in circulation at once, you probably have greater resilience to things like disease outbreaks (the 50-year-old cohort might have some past related immunity to a disease that rampages the 20-year-olds).
This also completely ignores any value of intelligence and ability to pass down knowledge, which is definitely a fitness factor just for being able to prevent future generations from poisoning themselves as easily.
This is all pretty obvious when you look at one of the main diseases of aging, cardiovascular disease. There are natural genetic variations that result in very low free LDL blood levels, which basically prevents artherosclerosis from every developing and which inspired the development of the PCSK-9 inhibitors. However, there's no evolutionary benefit to not dying of cardiac arrest when you're 60, but there are marginal benefits to the liver binding to fewer LDL particles when people are in a starvation environment, so these variations never became widespread.
The grandparent hypothesis is certainly compelling and might explain some marginal improvements in human lifespan relative to e.g. chimps (who live about 10-20 years less than us even in captivity). But if anything, that reinforces my broader point, which is that aging did not develop as some kind of culling agent by evolution and that we should be looking for ways to extend human longevity now that we have the resources to.
The life well lived is a life thats easy to let go, regardless of your beliefs. The more people messed up the more they desperately cling to it (I know its vastly more complex, but this is the core of what I see around).
I am not claiming we shouldn't be trying to make lives better, or longer. But immortality will be humanity's doom - there is endless row of puttin' and trumps and hitlers and stalins and maos in every single generation, and the only real working solution is inevitable death, none of them went or will let go power on their own from the bottom of their good hearts. That is unavoidable since it comes from base character of humans, whether we like it or not.
I'd say we should shoot on sight all researchers and VCs pouring time and money into directly immortality, that's much safer bet than some immortality bringing long term prosperity for mankind.
Feel like trump for example got wiser and saner and more rational the second term? Because literally whole world believes otherwise. He has his whole clan to think of due to consequences of his actions, if he cared. puttin' is same, just sour keg of bad beer that should be poured down the river (or some better ecological disposal of garbage).
We're not undoing death, dying healthy would be better than aging the way we do right now.
Increasing healthspans as a society would be great in a more family integrated society rather than an individualistic one.
I'd love my retirement years to be spent helping my kids and grand-kids instead of the other way around.
A senior community that can stay involved actively has been part of the "it takes a village" until very recent times.
One could say air conditioning is similarly "unnatural" but it will be saving lives this summer.
Aging doesn't exist because it benefits us, we did not choose 70-80 to be the ideal lifespan, and my back doesn't continuously ache to give new ideas a chance to spring forth.
Sure but that's because the US voting demographic is old. It's the tyranny of the majority [1]; as the largest generation the baby boomers can vote and do vote for things that advance their interest. I'm not sure this phenomenon works if people live out to 150 years as the generational bubbles would be relatively smaller.
Wouldn't a treatment for Alzheimer's be more accessible to the wealthy than the poor, making it unethical by your definition? Isn't it good that evil rich people often lose their cognitive capabilities thus limiting the harm they can do?
Conversely, pure life extension creates an exceptional state of existence—no one except those using them has a chance of living a thousand years. The wealthy have a clear-cut motivation not to let these drugs become readily accessible, as it is a competitive advantage that feeds directly into their pecuniary pursuits; they no longer need to worry about:
1. Dynastic management (heirs are unreliable—be your own);
2. Estate taxes (the government wants some of your money—hiding it adequately can be tiresome);
3. Religious threats of punishment after death (if such things matter to them—probably not); or
4. "You can't take it with you," which is perhaps the main reason why billionaire philanthropists exist.
As such, we aren't going to see lobbying efforts to democratize life extension cures—ever. There are real incentives for the rich and powerful to lobby against such a possibility.
Finally, we already know that many proponents of life extension research in the VC space have neo-reactionary sympathies or aspirations; our favorite whipping boy Peter Thiel has contributed directly to the "Dark Enlightenment" movement. These are people who are not hiding their desires to become feudal lords and absolute despots, and not taking them at their word in such matters is the sort of 5D mental gymnastics that belongs on 4chan.
It is much less of a problem if the playing field is level, which is an eventual outcome with conventional quality-of-life efforts like Alzheimer's research. While it is not out of the realm of science fiction possibility that all humanity could someday be blessed with the gift of immortality—as well as fix the planet and somehow keep our population at a replacement level—the nutjobs currently militating for it are about as trustworthy as a Ferengi handshake.
It's a shame the humans in the story still die of natural causes, otherwise it might actually be relevant to the discourse around the ethics of life extension. The dragon is a metaphor for normal preventative diseases and does not scale well to the demographic crises caused by functional immortality.
Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory.
> But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.
There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd rather the rest of mankind wait twenty years for the treatments than to never have had them at all.
Anyway, go away deathist. Shoo, troll.
One intuition pump that always works well in these discussions is to imagine that death is already solved, and all your worst nightmares are true. So we live in a world where a small number of humans own and control everything forever. What is your proposed solution? Kill everyone who is old? Really? That's the best you got? Literally just force everyone to die?
We already live in a world where most people's lives are made shit by the whims of a few rich psychopaths, it's just that right now the specific set of rich psychopaths randomly changes every so often. So? Why is that better? Why does it matter to me that the boots on my neck belong to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos instead of John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt?