This is another point of reinforcement for my view that this effort is going to look much like a mix of the Ellison Medical Foundation plus Sirtris: vastly expensive and with little other than knowledge to show for it once investors give up, because the researchers are from the outset trying to do something that is very hard, and which even if achieved will produce only small benefits. (Which is to say carry on trying to make drug candidates like Rapamycin do something useful enough to become a clinical treatment, bashing the square pegs at hand into the circular holes of regulation and clinical benefit).
"The AbbVie partnership seemingly makes it clear that Calico will be a drug discovery and development company, which is what many observers expected based on Mr. Levinson’s background in drug development."
In the best scenario, five years of this will raise the water level enough for more meaningful approaches than calorie restriction mimetics, autophagy inducers, and other attempts at slow-aging drugs that have consumed billions to date with nothing to show for it, to raise significant funds themselves. In the worst scenario, it burns investors for a decade on the whole topic.
It is a real time of choice and opportunity at the present. The lumbering monolith of mainstream research can continue to pursue things like Human Longevity Inc and rapamycin derivatives that are probably going to be profitable yet achieve next to no useful gain of human life span (because again they are doing hard things that can only achieve small benefits at best) or, hopefully, some form of disruption for a better path will overtake enough of the community to make a difference.
It is clear that far from everyone in the research community thinks that old school drug discovery, farming the natural world to take potshots at restructuring metabolism so as to work slightly better when damaged by age (without in any way fixing the underlying damage!) is the smart way forward. There is SENS, there are the European researchers behind the Hallmarks of Aging manifesto, there are some of the Russian contingent with novel ideas. The near future doesn't have to be an enormous waste of time and money that will go nowhere but to generate voluminous databases, entirely bypassing any realistic opportunity for achieving actual rejuvenation and repair of the causes of aging. But I fear that it will, based on what we're seeing the big money do.
Don't forget Telomerase-restoration and protection factors. And don't underestimate the reverse-correlation of nutrition and mortality age. It's definitely statistically significant.
I have very similar concerns. Thanks for taking the time to write this comment. Yes, I really don't understand why the super-wealthy don't allocate some tiny slice of their wealth toward doing science differently. I stumbled across an article recently about the Flexner Report (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report) which would be a great model for someone to apply to our broken process of scientific research.
This sounds like emperor Chin's quest for immortality to me, e.g. pure hubris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang#Elixir_of_Life). I'm really not looking forward to a world where a few rich and powerful old geezers are cementing their power through being virtually immortal (think of a mix of Kim Jon-un or Fidel Castro, but in a corporate setting like the russian oligarchs). The youth and new ideas will be subtly supressed by the 'better arguments and wisdom' of the elder. It would make a good dystopian science-fiction book though ;)
I partially share your views, but, if you've not already, I'd highly recommend watching one of Aubrey de Grey's talks on the subject. He offers a very different viewpoint, which made me reconsider my thoughts on radical life extension.
As a member of the tl;dr culture, who is too lazy to Google for them himself, I want to ask if you could link the ones you find most interesting/relevant?
The one I attended was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDJ_IjMwT20, which focuses less on whether this stuff is desirable and more on cost-effectiveness. But IIRC he also outlines his reasons why radical life extension is desirable.
You may well be better off trying some of the top Google results -- the recording quality isn't brilliant for this one, and its focus is perhaps a little different to what you want.
One man's hubris is another's refusal to keep being bullied by nature. I don't see anything bad with wanting to live longer. I don't see anything bad with fighting the "natural state of things" to achieve it. It's sad that throughout history, most humans are just willing to lie down and die.
Preventing it from turning into dystopia is another matter though, well worth of discussing.
Well to be a bit more clear: Enabling everyone to reach an old age by fighting diseases is an honorable and good goal (as long as this is available to everybody and not just those few with deep pockets). But on the other hand, I'm sure that death serves a goal as well. It is not a "problem", but very likely a solution to evolve the species. We should first aim for our 'granted' 120 years life span. I think if we are a very long living species, we will also become a very slowly evolving, very conservative species. I'm also afraid that we cannot know the longterm consequences (sort of like the Soviet project to irrigate the Karakum desert, which resulted in the death of Lake Aral half a century later).
> Well to be a bit more clear: Enabling everyone to reach an old age by fighting diseases is an honorable and good goal (as long as this is available to everybody and not just those few with deep pockets).
We might need to settle for a middle ground. Like for many other advances we had, we need rich to bankroll the R&D that will later lead to technology being available for rest. How to prevent it from turning into dystopia is another discussion.
> But on the other hand, I'm sure that death serves a goal as well. It is not a "problem", but very likely a solution to evolve the species.
It might serve a goal, but this is not our goal. Evolution may "value" inclusive fitness and death is its engine, but humans do not care about passing genes, they care about love, fun, intellectual growth, a good life. The process of evolution is not something we value.
If you fight against humans, it's usually not called hubris but fighting for your freedom and a right to live. I just think we should call it the same if our enemy is not a man, but the Grim Reaper himself.
Now we are moving away from the science and technology of extending lifespan and into the mire of politics. Just go watch 'When Worlds Collide'and call it a day.
Yeah with immortality will come changes. Folks likely to become very, very conservative if they have not decades but centuries at risk. Imprisonment for traffic tickets; voting age increased to 100 or more; heck just the change in the interest rate would rock the economy!
Calico has done a good job of keeping out of the press, so I'm happy to see more details. I'm somewhat surprised by the partnership with Abbvie, who is widely known as an "old school pharma company", not exactly a bastion of innovative thinking and risk taking.
Also, the focus on age-related diseases is an interesting one. Originally Calico was sold as a "fighting old age" company. That's vastly different than "fighting diseases associated with old age". At the same time, targeting age-related diseases is much easier than fighting aging itself.
The process is entirely different. Old-school drug companies have a very formulaic approach: 1) find lucrative disease, 2) find small molecule that abates disease, 3) get it through FDA, 4) market & sell.
A much more modern approach is to figure out what kills people (heart disease, atherosclerosis, muscular & neural degeneration, loss of immune system) and fix that. Build a new immune system, figure out how to 'plumb' one's blood vessels, or '3d-print' new ones. Stem-cell & regenerative medicine can make new, and sometimes even improved, organs.
The technologies of the second kind were only fanciful pipe-dreams 30 years ago when the old-school pharma companies came about. And a few still are today. But many are not. We can actually do meaningful research into designing these complex tissues today that would entirely obviate the old way pharma does business.
As someone who does tissue engineering & synthetic biology it's a bit telling to see big money come in from a different field and latch onto old-school 'names' rather than new-school 'ideas'. Calico really could be something truly spectacular - but it has to be careful who it sets at its helm...
Perhaps the most significant problem associated with aging is centered around our body's replication system. The way that cells duplicate and grow is not perfect. Hosts of environmental, biological, and "pure luck" factors all combine against us in a slow, but inevitable warping of our genetics.
In addition to genetic decay, our biological parts get "worn out" over time. Valves close with less force and vessels become inelastic. Our stretchy bits - tendons, ligaments - become scarred with micro-tears over time causing decreased flexibility. Our squishier bits - our inner organs and muscle - tend to become less efficient over time and decay sets in (a rule of thumb is past the age of 30, the average human loses 1% of muscle mass per year). Our squishy-stretchy bits - fascia - tend to lose the fight to gravity as the cells become less and less "sticky" and the skin on our faces droop.
As one ages, the mistakes in replication, the decay of our organic bodies begin to add up. As they pile on year after year, the likelihood of getting "sick" increases. Alzheimer's - thought to be brought about by tissue decay and subsequent scarring in the brain. Infarctions (a loss of blood supply, thus a loss of nutrients and oxygen) to a certain part of the body (heart attacks are a common result of cardiac-related infarctions) - can be caused by a stiffening of the walls of blood vessels which lets plaque build up and eventually, when some plaque is dislodged, that plaque might get trapped in a smaller vessel and cause a lethal blockage. Edema (excess fluid building up in tissue) - generally as a result of the weakening of the heart (the heart is a muscle which gets weaker over time) and the decay of the vessels and the muscles surrounding the vessels. And so on and so forth.
Fighting old age tends to be thought of as fighting the underlying physical and genetic decay the geriatric (or just aging in general) undergo. Reversing old age, in a similar manner, tends to focus around the prevention or the reversal of that decay. Fighting diseases associated with old age thus is far more limited in scope. While the end result of "fighting old age" might eliminate certain diseases, "fighting diseases associated with old age" will never prevent people from getting old.
We need both. We already live long enough to see that if you clocked too many years, either your heart will shut down or you will get cancer and die anyway.
The ability to stop aging process might still end up somewhat limited by cancer, so both goals seem to be tightly connected.
Good job at keeping out of the press? For an age research facility, it's been in the press a prodigious amount! You probably don't even know about other age research!
The largest impact in the history of humankind will be made by those companies that work to extend human lifespan. Good to see how this whole race to increase lifespan can change Silicon Valley, moving it once again toward true innovation, truly changing the world, while other companies like Craig Ventor's http://humanlongevity.comhttp://genopharmix.comhttp://www.sens.org and http://buckinstitute.org come into to play.
I would say that lifespan lengthening is in the top tier of impactful technologies, but I think there are three equals in the top tier: strong AI, nanotech, and biotech. Of course, all of these four are quite intertwined, with some being enabled or perhaps even prevented by progress in another.
I tend to group biotech and nanotech together. Because essentially, what is life made of if not nanotechnology that is not ours, and we don't yet know how to control? The simplest way to build our own nanomachines is to start with tweaking the ones we already have around us.
"The largest impact in the history of humankind will be made by those companies that work to extend human lifespan."
True but I feel for the wrong reasons. To my mind, the single greatest challenge our species has faced in our brief history on this planet is how we minimize our impact on the finite resources available to us.
The elephant in the room is how do we curb population growth in a meaningful and humane way. What's the point of extending life if there's a diminishing return experientially?
I get frustrated when people bring up Malthusian catastrophe to denigrate the real and important work that scientists are doing in the field of human longevity. Population growth curbs itself as nations become more economically stable. Over population is not a global problem, but rather a regional one.
Even Bill Gates has written about this, more recently in his 2014 Gates letter, but also in the following essay, criticizing the doom and gloom predicted by books like The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth.
> The elephant in the room is how do we curb population growth in a meaningful and humane way.
Or, how to switch to sustainable means of energy production to secure comfortable level of life for increasing population.
It's a bit of an hammer and anvil situation - on one hand, achieving sustainability will most likely require getting rid of capitalistic economy and basically tearing the whole system apart and reassembling it into something different. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to be the one denied the right to live and/or reproduce, and allowing for this will open a huge another can of worms.
> To my mind, the single greatest challenge our species has faced in our brief history on this planet is how we minimize our impact on the finite resources available to us.
Despite that this doesn't look the greatest challenge to my mind, conquering aging and death might actually help rather then hinder meeting it.
I think it's safe to say that 'think of your children' has proved to be less effective a slogan and we might as well try 'think of yourself 100 years down the road'.
If people live longer and the fertility rate stays the same, it's an interesting question about what effect that would have on the population - if you have children at 30-40, and live until 100 rather than until 70, you're certainly not getting any exponential growth pattern as a result.
Yes you would. Growth is a result of the differential between the birth rate and the death rate. If the fertility rate stays the same, but lifespan increases, there would be a period where the death rate would decrease, at least, until the new stable lifespan is reached. In this period, the population would increase dramatically.
I'm not using exponential as a synonym for really fast, I'm using it to mean an exponential function. If lifespan increases but fertility rate remains low (as in the developed world), you get a very different sort of population growth than each couple having seven children, each of which will marry and have seven children, and so on. If fertility rate stays the same, and adult lifespan increases from 70 to 100, there would be the same number of children born over a number of generations as would have happened anyway, but they would live 40% longer. I presume that would mean a capped one-off 40% increase over the period of 30-150 years (depending on how quickly and equally the global population took up the technology, and how much it relied on preventative treatment early in life). Fertility based population growth would mean exponential increases - so for instance a doubling from 2 billion in 1930 to 4bn in 1970, then 8bn in 2010, 16bn in 2050, 32bn in 2090 etc.
I think this "filling out" sort of non-exponential growth is actually a large part of what is predicted over the next 50-100 years (from adults in middle wealth countries getting near Western levels of life expectancy), Hans Rosling talks about it in his "Don't Panic" lecture from a year or two back.
Simple answer: think how to colonize desert or build underwater habitats first. It's infinitely easier, and yet still superhard. We'll have to do all of this eventually.
As for resources, we don't need to relocate to get to them, we can bring them down here. There are companies already working on it.
Floating cities around the doldrums could also be fun. However I do think that having a functioning economy off planet helps a lot if we want to tap resources in space. Getting up the gravity well is expensive, once you are up there you might as well hang around.
What resources? There's not much useful water out there, let alone breathable air, carbon, organic matter, living things, ecosystems. All of those crucial resources are here.
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.
Survival is an argument for getting a lot of people living off planet, not an argument for not doing so. We can try and create utopias as much as we like, but that is not going to help very much when we get hit by a big rock.
Also, personally I suspect that the real advance is not going to be in settling other planets, but building habitats out of asteroids.
Depends where you go. Lots of all that in the right places. Saturn's rings and moons; water is on the moon and on Mars; we can make what we don't find if we have enough energy.
Lifespan solves for this. If people knew they would be living long enough to experience what future generations would have to experience in terms of environmental impact, many would take on a different viewpoint toward climate issues as opposed to the "let them deal with it, I ain't gonna be alive anyway" approach.
In terms of population control, it's all about lifespan combined with more efficient discovery as fewer ideas would die with those moving them forward. Space travel will solve for moving the human race to further inhabitable planets, but not without a solution for the more important lifespan issue which is a requirement for extended space travel. We've got 4 billion years before our sun runs out and before the Andromeda galaxy will cause us a bit of trouble.
4 billion years from now, lets at least be known as the generation that began to make an impact in this area.
Even before going interplanetary, we still have a lot of uninhabited space on Earth. Colonizing various deserts would be a first step, then maybe underwater habitats will become a thing - all of this is cheaper, safer and easier to do than going to space.
We will eventually have to spread to other worlds, but for now, there is still a lot of space to use on ours, so we don't have be afraid of overpopulation in terms of land. We just need to figure out how to feed us all in a sustainable way.
I agree in part, however, sustainability requires a complex combinatorial solution as well due to it's association to the human condition related to self-interests (the list goes on of course), science, international distribution policy/policing, philosophical vs. technology GMO issuse etc.
We need to learn more about are species, we need to buy both time and food with something other than money.
You're right of course, but we won't solve our problems by just throwing away this planet and going to another (that, remember, doesn't support life by default, we need to make it do that).
We need to crack sustainability anyway, and it's best to focus on it ASAP.
I completely agree, we need to solve for this Earth first. If we continue to ruin this earth, we don't stand a chance and even worse, we'll have a horrible intergalactic reputation.
I actually wonder sometimes how much damage we did to ourselves by creating various popular science fiction shows. As people can't help but believe Hollywood ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic ), I wonder how many people feel subconsciously that space travel is easy, so if ruin this planet, we can just go and find another one.
I'm definitely not pointing at BSG. I was thinking more about Star Trek, et al. (which I absolutely love, but then again I can feel the availability heuristic working in my head when I think of space travel).
If any of our descendants ever have to worry about their intergalactic reputations, we will have saved life on earth many times over by deflecting large asteroids.
In the long run, having a technologically spacefaring species is the only way for anything other than microscopic life to survive.
"The AbbVie partnership seemingly makes it clear that Calico will be a drug discovery and development company, which is what many observers expected based on Mr. Levinson’s background in drug development."
In the best scenario, five years of this will raise the water level enough for more meaningful approaches than calorie restriction mimetics, autophagy inducers, and other attempts at slow-aging drugs that have consumed billions to date with nothing to show for it, to raise significant funds themselves. In the worst scenario, it burns investors for a decade on the whole topic.
It is a real time of choice and opportunity at the present. The lumbering monolith of mainstream research can continue to pursue things like Human Longevity Inc and rapamycin derivatives that are probably going to be profitable yet achieve next to no useful gain of human life span (because again they are doing hard things that can only achieve small benefits at best) or, hopefully, some form of disruption for a better path will overtake enough of the community to make a difference.
It is clear that far from everyone in the research community thinks that old school drug discovery, farming the natural world to take potshots at restructuring metabolism so as to work slightly better when damaged by age (without in any way fixing the underlying damage!) is the smart way forward. There is SENS, there are the European researchers behind the Hallmarks of Aging manifesto, there are some of the Russian contingent with novel ideas. The near future doesn't have to be an enormous waste of time and money that will go nowhere but to generate voluminous databases, entirely bypassing any realistic opportunity for achieving actual rejuvenation and repair of the causes of aging. But I fear that it will, based on what we're seeing the big money do.