The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
The dragon-tyrant will fall.
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Uhh, I think this is just a bit of fiddling with the telomeres to account for someone with a genetic disorder. This may not actually do anything for anyone else.(or for anyone, actually) Even if it does, I suspect it won’t be much.
The important thing is that they are working on it, and achieving some outcomes. Rejecting anti-aging is far, embracing it is near, and these things help us get from abstract moralistic far mode to “I want more life, motherfucker” near mode.
The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
At the time of my birth the human population on planet Earth was just over 5 billion people. By the time I had reached 12 years old, that number had risen to 6 billion. By the time I had graduated high school, that number had risen to 7 billion.
There is no easy way to address an issue like overpopulation. At the very root of the problem is the fundamental right of every human being to procreate and prosper, as guaranteed to them by their own birth. Efforts such as eugenics, enforced contraception, and the withholding of medical technologies in the third world, while effective, violate this human right.
In the end, it boils down to the individual: You and I, and every other human being on this planet, must bear the burden of improving the collective quality of life. The only means by which this can be attained is to find equilibrium with our environment. Our species, like any apex predator left unchecked, is beginning to see the negative impact of our actions: In the food chain, in water quality, in global temperature patterns, and within the hearts and minds of our own children.
We seem to forget, that despite God given rights, we also carry the responsibility of controlling ourselves for the sake of others. This control may manifest in myriad ways, not the least of which being satiety.
We have reached a point in our history at which medical advances have made the arbitrary extension of life available to the general public. It is understandable that every person is motivated to continue living as long as possible, but I ask a single favor, from one human to another:
Really think about the consequences of your actions, now, and in the future.
The collective quality of life (including that of every species within man’s dominion,) is objectively more important than the singular pursuit of immortality. If we allow our fear of death to rule all of our actions, we will destroy that which has been handed to us. Transcendence of these human shackles requires faith in a power greater than oneself.
For you see, gravity is not a purely physical force, it influences existence in realms beyond both the third and fourth dimension. We are now aware that light itself can be warped by the gravitational pull of a massive object; time, on the other hand, requires a significantly more powerful well.
We, as semi-conscious beings, often neglect the uncomfortable realization that minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years are constructs created and maintained by the human mind, for the purpose of regulation of ourselves and our fellows.
It would do one well to remember that time, as we know it, is merely a standardized division of the cycles of the moon and sun. On a galactic scale, this model holds true, but stretched across the current projection of the known universe, it becomes obvious that our understanding of the passage of moments is woefully inept.
My only trouble with this would be to point out that we can only put our trust and faith in ourselves, and even then not too much. Everything in the Universe is horrific and awe-inspiring. There are no guarantees, no promises here. The great variety of life is not maintained because the Universe respects it; past events reveal in the long run, every species is doomed to starvation, disease, and death until it goes extinct. What we perceive as balance in the ecosystem is actually a monumental, blind struggle against that sort of suffering and destruction. We’ve run the experiments. We know what happens when the environment allows overpopulation. No species controls itself. Except, it would seem, creatures smart enough to notice what’s changed… like ourselves.
Our population has increased because we’ve become better at keeping ourselves alive in nature. I expect our population will decrease because we will become better at living well in nature. Once no one needs five babies just to keep the family line going, there is really only one option: make one or two babies that absolutely will live the best lives possible. As a result, the population spikes we experience as a location gets industry and medicine gradually become more manageable even if the great crowds expecting good living conditions frighten the authoritarians. We’re now experiencing a new development here in the West (and a great many other places are doing it much better than we are). With the introduction of science, existentialism, and the practices of rational thought, we come to expect more than previous generations from life. This, too, will have an impact on our population growth.
As we make life better for everyone, the number of people that want many children will go down. As we increase lifespans and make college-level education available, more people will want fewer children because they mean to do well by them. Plans for children will become something that must be done someday, rather than something that must be done soon. For an increasing number of people, Someday will become Never as they realize that children are not what they actually want from life. Eventually, we will live so long and so well that planning about what we can do outside Earth won’t be dreaming. If overpopulation is still a problem then, we’ll have somewhere new to bring our home ecosystems, allowing us to thrive in spite of refusing to bow down before starvation, disease, and death.
We seem to forget, that despite God given rights, we also carry the responsibility of controlling ourselves for the sake of others. This control may manifest in myriad ways, not the least of which being satiety.
We have reached a point in our history at which medical advances have made the arbitrary extension of life available to the general public. It is understandable that every person is motivated to continue living as long as possible, but I ask a single favor, from one human to another:
Really think about the consequences of your actions, now, and in the future.
This world is afraid of me…I have seen its true face. The crowds are unaugmented fools and the fools are full of pain and when the telomeres finally run out, all the sheeple will die. The accumulated harm of all their shortsightedness and ignorance will build up about their neurons and all the cishumanists and bioconservatives will look up and shout “Kill yourselves to satisfy our moralistic whims!”… and I’ll look down and whisper “No.” They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good people like my friends or Elon Musk. Decent people who believed in a lasting future for a lasting species. Instead they followed the droppings of preachers and bioethicists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice.
I often worry about what Drew Summit calls the “bourgeoisification” of socially liberal activism, wherein some policy or social shift is justified by emphasizing how normal and uncontroversial it is, often while explicitly throwing more “extreme” acts/people/situations under the bus. Gay people want to settle down, be monogamous, have 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence just like you! Marijuana is really safe, safer than alcohol, and has some medicinal benefits too, it’s not like it’s *heroin* or anything!
On the one hand, the things this kind of activism focuses on are true. And they do address some of the concerns of people who would otherwise be opposed. And there’s a plausible case that over time this kind of strategy can lay the groundwork for the more weird cases to be accepted too (though I’d love to see concrete historical analysis here), and that even if they remain outside of the realm of the socially acceptable/legal they are at least not really much worse off for the change that’s being pushed.
On the other… These issues are totally besides the point. Marijuana should be legal even if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. Gay people should be able to make arrangements about child care, shared finances, medical decisionmaking, etc. even if they’re living lives of constant drug-fueled sex parties in broken-down tenement homes. And not everyone can pass for normal, and not everyone wants to, and their legal rights shouldn’t depend on that.
I don’t have a solution here. I don’t know that this worry is justified; it may be that this kind of incremental change is exactly the right way to go. It feels like betraying my principles and letting values I don’t hold set the terms of the discussion, but feelings aren’t conclusions.
Marijuana absolutely should not be legal if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. One of the key reasons for a government’s existence is to protect people from irrational choices.
Re: gay marriage: prima facie the objection people have is “gay people are hypersexual fetishistic degenerates and thus tolerance for gay people is tolerance for moral decay”. Factually, “being gay” and “being a hypersexual fetishist” are orthogonal for the most part, which is what’s important here, because “actually hypersexual fetishistic degeneracy is great unlike your puritan morals which are based filthy lies that must be destroyed” is a discussion for a different day and a terrible objection to raise if you’re trying to make gay marriage legal.
It’s kind of like communism.
Did you know that people are pretty receptive to workers’ rights as long as you don’t mention Marx? “For each according to his ability, to each according to his need” sounds almost like a politically neutral phrase. People’s opposition to communism is mostly about, like, gulags and revolutions. Which is why internet marxists say “well, the bourgeoise must be of course slaughtered when we come to power. Join us now, and maybe we won’t kill you later.”
Respectability politics is the only reason anything ever gets done.
First, on the object level issues: I think that, possibly modulo some uncertain concerns about age and mental capacity, you have the right to do whatever you want to your own body. I also think you have the right to delegate financial, medical, childcare (modulo uncertain concerns about child abuse etc.), etc. concerns however you wish, regardless of the specific nature of your relationship with the person/people you delegate to. If you disagree with those things, fine, but this is not the post for you then.
Second, I think there’s a difference between incremental progress/aiming for low-hanging fruit and what I’m talking about here. You could look at the situation in, say, 2008 and say “hey, we’re pretty close with gay marriage, let’s focus our efforts on this” without specifically emphasizing “they’re normal, they fit into our existing social and economic system just fine, don’t worry this isn’t a gateway to polyamory or anything” etc. You could say “gay people are just as entitled to make decisions about their lives as anyone else, the legal institution of marriage is currently how our society mediates certain decisions people make about their lives, so as long as that’s the case gay people should be extended the right” and not simultaneously distance them from more extreme cases.
Finally, I acknowledged in the OP that it may in fact be the case that this is the best way to do things (though I am still interested in detailed analysis here). I acknowledged that this is just a feeling, and is not something that should guide decisionmaking. There is no reason to shove the last two paragraphs in my face like they are somehow news to me. But, if I were a communist and I believed the bourgeoise would need to be slaughtered when we came to power, it would at the very least be fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies recoiled at that idea and it wouldn’t be completely illegitimate for the working class to consider me a traitor. OK,that analogy is so far from my actual views as to be unhelpful, so let me go to an actual stance: It is fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies in the fight for drug legalization don’t actually care about bodily autonomy, they just don’t think pot is worth the government forcing us about, and to the extent I emphasize those reasons instead of the autonomy ones I could very well be considered an enemy of those whose drug use falls outside that range. Again, to reemphasize, it may be that this is the best we can do, and once the pot battle is behind us we can move on to the next step, but it feels off.
That argument about hypothetical super-harmful marijuana is way too broad. Any kind of an unpopular and stigmatized choice can be constructed as an “irrationality” that people must be protected from if the powers that be so desire. Gays? Oh no, they’ll be bullied and catch AIDS, we must therapize them straight. Trans people? Oh no, they’ll kill themselves, we must do everything we can to prevent children from expressing gender non-comformity. Suffragettes? Oh no, don’t they know politics will ruin a woman’s uterus, won’t somebody think of the children because these mothers-to-be certainly don’t. Transhumanists? Don’t they know death is a blessing in disguise, we must throw a million bioethicists at them to force them to die against their will.
Autonomy is the only option that can’t be co-opted by oppressors so easily (even then there’s childrens’ vs. parents’ autonomy etc. but at least it breaks less often than paternalism). Anything that can be used to actually prevent people from doing ‘scientifically irrational thing X’ can, and all too often will be used to destroy you and people you care about (pigovian taxes notwithstanding; they still impose a burden but at least it’s not completely insurmountable and/or violent in the same way legal prohibitions are, so if you want to reduce irrational thing X don’t ban it, just tax it (but not so much that you create profitable black markets that are hard to eradicate non-violently)). For example, trans people have spent something like half a century fighting against gatekeeping imposed on us because the establishment wanted to protect us from irrational choices and was, and mostly still is, unable to recognize the harm from doing so. Transhumanists are right now subjected to ridiculous biopolicing to protect the sanctity of repugnance or whatever it is cishumanists fetishize.
It’s obscene that often a doctor can’t do the thing I specifically ask and pay for, to my own body with my own informed consent, because “primum non nocere”; but governments are completely unbound by such rules and violent men with guns will definitely force all sorts of reckless things upon a non-consenting populace because some people think they know better than others and can cook up studies supporting them.
Bans are serious fucking business, they should be reserved for things actually worth using the state apparatus of violence on. Eradicating measles? Possibly worth it if the alternatives don’t work. Preventing people from frying their own brains in ten years? Fuck no.
