Humans Can Start Living Longer—Once the FDA Does This

Humans Can Start Living Longer—Once the FDA Does This (msn.com)

Ok, why do I feel like the cure for aging is all about the pursuit of the almighty dollar?

Anyway, declaring aging as a disease will certainly bring in the attention of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry.

But the real question is whether or not my health insurance will cover it???

 

Aging is certainly a disease. As for a cure you'd have to discover that Fountain of Youth that Juan Ponce de Leon was looking for. Best case you can buy a new kidney but how long is that going to get you?

 

Actually, the article seems to indicate that cures for aging can't be used under the current rules. The rules say that aging is a natural process meaning that legally doctors can only treat the side effects of aging not treat it as a disease to be cured. So cures for aging can never leave the lab, regardless of how advanced we become.

 

"Cure" hits me as the wrong word. Adding more years of useful life is great, but that isn't a cure.

Also, our healthcare system is all based on the pursuit of the "almighty dollar" - capitalism. We publicly fund some research, but is is the pharma companies that make and test the solutions. And, they choose what solutions to make based to a significant extent on profitability.

 

Many people are convinced that he found it at a place called North Port Florida at warm mineral springs.

Been meaning to get over there and check it out someday it's less than 50 mi away. Maybe they're right?

But seriously though people would probably live a lot longer if we quit eating all the processed garbage we call food

 

Also, too many breath air through burning tobacco, drink alcohol, and think that guns make the man.

 

I too do not see this as a "cure". I believe it is quite possible to double our life expectancy, but if you are talking about eliminating death as we know it, then you have to look at some of the sci-fi ideas that are already out there. A great show that explores this is on Netflix called Altered Carbon. In essence, it imagines a future where we can avoid death by uploading our consciousness and then downloading it into a clone of our bodies, or any other body for that matter. In other words, bodies will be the equivalent of fashion.

 

I know it's a movie. But, that's going to cause a serious body supply shortage!

 

Cloning would wind up replacing procreation as we know it.

 

Accept that you still die. You just have someone who has a copy of your memories moving around, But YOU still die. I'm not sure that's much of a solution.

 

doing nothing can actually help extend one's life imo..... fasting occasionally in order for the body to clean up misfolded proteins and such

 

agree, if you can forget your memories when alive due to brain injury, then they are attached to the body it would seem

 

The premise is if all of your memories could be backed up like a computer and then transferred to another body, I would think it would alter the definition of death as we know it, in addition to defining what exactly is a "soul". There appears to be enough research into this that makes it a possibility. Of course, if you still hold onto the sacred religious definition of the soul, you will not comprehend this idea.

 

yeah, scary idea that when our bodies die, our soul may have no memories

 

Bringing in the issue of the "soul" needlessly complicates things by turning this into a theological discussion. Let's start with the premise that there is no soul, and human consciousness resides in our organic brains and no where else (not heaven, hell, or purgatory). You are still left with the problem of you dying and your copy living.

Imagine you backed up your memories, "downloaded" those memories into a clone body, but you yourself did not die. Is the clone you? Obviously not. So doing that and then dying doesn't grant you immortality.

 

Soul and/or consciousness is the big mystery we are getting closer to unraveling.

 

memory could be to the soul, like a hand is to the body, it's not what the soul is, but the soul can use it while it has it

when a soul gets a new body, it has a new hard drive to store information

 

That all depends on how you define consciousness, the thing that makes you, YOU, of which is unique to you. The research that has been going on for decades regarding maternal twins seems to be quite interesting and seems to indicate some sort of spooky interaction that cannot be completely explained yet.

 

So it begs the question, how do you define the soul?

 

Christians have been saying that aging is a disease for a long time. It came because of our separation from a perfect God. Glad to see that government and science has finally caught up.

 

Actually your cells have all died and been replaced since you were a young boy. Are you the same person you once were?

 

OK it sounds like you are going in for a religious/supernatural link. Or at least that's how I would define dropping in "spooky interaction" into this conversation. However this is the Science section and you should probably stick to that.

 

I am referring to the phenomenon of maternal twins being able to know and feel the same thing even when they are hundreds of miles apart. Don't tell me you never heard of that.

In physics, it's called Quantum Entanglement.

 

Actually it is the universities and research foundations that actually make the big breakthroughs. Pharma pays them for the idea and then does some more testing through to sale

 

Outside physics it is called “weird ****”