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re: americans and our lawns

A judge told a 72-year-old man who has cancer that he 'should be ashamed' of himself after he said he was too weak to keep up with his lawn
https://www.insider.com/judge-berates-c … 8YVFxdJkbE

video: https://twitter.com/59dallas/status/1481227341401628672

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2022-01-13 11:07:01)

really tired of out-there geneticists talking about 'age reversal'. a regular feature at cambridge has been beating this drum for decades.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features … in-decline

it's the fountain of eternal youth or el dorado in scientific garb. not going to happen, probably ever. things have to die: it's essential for adaptation, new mutations, and for the future fitness of the species. we don't need 130 year olds with failing cognition and perfect cardio health. the whole western cultural approach to ageing and death is itself pathological imo, and nowhere more so than in america.

the pig heart thing is neat, but the bigger revolution in modern medicine/genetics generally is CRISPR cas-9.

500+ co-authored papers

not that dramatic in STEM publishing. especially professors in senior positions or chairs at major research universities/research centres. they get a co-author credit on most of their PhD/grad students projects.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-15 11:51:25)

just what we need - a planet of 10 billion and counting and then humans decide to stop ageing.

the stuff of sci-fi, suuuure. most sci-if published thesedays is dystopian.

we have already recently discovered a very likely link between the causes of alzheimer's and degenerative neurological conditions like MS and things like early infection with mono. that seems to me a much more philosophically wise line of inquiry rather than 'hey, let's live forever'.

ultimately, as with the deep implications of gene editing, this raises philosophical and meta-scientific questions beyond the narrow purview of 'disinterested' research. ok: so we are slowly addressing the 7 or half-dozen or so chemical-biological processes that lead to apoptosis and cell death. maybe one day we'll have addressed them all. but ... WHY? why would anyone want to live for 200 years? this comes down to ethical questions and the examination of a whole worldview.

a few of my close relatives wasted away with dementia. their end-of-life quality was mulch. would i like to see a cure for dementia? well, of course, based on the prima facie alleviation of suffering. but what are all those 90+ year olds going to do, gifted with deliverance from degenerative illness? they're not going to work. they're not going to be physically active. they're not going to be cognitively able to drive cars or lead independent lives.

for all of our fancy gene editing, we still don't understand 5% of how the brain works. we still can't regenerate neurons or glia after they have been damaged or wasted away. something is going to contribute to senile people's deaths, if it isn't the late-stage encroaching fog of alzheimer's.

a much more important, and much more uncomfortable, much more realistic, much less 'sci-fi' and altogether more depressing topic of conversation, which won't command glossy write-ups of praise and wide-eyed enthusiasm in scientific magazines or broadsheet newspapers, is the topic of quality of life. western culture has this default assumption that living forever is Good and Desirable. is it?

that's very strange and circuitous reasoning.

better medicine has lead to much extended lives - so now degenerative illness is a growing burden on society.

therefore let's fix degenerative illness and 'reverse' ageing? for what? to kick the giant demographic bomb down the alley a bit and wait for the next complication of perverting nature in this way?

just think, once we've alleviated the 'burden' on the healthcare system placed on it by 90 year olds with dementia, we'll have to think about the even bigger burden of people expecting a pension until they've 130.

oh well thank god for this guy. now i can work until i'm 90.

Could do away with retirement altogether.

talk about utopia! and here's me mentioning hoary old cliches like 'ethics' and 'the value of life'. thanks to science we may never have to retire from work!!!

and by then the masters-of-the-universe gene editing scientists will probably have devised much better euthanasia methods too!

it seems to me that the 'upper limits' on human life contrived by nature over many long millenia of evolution seem ... eh, prudent and wise. i don't want to artificially gift humans another 30-40% of life. i'd rather we focus on making life more meaningful and high-quality in our allotted time here on this Earth. and you're still not addressing any of the wider implications of these de-ageing technologies, such as: What the fuck is the planet going to do with 10 billion people who are all living on average 1.5x as long?

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-15 12:35:52)

euthanasia is available now for people who don't want to suffer degenerative illnesses and long senescence.

there's a qualitative difference imo in medicine tackling causes of avoidable death ("he died at 30 from tubercolosis; alas we didn't understand germs and had no vaccines", "he perished from a cut sustained in the wilderness, which became infected and progressed to sepsis") and us engineering our way out of senility and old-age degeneration. the massive increase in the incidence of denegerative illnesses - chief among them so many cancers - is precisely the sign that we are already stretching out our 'natural' ordained durations to a very taut, thin string.

society isn't set-up to deal with vastly ageing populations. and being able-bodied until 90 is a very different proposition to being able-minded. we are likely never going to be able to regenerate the brain. it's just an order of magnitude more complex a problem. people are still going to get senile and cognitively degrade. so, great, grandpa gets a healthy ticker and spry joints until he's 130. he's still going to have the mental age of an 8 year old.

i remain deeply, deeply skeptical.

your scientific triumphalism sounds a bad note. we are in the era of human-made mass extinction and seemingly insuperable climate change. the last thing we need is blanket celebration of unlocking pandora’s box.

we’ve had gene editing tools for the last 5 years or so. i keep mentioning CRISPR. why are you suddenly singing hymns of praise now?

gene editing is precisely a pandora’s box. for every life-saving heart surgery there’s a chinese billionaire’s designer baby. countries and research bodies with far less scruples than western medicine also have this tech.

there are labs in china already doing this stuff.

why do you think american bodies were funding gain of function research in chinese labs? it’s all part of the same shadow research economy - a laxer framework of regulation and less thorny questions asked about ethics.

likening crispr gene editing to nuclear bomb development yeah, you don’t need a manhattan project sized budget to mess about with proteins. and some rogue chinese scientist making genetically modified babies or messing around with foetuses doesn’t quite have the same global importance as someone developing a superweapon that could flatten cities. really dumb comparison.

a south korean scientist, called ‘the pride of korea’ a few years ago, was disgraced recently when it turned out he falsified a bunch of his results. but like certain chinese figureheads, he was pushing the envelope on human cloning. you better believe we are opening pandora’s box.

Last edited by uziq (2022-01-15 14:31:14)

… which precisely already exists in china and has done for years.