Some opponents of increased human healthy longevity argue that if we begin to live for far longer than the present human life span then progress in technology will slow to a crawl. This is often presented as a variation on the stagnation argument: that long-lived people will cling to their ideas and their positions for decades or centuries, resisting all change. It is true that human nature comes with a strong conservative streak, and all change is opposed. But despite that fact change nonetheless happens on a timescale quite short in comparison to human life spans: leaders come and go, like fashions, and revolutions, and changes of opinion, and sweeping redefinitions in culture and society. Rare indeed are those that manage to last for a couple of decades, never mind longer. This pace of change in human affairs is essentially the same as that of the ancient world, despite our much greater adult life expectancy in comparison to the classical Greek period or Roman empire.

If we want to look at raw correlations on the other hand, it seems that the technologies needed to extend healthy life go hand in hand with an increased rate of technological progress. Longevity has made the human world become wealthier and run faster, opening doors of opportunity rather than closing them. The only way to increase the healthy human life span is through the creation of a broad pyramid of enabling technologies that in turn lead to faster progress in all fields, not just medicine. Computing is the present dominant enabler, for example, not just for biotechnology but also for almost all other fields of endeavor. If human nature to date has failed to hold back the tide of progress, I'd say it has little chance at doing so in the future: progress is only speeding up.

As is pointed out in the article excerpted below, people change throughout their lives. This also is the same as in the times of antiquity, despite much longer life spans. Human nature is human nature, and the caricature of inflexible, static old people is just that: a caricature. Minds change, and where the elderly are in fact forced into smaller and smaller circles it is largely through disability and frailty, not choice: the failing body and mind narrow the accessible vista, not the lack of will.

Combatting the "Longer Life Will Slow Progress" Criticism

We are all still children. As far as the Centenarian is concerned, the only people to have ever lived have been children - and we have all died before our coming of age. What if humans only lived to age 20? Consider how much less it would be possible to know, to experience, and to do. Most people would agree that a maximum lifespan of 20 years is extremely circumcising and limiting - a travesty. However, it is only because we ourselves have lived past such an age that we feel intuitively as though a maximum lifespan of 20 years would be a worse state of affairs than a maximum lifespan of 100. And it is only because we ourselves have not lived past the age of 100 that we fail to have similar feelings regarding death at the age of 100. This doesn't seem like such a tragedy to us - but it is a tragedy, and arguably one as extensive as death at age 20.

The current breadth and depth of the world and its past are far too gargantuan to be encompassed by a mere 100 years. If you really think that there are only so many things that can be done in a lifetime, you simply haven't lived long enough or broadly enough. There is more to the wide whorl of the world than the confines and extents of our own particular cultural narrative and native milieu.

Luckily, functional decline as a correlate of age is on the way out. We will live to 100 not in a period of decline upon hitting our mid-twenties, but in a continuing period of youthfulness. There are no longevity therapies on the table that offer to truly prolong life indefinitely without actually reversing aging. Thus, one of the impediments preventing us from seeing death at 100 as a tragedy, as dying before one's time, will be put to rest as well. When we see a 100 year old die in future, they will have the young face of someone who we feel today has died before their time. We won't be intuitively inclined to look back upon the gradual loss of function and physiological-robustness as leading to and foretelling this point, thereby making it seem inevitable or somehow natural. We will see a terribly sad 20 year old, wishing they had more time.

It seems to me a truism that we get smarter, more ethical and more deliberative as we age. To think otherwise is in many cases derivative of the notion that physiology and experience alike are on the decline once we "peak" in our mid-twenties, downhill into old age - which does undoubtedly happen, and which inarguably does cause functional decline. But longevity therapies are nothing more nor less than the maintenance of normative functionality; longevity therapies would thus not only negate the functional decline that comes with old age, [but also] the source of the problem arguably at the heart of the concern that longer life will slow progress.

Increasing longevity will not bring with it prolonged old-age, a frozen decay and decrepit delay, but will instead prolong our youthful lives and make us continually growing beings, getting smarter and more ethical all the time.

Lastly, this thought: so what if increased life spans did slow progress? Even in the hypothetical world in which that did look even remotely plausible, it is still the case that for so long as the pace of longevity is greater than the slowdown, everyone still comes out ahead. Being alive and in good health is the important thing: given that, the only thing that matters with regard to further technological progress is whether it is happening fast enough to keep you alive and in good health. Everything else in life is what you make of it.

Source:
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/08/opposing-the-argument-that-increased-longevity-will-slow-progress-and-is-therefore-undesirable.php

It is human nature to be capable of committing acts of great evil or economic self-destruction for years on end, and especially in groups. We are not at all far removed at the moment from large-scale genocides, collapsed kleptocracies, meaningless prohibitions, and more. So it's probably unsafe to assume that no state will outright ban the extension of healthy life via medicine in the future: there are more than enough examples of human collectives acting against the long-term self-interest of all their members for decades, and that becomes ever more likely if those at the top invent the means to profit personally from a widespread destruction of life and wealth.

For all that, I do think it's an unlikely outcome. The more plausible outcome is the one that is taking place right now: great economic harm to the pace and breadth of medical development through heavy, centralized regulation. Enormous, entirely unnecessary costs and very high barriers to entry are imposed on clinical applications of medicine, which ensures that a great deal of possible, plausible research and development never happens. Worse, in a system in which all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden - which is exactly the case for the FDA and similar regulatory bodies elsewhere in the world - radically different new technologies such as the means to treat aging are restricted by default, without any politician or bureaucrat having to raise a finger. The entire system of regulation must be changed to even allow them to be considered: which means more cost, more delay, and more work suppressed because it isn't cost-effective to undertake.

Here the possibility of future restrictions on rejuvenation therapies is considered by someone who is more supportive of the existence of a large state than I am. They see the solution as working within the system, being a petitioner to power to beg for the chance to be free enough to make the world a better place. I'm not sure that this has ever had a good record of success over the long term, certainly not when compared to revolution or the establishment of new colonies far enough distant from the state to be largely free from its bureaucracy:

Most laypeople with an opinion [on] biogerontology assume "[life extension] treatments will be centuries in the future", actual specialists with a medical background tend to be more 'optimistic' and postulate some for of accessibility of these treatments somewhere later this century. I'll abbreviate "Life Extension" as LE and Rejuvenation as RE.

The human that has singlehandedly saved most lives world wide may very well have been Maurice Hilleman. In the late 19th to mid 20th century there was a small number of cynics who insisted that vaccinations (and other treatments intended to make people live longer lives) would contribute to Malthusian overpopulation. It is interesting to realize that many of these objections were based on class-prejudice and racism. People who objected to child vaccinations tended to not like poor people very much, and didn''t want 'their' world overrun by the kind of people they took offense to. These sentiments are by no means dead. A very common objection to the mere realization of RE/LE treatments is that "the world would quickly overpopulate". When quizzed strikingly many people today insist that RE/LE might "have to be declared illegal to avoid an overpopulation disaster". These people seem to be unable to infer comparisons from earlier Life Extension treatments (clean drinking water, sanitation, healthy diets, environmental protection laws, vaccinations) from which they benefited, and regard Biogerontological Life Extension as something different altogether.

The process of development of actual "biological immortality" is likely to be a long trajectory of dead ends and catastrophes. The beta stage of life extension may come with painful episodes and failures. Early adopters may end up forking out large sums of private capital for treatments that may or may not work. If earliest stage regenerative treatments were to emerge in the 2020s it may be decades before these treatments would end up safe, affordable, comfortable and easy to use. What is worse - such treatments don't have a convenient fit in the current medical corporate sector. What does a LE or RE treatment actually do? Does it make people less dependent on other medical treatments? If that is the case many established medical conglomerates may very well vehemently object against these treatments, and declare them "snake oil" or "pseudoscience". It is thus quite likely that on the earliest years of emerging LE/RE many consumers may reject these treatments basing their choices on vicious and deceptive media campaigns.

Link: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/suntzu20130801

Source:
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/08/considering-state-opposition-to-life-extension-technologies.php

The thymus helps to generate the cell populations of your immune system when young, but it atrophies - a process called involution - quite early in adult life. Many of the frailties of aging have their roots in the age-related decline of the immune system. It fails with age in large part because it is a size-limited population of cells, and ever more of those cells become inappropriately configured and unable to respond to new threats. One of the proposed methods for dealing with this issue is to restore the thymus, and therefore create a stream of new immune cells to take up the slack. Transplanting a thymus from a young mouse into an old mouse improves the immune system and extends life, for example.

For human medicine, the focus is on finding ways to tissue engineer a new thymus from the patient's own cells, or spur regrowth of the existing involuted thymus. Here is an example of progress in the research and development needed for thymic tissue engineering - if you want to build a thymus, you first have to be able to reliably generate large numbers of the right sort of cells. Work on that goal is still in progress:

Thymus transplantation has great clinical potential for treating immunological disorders, but the shortage of transplant donors limits the progress of this therapy. Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are promising cell sources for generating thymic epithelial cells. Here, we report a stepwise protocol to direct the differentiation of hESCs into thymic epithelial progenitor-like cells (TEPLCs) by mimicking thymus organogenesis with sequential regulation of Activin, retinoic acid, BMP, and WNT signals.

The hESC-derived TEPLCs expressed the key thymic marker gene FOXN1 and could further develop in vivo into thymic epithelium expressing the functional thymic markers MHC II and AIRE upon transplantation. Moreover, the TEPLC-derived thymic epithelium could support mouse thymopoiesis in T-cell-deficient mice and promote human T cell generation in NOD/SCID mice engrafted with human hematopoietic stem cells (hHSCs). These findings could facilitate hESC-based replacement therapy and provide a valuable in vitro platform for studying human thymus organogenesis and regeneration.

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2013.06.014

Source:
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/08/steps-towards-tissue-engineered-thymus.php

The success of Kickstarter and conceptually similar entities (IndieGoGo, AngelList, and so forth) as fundraising communities has more than adequately demonstrated that crowdfunding works very well in an environment of low-cost, ubiquitous communication and open data. All the old centralized time-proven activities of fundraising in for-profit business can in fact be distributed, turned inside out, and disintermediated. New middle men arise in this process of disruptive change, such as Kickstarter, but the future will see their dominance vanish in favor of open protocols and marketplaces with some sort of an ecosystem of optional gatekeepers and reviewers. This is exactly the same as the transition from early dial-up services and their walled gardens to the open internet, and seems to be something of an inevitability.

Can this be made to work for science and research? Therein lies the question. At the high level, it seems as though the answer is obviously yes: it's all just money, and money is presently invested in research. But at the detail level research is a very different thing from funding a new artwork or widget: it has a much longer time horizon, a far greater degree of uncertainty, and the funders don't walk away at the end with a new widget. A number of companies are presently attempting to find the magic recipe by which crowsourced science funding can be made work in a Kickstarter-like fashion.

Clearly crowdfunding for specific research goals is possible. There are numerous examples of success in the past decade beyond those I'll mention here. The Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation grew out of crowdfunding initiatives, raising money from hundreds of donors from the transhumanist community and other supporters of longevity science. The advocacy community of Longecity raises modest sums for specific life science research projects connected to longevity and related medical technologies. But these are tailored projects, integrated with specific interest communities: not the same thing at all as building a successful marketplace for diverse forms of project and community.

Crowdfunding intersects with another important trend that arises with ubiquitous, low-cost communication and openly accessible data, which is the distribution of effort in large projects. Complex initiatives can now be undertaken piecemeal by geographically dispersed groups who share a common interest. The open source software development community is far ahead of the rest of the world in this respect: many vital and important software projects have evolved in a worldwide fashion, with self-organizing collaborators who will never meet in person. Science is moving in the same direction: lots of data, lots of complex software, data becoming more open, and more distributed collaboration between researchers in different parts of the world.

What medical science has that the software industry does not is a vast and pervasive edifice of regulation, wherein largely unaccountable regulators insist on centralization and the imposition of enormous costs on research and its application in the form of new therapies and medical technologies. Regulation opposes movement to a more distributed research and development industry in which even exceedingly rare diseases will be worked on by someone, somewhere with a vested interest. Higher costs always mean that marginal work suffers, vanishes entirely, or takes place in black and grey markets with all their attendant issues. It is enormously harmful, and that harm is largely invisible: the technologies not developed, the progress not made, the dead in their millions who might have had a chance at longer lives.

The article quoted below offers some thoughts on all of this in the context of cancer research and proto-crowdfunding efforts that have aimed to spur research and development in therapies for very rare forms of cancers, those that present regulation makes it unprofitable to work on. The points raised are also applicable to the situation for aging and rejuvenation research, however, which is also a collection of related minority fields that are shut out from clinical application by the decisions of regulators.

Can We Build A Kickstarter For Cancer?

Building large analytical databases to mine clinical and molecular data, and scan the scientific literature to identify better treatments for cancer patients is happening today. But what about patients who fall outside what we already know - whose cancer subtypes haven't been discovered yet, and who don't have access to the technologies that could make a difference in unraveling the aberrations driving their cancers? The technology to unravel the molecular drivers of cancer is, for the most part, available today: "-omics" technologies for screening tumor samples from patients and comparing them to healthy tissue samples to pick out cancer-specific mutations; diagnostics that can track patients' response to treatment in real time at a molecular level; and Web-based tools and apps [that] patients and community oncologists can use to guide treatment decisions (and feed those outcomes, good and bad, back into the research process).

Our current research approach - one drug, one clinical trial, one cancer type at a time - won't generate enough of the information we need to unravel cancer's molecular mysteries at the patient level. And it is too slow, too bureaucratic, and too expensive to be sustainable, given the number of compounds we have to test and the limited pool of patients who participate in clinical trials. Only about 3% of all cancer patients participate in cancer clinical trials, and those patients - because of restrictive inclusion/exclusion criteria - are often very different (i.e., healthier) than the average cancer patient, who is likely to be in poorer health and have one or more co-morbidities (obesity, diabetes, etc.). This limits the applicability of even the best drug guidelines based on classical trials for real-world patients. Classical clinical trials lead to a "tyranny of the averages," rather than helping us to - as in the case of cancer - disassemble complex diseases that might share the same clinical symptoms (and which we happen to call cancer or diabetes) but which are really molecularly distinct and thus require different treatment approaches.

In short, we won't develop the drugs or complex treatment regimens we need to for truly personalized cancer treatment regimens for patients if we keep doing business as usual. The patients who have the most to gain from this approach are those who have the most to lose today - patients with rare or hard-to-treat cancers, who fail rapidly on standard or even targeted treatments. And it's exactly these patients who will, in all likelihood, be most eager to embrace the risks and promise of Kickstarting their own cancer research.

It's not just cancer: all of modern medicine would benefit from an overturning of the present centralized regulatory structures in order to allow unfettered diversity in fundraising, research, and clinical application. This is exactly the sort of approach that modern communication technologies enable: let there be far more in the way of researchers connecting to the interested small communities among the broader public - as was the case for the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - and the best of these initiatives, those that manage to obtain support from both the public and the scientific community, will prosper. This, I think, is a far more promising model for the future of research than the stasis, obstructions, and failures of highly regulated, state-funded scientific and medical monoliths.

Source:
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/08/the-intersection-of-kickstarter-style-fundraising-for-research-and-distributed-development-in-complex-problems.php

This popular science piece outlines some of the evidence for greater height to come with a penalty to longevity. I believe that the most plausible contribution to this effect has to do with growth hormone metabolism, given the degree to which it is linked to longevity in laboratory animals. Broadly speaking less growth hormone means a longer life in species such as mice. Larger individuals with more growth hormone accumulate damage and dysfunction at a faster pace in all areas: they age more rapidly.

One of the goals for future medicine is to make all such correlations in long term health irrelevant. Advanced medical technology, sufficient to repair the causes of aging, will sweep away the effects of differences in genetics and circumstances. This is something to look forward, as with suitable levels of funding and support the first of these new therapies of rejuvenation might be developed and rolled out by the late 2030s.

Physicians and epidemiologists began studying the link between height and longevity more than a century ago. Early researchers believed that tall people lived longer, [but] in fact in the early 20th century height was [a] reflection of better nutrition and hygiene, which increased longevity. Once the studies were limited to otherwise homogeneous populations, a consensus emerged that short people are longer-lived.

Among Sardinian soldiers who reach the age of 70, for example, those below approximately 5-foot-4 live two years longer than their taller brothers-in-arms. A study of more than 2,600 elite Finnish athletes showed that cross-country skiers were 6 inches shorter and lived nearly seven years longer than basketball players. Average height in European countries closely correlates to the rate of death from heart disease. Swedes and Norwegians, who average about 5-foot-10, have more than twice as many cardiac deaths per 100,000 as the Spaniards and Portuguese, who have an average height just north of 5-foot-5. Tall people rarely live exceptionally long lives. Japanese people who reach 100 are 4 inches shorter, on average, than those who are 75. The countries in the taller half of Europe have 48 centenarians per million, compared to 77 per million in the shorter half of the continent.

Setting aside simple mortality, individual diseases are also more common among tall people. American women above 5-foot-6 suffer recurrent blood clots at a higher rate. Among civil servants in London, taller people have been shown to suffer from more respiratory and cardiovascular illness. And then there's cancer. Height is associated with greater risk for most kinds of cancer, except for smoking-induced malignancies.

Unlike intelligence, which has a merely coincidental relationship with height, there are plausible biological explanations for why short people live longer. Researchers have found that the lungs of taller people don't function as efficiently, relative to their bodies' demands, as those of short people. Explanations for the link between height and other disorders are slightly more speculative, but largely credible. Tall people have more cells, which may increase the chances that some of them will mutate and lead to cancer. The hormones involved in rapid growth may also play a role in cancer development. It's even possible that the foods that lead to fast growth during childhood may increase the likelihood that a person will eventually develop cancer. The link between height and clots probably has to do with the length and weight of the columns of blood that travel between the heart and the body's extremities.

Link: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/height_and_longevity_the_research_is_clear_being_tall_is_hazardous_to_your.html

Source:
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/08/the-cost-of-being-tall-is-a-shorter-life-expectancy.php