Never Say Die

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  • Posted By: olderwiser @ 12/08/2008 2:27:46 PM

    Well, if a person is to go to heaven after life is over, why postpone it? According to some who claim to know, a person who lives a life of sin will go to a place of some sort of misery. Those are the ones who need the extra long life. Just call if you want me to solve any more of these quandaries.

    • Posted By: kakkoii @ 12/10/2008 8:56:05 PM

      Wrong. There is no proof of a heaven or any type of afterlife. There is only a hope that there is one based on whichever of the TONS of different religions you have put your faith in. It's ignorant to say yours is the true one, as no religion is more valid than the other, as none have true proof for their claims. As they stand they are merely fairy tales with a little history mixed in.

      It's not the people who don't want to go to hell that want to live, it's the people who realize that there most likely isn't anything after death. Why would someone take the extremely low chance of there being something after death? Only someone with no common sense or a clouded mind would.

    • Posted By: kakkoii @ 12/10/2008 8:50:21 PM

      No, we don't know for sure that there is a heaven and there truly is no way of knowing. There are so many religions out there that it is utterly ignorant to just choose one also.

      More and more people are starting to think more rationally about life and religion every year.

      It's not the bad people who want to live longer, but the people who realize that there most likely isn't anything after death. Why would any logical person want to take that chance? It is too great.

  • Posted By: McGENIUS17 @ 12/10/2008 5:30:39 PM

    wow. i wish i'm stay alive......in future.

  • Posted By: spin @ 12/10/2008 4:11:03 PM

    Comments are disabled on the marriage,church and gay thinge, so I would like to invite anyone wishing to comment on "A Religious Reaction to Gay Marriage" to do so here. My question, "Do you think everyone at Newsweek and it's advertising affiliates are predisposed to the Gay lifestyle? If not, why do they keep trying to generate articles about the Gays linked with them or the church? Do you think this is a Gay ploy by Newsweek or is Newsweek losing it's popularity and like others they flee to the church for more recognition especially so at Christmas and Easter? Do you think that even a dialogue in a place which caters to the "liberal mindset" can actually benefit the dialogue or harm it? Do you really care since the latest article shows their true purpose as media attention? Would you really want to date Lisa Miller or pay someone else to date her? Is she to become the new "Church Lady Lurch"?



  • Posted By: Stephen06 @ 12/10/2008 3:38:10 PM

    With the onset of agriculture, the world's population was able to increase and the earth has been able to sustain an incredibly larger amount of people than the pre-agricultural societies of ancient times. So to say we would not have enough room would require us to have very limited imaginations. With more people, there will be the opportunity for more geniuses. Also, people mature with age. Imagine how smart and wise some people could become if they lived for 300 or 400 years. Another thing to consider, the Americas (North, Central, and South America) provided so much more room and food for the world. If people could broaden their imagination slightly, they could colonize our solar system and create space stations with vegetation capable of harvesting energy from the sun. And another thing, regardless of health and exercise, if you're genetically deficient in some way, it's almost impossible to escape illness. Imagine the extreme cases of hemophiliacs who need blood transfusions every time they get cut. Imagine kids born with cystic fibrosis or sickle-cell anemia. We are prisoners of our genes. The idea of curing ourselves and promoting our lifespan through genetic intervention will predispose us to a naturally healthy life, which could bring down the cost of healthcare and necessary treatments that could be disposed of very early in life.

    However, one could argue that we were not all meant to live like that and that the people who already have those naturally fit genes should be the ones passing those genes on to their children and letting natural selection do its job like it has been doing for however long life has been sustaining itself through reproduction. If we intervene too much, the human race will no longer be fit for the environment and will either have to modify the world around it enough to fit its needs or it will perish with the rest of the species who have been brought to extinction over time as a result of so much other human intervention.


    I would love to have an extension on my lifespan to be able to study the world and the physical universe to discover more of its wonders. Discovery and creativity is what continues to push us forward into time. It???s a shame the general population might not be ready for that, but I am hopeful that the newer generations will be.

  • Posted By: samher @ 12/10/2008 3:12:07 PM

    i belive that everybody should think of his own life style and think of things he need to live his own healthy life..
    samhar

  • Posted By: jmotley @ 12/10/2008 2:15:46 PM

    People don't seem to understand, While living forever or just doubling our life expentcy would ultimaly destroy the human race. As nice as it seems we can not live that long unless there are major changes to our socity. The older generation has to move on or else there will be no room the the next. We are already running out of room. Could you imagine if my generation started living till 200. Yes I would be able to see my great great great grandchildren but where would everyone go. Last time i checked we only had one planet to live on. If this happened would we impose limits on how many children can be born lto a family like in china. While I would love to think this would be a good thing I dont think any one is looking at the big picture. Unless your kids are having kids at an early age and there kids are doing the same most people dont live long enough to see their great great grandchildren let alon watch then grow up and become grand parents their selves.

  • Posted By: jmotley @ 12/10/2008 2:11:01 PM

    People don't seem to understand, While living forever or just doubling our life expentcy would ultimaly destroy the human race. As nice as it seems we can not live that long unless there are major changes to our socity. The older generation has to move on or else there will be no room the the next. We are already running out of room. Could you imagine if my generation started living till 200. Yes I would be able to see my great great great grandchildren but where would everyone go. Last time i checked we only had one planet to live on. If this happened would we impose limits on how many children can be born lto a family like in china. While I would love to think this would be a good thing I dont think any one is looking at the big picture. Unless your kids are having kids at an early age and there kids are doing the same most people dont live long enough to see their great great grandchildren let alon watch then grow up and become grand parents their selves.

  • Posted By: DrBlair @ 12/10/2008 12:54:51 PM

    The author puts alot of faith in modern medicine while virtually ignoring diet, exercise, mental attitude and alternative sources of health care that have been proven to improve health.

  • Posted By: DrBlair @ 12/10/2008 12:53:23 PM

    The author obviously puts alot of faith in modern medicine yet virtually ignores the benefits of exercise, diet and alternative approaches to improving health

  • Posted By: dwmoskowitz@genomed.com @ 12/10/2008 12:32:15 PM

    The problem with the IGF-1 story is that roundworms (and flies) live longer without IGF-1 and the insulin pathway. Humans just have diabetes without it.

    My company, GenoMed (www.genomed.com, GMED.PK on the OTC Pink Sheets) believes we have found the clinically significant major aging gene for humans (and vertebrates, including cats and dogs).

  • Posted By: LuvMashiach18 @ 12/10/2008 12:08:55 PM

    The problem is that this won't lessen the negative impact bad health habits have on the social safety net. Bad habits stem from poor education and bad prioritizing, and that will never change among the statistical burdens on our economy, no matter how accessible new information or supplements become. The smart will become smarter and live longer - perhaps expanding the positive contributions such individuals can make to society - while the typical burdens will continue their convenience-enthusiastic lifestyles of sloth, television, and processed and microwaved foods, and continue weakening our healthcare system. Ever go into an emergency room and have to wait eight hours to be triaged because someone who made poor decisions or couldn't care less about healthy decisions in life is being treated ahead of you? Don't expect that to change.

  • Posted By: Wall Street Dancer @ 12/10/2008 11:45:22 AM

    THe telomerase cell is one of the key links in not only aging but in cancer. The company researching this is Geron, symbol GERN. I have followed them for years.as they have progressed through the various clinical trials.
    Trent Tucker
    author Wall Street Dancers
    http://www.strategicbookpublishing.com/TheWallStreetDancers.html.

  • Posted By: DVLKCC @ 12/10/2008 11:35:34 AM

    The only way this science will thrive is if people let go of their beliefs about death being natural. Death is a disease that has plagued mankind for centuries. I applaud scientists around the world that are working on anti-aging technology.

  • Posted By: tangledsynapses. @ 12/10/2008 10:08:28 AM

    It seems to me that living one day at the time, right here, right now until we die, be at tender age or old age, would the smart thing to do.

  • Posted By: msiucaldera @ 12/10/2008 9:07:33 AM

    Do you know what causes our bodies to renew & rebuild? Adult Stem cells are the only known source for rebuilding the body and renewing health by restoring lost or degraded cells, and YOU HAVE THEM IN YOUR OWN BODY. Adult stem cells are predominantly formed in the bone marrow. And, just as in the beginnings of life, adult stem cells can literally change into any type of cell in the body throughout life. These adult stem cells are released from the bone marrow into the bloodstream to seek out problem areas, then renew and restore those areas. As we age the number that we release primarily from the bone marrow declines, hence degeneration (aging) prevails. Avoid the controversy of embryonic stem cell research and BOOST YOUR OWN STEM CELL PRODUCTION. For the answer go to www.boostmyownstemcells.com

    Dr. Siu-Caldera, MD,PhD
    mcaldera21@gmail.com

  • Posted By: gringo64 @ 12/10/2008 8:39:17 AM

    Wow, I havee been viewing it all wrong!

  • Posted By: thenarfus @ 12/09/2008 8:46:55 PM

    One of the tools we will need to jump start a new age in biotech and finding solutions to reverse aging will be new tools such as this link to writing new dna code is like writing software code:

    Designing and building better organisms simple as writing (computer software) code.

    http://fora.tv/2008/11/17/Designing_and_Building_Organisms_Simple_As_Writing_Code

  • Posted By: thenarfus @ 12/07/2008 10:43:22 PM

    Very good article, but you forgot to inclued Aubre de Gray's mprize (www.mprize.org), a tax deductable charity in the US that supports university researchers world-wide and has gerentology conferences on aging research each year, they also are new supporting new, young researchers entering the feild.

    Aubre's mprize was featured a few years ago on the news show 60 minutes, he predicts that with funding of 1 to 3 billion over 10 years to solve aging in mice and then use that information to sove the problem in humans (see his book "ending aging").

    Like 30 years ago, when the personal computer revolution changed the world and shocked a lot of people who did not see it coming, the currrent and future biotech/nanotech revolution will enable us to gain direct control over day to day functioning of our cells and enable us to reverse aging in old people and provide 10 year tune-ups on younger people to reverse and eliminate aging.

    How to pay for it?, that should not really be a problem, the world military spends easily 3 billion or so per day, we just spent 100's of billions in Iraq, there are over a hundred multi-billioinairs in the world, each which could easily fund a 3 billion dollar research program.

    We could easily do a really big super aging project and fund a world-wide program in fewer than 10 years, after all, they developed computers, radar, the atom bomb during world war ll in just 3 years, now we have the internet, massive quantiity of computers and computer smart people world-wide, people understand that DNA in our cells are the equivallent of 26,000 small computer software programs that run on the cells machinery. What we need is the ability to computer model aging biology and use future nanomachines to fix/alter these cellular DNA programs and hence repair and eliminate the damage of aging. A popular saying is that aging is simply atoms in the wrong place, by using advance nano to move/remove/add said molecules to reverse aging and keep people younger.

    • Posted By: thinkotsdbox @ 12/09/2008 2:59:51 AM

      DNA is vasty mare complex than a computer or a computer program... sorry but its a bit of a simplistic analogy.

    • Posted By: misterharban @ 12/08/2008 1:12:18 PM

      The U.S. currently spends about 16 percent of its GDP on healthcare, up from 5 percent of a much smaller GDP in 1960. All of that increase has purchased about 8 years of added life expectancy. The U.S. currently spends about 4% of its GDP on defense related expenditures. While it is wonderful that we have applied our intellectual and economic resources to improving our health and longevity, we seem to live under the illusion that those health care costs far less than it really does. This is largely a result of the fact that, for most of us, the checks for the healthcare we receive are written by somebody else.

      A billion dollars (or even a trillion dollars) seems like a small price to pay to raise life expectancies by another 20 or more years. But when you consider the trillions of dollars we have spent on healthcare for the last 50 years to increase life expectancies by 8 years that the numbers which you casually tossed out to further increase life expectancies are not realistic. Nor is there any reasonable consideration of the collateral costs of solving the unseen collateral costs of simply increasing longevity. We have successfully applied our considerable resources to substantially reducing, for example, the incidence and severe effects of heart disease. Now, instead of keeling over dead of a heart attack at 55 or 60, we survive that to succumb, if we are lucky, to an increased incidence of something like prostrate cancer. If we are unlucky, we hang on and succumb to the prolonged agony of Alzheimer???s. The increased incidence of many ???new??? causes and pathologies of dying is, in no small part, a consequence of ???conquering??? the old ones. And the costs of ???conquering??? each new challenge seem to increase exponentially.

      Our current allocation of one dollar in six to health related expenditures (projected to rise to one dollar in five by 2025) raises the question of how much of expenditure of our total expenditures for health care is reasonable. If we abandoned our wasteful expenditures on defense, and whatever wasteful expenditures that you are judging that billionaires are making we might raise our total health expenditures to 20 or 25 percent of our GDP. In 1960 we each spent 2 hours a week working to provide for our health care. You are suggesting that there would be a payoff in working 8 to 10 hours a week to get to live longer. When I look back at what I did with the extra 6 to 8 hours worth of effort that we are (and would be) spending to live longer, I lived. I really lived. And I would never wish to trade the life I lived when I was young for the prospect of living another 20 years, ravaged by the unforeseen consequences of giving some new and horrible health problem a final shot at my life.

      Life is not about how much time we have. It is about what we do with the time we have. Spending more and more time to get more and more time is errand of a fool.

      • Posted By: bcw99 @ 12/08/2008 4:17:43 PM

        You are confusing the costs of health CARE and the costs of health RESEARCH. They are not at all the same thing, and conflating the two (as you do here) is both foolish and intellectually dishonest.

        Predicting the costs of future technology is difficult at best. 50 years ago probably nobody would have predicted how cheap, powerful, and ubiquitous computers would become - but yet they have. By contrast, some forms of traditional technology have become relatively more expensive - many types of construction, for example, which relies both on natural resources which are becoming more expensive over time, and on labor costs which in general have not been reduced significantly and which in many cases have increased.

        You are entirely correct in your comments about the need to prioritize expenditures in order to maximize the benefits, but that's always been true, and in fact is almost a tautology.

        • Posted By: misterharban @ 12/08/2008 8:13:59 PM

          Fifty years ago no one would have imagined that we would triple the total share of all of our wealth devoted to health. However great cost trends are for lap top computers and such, there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that there is any trend toward similar savings in the overall cost of our healthcare. For all the money we have spent on research we have simply exponentially increased the cost of healthcare and raised our life expectancy by 8 years.

        • Posted By: misterharban @ 12/08/2008 8:08:28 PM

          It is neither foolish nor intellectually dishonest. Just in case you haven't caught on, the cost of the research that you so blithely separate from the cost of health is not ultimately paid for by the tooth fairy. It becomes a part of the incredible cost we pay for our good health. $2000 dollar MRI???s and colonoscopies. Procedures which, by any measure, are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In case you are too young to remember, pills for common ailments which now cost $4 a pop were once considered (on an inflation adjusted basis) exceedingly expensive. Pills which cost $50 a pop are not at all uncommon anymore. That???s how your research is being paid for. As for so-called public research efforts, the same tooth fairy that does not pay for commercial research does not pay for public research.

          I spent my life in science and I am sick to death of scientists and their acolytes who continually sell the next idea over the hill as the key to a better life. I believe that science can (and sometimes does) improve our lives. But it seems to me that most of our improvements ultimately result in ways for us do discover new ways to waste new things. Science may find ways to allow us to live longer, or drive farther, but if we as human beings were really interested in improving life, more could be done by reallocating our current resources and priorities than by relying on science to satisfy our narcissistic fantasies.

          I have devoted a small portion of my life to serving on health and education projects in Central America. I can assure you that the modest funding that you suggest might be spent to maybe discover something that will extend and improve the lives of a few of us could improve the lives of billions of people, and would not require any scientific creativity whatsoever. It would simply require us to remove our self centered heads from our obese posteriors. Improving the human condition (even extending the lives of billions of people) doesn???t require near as much creativity and imagination as it does awareness and compassion. I am certain that it would mean more to undertake changes that would add twenty years to a significant population of people whose life expectancy is 40 than to add twenty years to those of us who already expect to live to be eighty. This does not require any glitzy science. Simply a discovery that we are not the centers of the universe.

      • Posted By: bcw99 @ 12/08/2008 5:55:29 PM

        I feel that perhaps I need to amplify my comment, because it did not expose enough of the wooly-headedness of your posting.

        In 1960, there was no reasonable amount of money that could have been spent on health CARE that would have accomplished many of the health benefits that we have since achieved. Yes, we are currently spending more on health care as a percentage of GDP than we did in 1960, but even if we had spent ALL of our 1960 GDP on health care, we would not have been able to achieve what is now routinely possible.

        The reason, of course, is that our technology has also improved during that time, allowing our health care dollars to buy things that simply weren't available in those days.

        As I said in my previous post, the eventual deployment costs of a future technology are difficult to anticipate - but arguing against some hypothetical future deployment should take without knowing either the costs or the benefits is just a form of modern Ludditism.

  • Posted By: thinkotsdbox @ 12/09/2008 2:50:14 AM

    well, here we are again. like we understand genetics. No one does and wont for a long time. we barely have an understanding of chemistry. I was a practicing Chemical Engineer before an incurable genetic disease caused me to become disabled. The disease had a standard.diagnosis which takes an average 7-11 years to be identified. the first standard was developed in around 1960. I lost my job and my disability benefits because i could not prove this in two years as the law requires. Over 50% of the folks with this disease are unemployed like me.

    Google "junk DNA" some time. when the human genome was first decoded (about (2000)... 80% was thought to be left over from evolutionary precursors... well that wasn't right. now they think it regulates proteins and enzymes production and may be impacted by behavior. now (2007) they call these 80% epigenetics..

    This makes me wonder about Evolution. For Evolution to be true one has to understand genetics and we clearly don't. Darwin was actually wrong about genetics. Mendel was correct on the basics. Darwin was in seminary and lost a child then took his famous trip to the Galapagos. Science is only one domain of knowledge. Even in the hardest science.. Chemistry... well we use fudge factors in designing plants called rules of thumb because we are human and not all knowing. we error on the side of caution and safety, we hope.

    This is why your doctor never gives you a guarantee. You won't get one from your geneticist either!!!.

  • Posted By: drvein99 @ 12/08/2008 5:51:58 PM

    Just get married. You won't live longer, it'll just SEEM longer.

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