Reason, from Longevity Meme points out some things we don’t need to know to cure aging.

Functional bridges preceded the tools and understanding of modern architecture, just as beneficial medical techniques preceded the biotechnology revolution. More knowledge and science brings better bridges and more effective medicine - but you can still do good and save lives at earlier stages in the progression of knowledge.

"Is a full understanding of our metabolic biochemistry important and useful? Yes, of course, very much so. Is this knowledge necessary for us to proceed to reverse and repair aging? No. We already know what the damage of aging is, at the cellular and molecular level. Knowing more about the way in which that damage twists our metabolism and controlling biochemistry will help, in the same way that modern techniques of architecture improve bridge building, but the absence of that knowledge does not hold back significant advances in the engineering of healthy longevity.

"The only present barriers hindering rapid and aggressive progress towards rejuvenation of the aged are those of will and funding. That is why we can all help to make a difference to the future of aging science - you don't have to be a scientist to help make will and funding a reality."

THE VALUE OF A LONGEVITY THERAPY

What are people willing to pay for a medical therapy that is expected to add healthy years to life? Following that trail will give you a good idea as to how the development and commercialization of longevity therapies will proceed over the next few decades. As it happens, good research on the value placed on life already exists:

"Studies of real-world situations produce relatively consistent results, suggesting that average Americans value a year of life at $100,000 to $300,000. So let's take the hypothetical of a longevity therapy that the consensus believes will add ten healthy years to the average life. Replacing age-damaged mitochondrial DNA might do that in humans, for example. This suggests that to bring a first widespread commercial version to the high-end medical practices of the world, the price tag on the therapy has to be brought down below $1-3 million, or the value of a decade of healthy life."

That's the story for first few years of availability, of course, in which investors are recouping their initial investments, and before competition and refinement of the technology has started in earnest. The price will fall rapidly and quality increase as many more groups enter the market. Competition is what drives the path to faster, better, cheaper.

"The stable state for a medical treatment is that in which many specialist staff are available, and a competitive marketplace exists to train those staff and supply needed raw materials. At that point, the cost is much the same for medical procedures across the tiers of specialist labor and complexity - it's largely down to the wages of those folk performing the work.

"Replacing mitochondrial DNA should be a hands-off outpatient procedure, once the technology is mature. Have a sample taken, send it off to the lab to work up a repaired genome and the viral vector, get injected with the vector that will replace your mitochondrial DNA with repaired versions, and then come back for regular testing for a couple of months. That is nowhere near as labor intensive as, say heart surgery today. So you could look at comparable procedures that require supporting individual lab work on the back end, such as limited genetic testing, and take a stab at the price tag in the $10-30,000 range."

"That's a hundred times smaller than $1-3 million, which seems fair for the progression from early version to mature technology, especially in this age of rapidly advancing biotechnology. It's also a hundred-for-one bargain on the consensus expectation of value of life gained, which is a pretty good deal - good enough to tempt a very broad customer base, and enough profit for a large and competitive industry to form."

By way of a reminder, safe whole-body replacement of mitochondrial DNA was first demonstrated in laboratory animals three years ago.

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LOOKING FAR, FAR AHEAD

"First things first" is a good philosophy to live by, but it doesn't hurt to spend a little time thinking about what comes after the first step. Here, the first step is the comprehensive repair of aging through medical science, and rejuvenation of the old - a very big first step, but we know more than enough to get underway. If you're new to that concept, you might want to look at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence:

http://www.mfoundation.org/sens/

When step one is done, what, then, is your step two? You'll have a great deal of time to work on it. Personally, I'm up for pushing the boundaries of an enjoyable life out even further:

"I'm not going to try to convince you that the future will be a golden, wondrous place: either you accept the implications of the present rate of progress towards what the laws of physics make possible, in which case you've probably thought this all through at some point, or you don't. Life, space travel, AI, the building blocks of matter: we'll have made large inroads into bending it all to our will within another half century. Many of us will live to see it even without the benefits of medical technology to come: growing up in a 1970s urban area will be the new version of 1900s farmboy youth come 2040; a strange and primitive near-past erased by progress, for all that so many people still alive actually lived it, time travelers in their own lifetimes.

"If you project out the accident rates for life today, you'll see that an ageless human, sustained by foreseeable biotechnologies of cellular and biochemical repair, has a life expectancy in the 1000 to 5000 year range. Sooner or later that piano is going to fall on you hard enough that even advanced medical technology can't fix you up.

"Once you start looking at living for 100,000 years in much the same shape as you are today, it becomes apparent that almost any activity bears a level of risk that'll jump up and kill you. Eating, swimming, reading .breathing. Stretch out the time for long enough and the improbable and fatal will happen to you.

"The answer is to change the shape you are. Getting past step one, the repair of aging, gives you a few hundred years of comparative statistical safety. I can't imagine that much of the technology needed for step two will remain beyond the human civilization of the 2200s."

As I said, it's good to have spent a little time on speculative, realistic plans for the long term. But we can't forget that step one, the work needed to develop and commercialize the medicines of repair for aging, is by no means certain. It'll happen sooner or later, but "later" isn't so good for those of us reading this now:

We have a lot of work to do to ensure that the best scientific paths to rejuvenation are funded, and that capable research communities grow to take advantage of that funding. An amazing future is ascending to great heights ahead of us, and it would be a crime to miss out on it because we didn't lay the groundwork now.

Long Life,

David A. Kekich

Maximum Life Foundation

714-641-0700/Fax 714-464-4135

kekich@maxlife.org

www.MaxLife.org

"Where Biotech, Infotech and Nanotech

     Meet to Reverse Aging by 2029"

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