So you wanna build an aging company

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.

1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.

3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.

Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve.

As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea.

For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations.

Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to fiat wealth, engaged in vain wank.

Pedantic semantics gripe: DNA damage refers to actual damage to the DNA molecule (breakage of the sugar-phosphage backbone, loss of nucleosides, etc). DNA accumulates MUTATIONS over time, which lead to the loss of genetic fidelity.

Many cancers have unregulated DNA repair pathways, which is one of the mechanisms by which they can sustain proliferation without succumbing to apoptosis. Common chemotherapeutic targets are actually DNA repair factors that can both help kill the cells and sensitize them to radiation. It's well known in the DNA repair field that cells maintain rather delicate balance between carcinogenics and death by regulating repair. The vast majority of research into DNA repair is aimed at solving problems treating cancer, with some peripheral voices (albeit ones that garner more publicity) working on anti-aging applications. I personally wouldn't sign up for any of these start-up nonsense treatments; traditional scientific orthodoxy may be overly reductionist, move slowly, and lack imagination but good god does it beat all of these people that treat grand problems in biology like some sort of app you just need to take the right angle on to figure out.

We all get cancer everyday, normally our immune system destroys it.

Neither. It is the prevention of high sugar to prevent steady organ damage. For those with diabetes, there is no way to reverse it. They just have to reduce their intake. And all organs will continue to be steadily damaged over time.

>I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".

we're not going to natural food our way to 150.

Yes, which is why we need to protect publicly-funded biomedical research—grant review tends to be more sober and less selfish than investment capital.

Hang on there a moment—you missed a few things:

1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.

2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.

3. Unlike other technological advantages, life extension is a _multiplier_ for inequality. The Undead pay no estate tax. The Undead never change their minds. The Undead never have to give up their bought-and-paid-for seats in Congress.

Death is the ultimate Chesterton's Fence.

It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks...

It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal.

The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict.

There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?!

The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin:

> To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair

> The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress

> The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people

> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish

In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good.

...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.)

If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?