DailyDirt: How Old Can People Get?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, Apr 17th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Some biblical characters lived for hundreds of years. (eg. Methuselah lived to be 969.) However, people living now don't quite get that old. Aging is a mysterious process that is slowly killing everyone, and there are more than a few projects working on ways to avoid death. Immortality could be a blessing or a curse, and maybe someday we'll find out which it is.

Suspended animation is a real medical procedure, and some techniques are being tested in emergency rooms. The FDA has approved a procedure that will be used at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital to replace near-fatal patients' blood with a cold saline solution. The process stops the patient's body from doing normal things like breathing, but patients can be revived hours later from a death-like state. [url]
The Methuselah Foundation has a few projects to develop regenerative medicine that might allow people to live longer, healthier lives. Regrowing organs, developing custom chemotherapies based on a patient's DNA, and studying long-lived animals could help extend human lifespans. [url]
Google funded an anti-aging startup in 2013 called Calico. Larry Page noted at its launch that "curing cancer" might not be a good enough goal because death might only be delayed a few years, even with a cure for cancer. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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Filed Under: aging, anti-aging, cancer, death, immortality, larry page, methuselah, regenerative medicine, suspended animation
Companies: calico, methuselah foundation

10 Comments

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Reader Comments

The First Word

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Immortality?! Dammit, now those copyrights will never expire!

—Anonymous Coward

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That One Guy (profile), 17 Apr 2014 @ 5:03pm

Priorities
Before worrying about extending lives, it would probably be a better idea to focus on improving the ones we have currently, with stuff like better healthcare, clean water, enough food... you know, the little stuff that's just kinda important, yet still problematic in numerous places around the globe.
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Apr 2014 @ 5:52pm

Re: Priorities
Given humanities history... are you really that serious?

Humanity is vain, selfish, and greedy.

The reason that America gained so much is because a capitalist system benefits everyone the most from this nature greed.

The biggest failure of Capitalism is that we did not put ENOUGH socialist controls against its worst attributes which is monopoly. Instead we put socialist controls against it BEST attributes. Now we have the worst of both worlds... due to things like copyright, patent, & regulation we are no where even close to a free capitalist market. Due to socialistic intervention shit like TARP bailouts, Wall-Street immunity to massive theft, and out & out cronyism in government has ensured the survival of the monopolists while the regulations keep the little man down because start-ups & mom/pop shops cannot easily survive under the litany of contradictory regulations that cost $$$ to adhere to.

We already have good healthcare, clean water, and plenty of food, but government and corporate interests keep making them bad before it makes it to you!

You, and the rest of us keep voting in the clowns that screw us. We reap what we have sown, any person that has not realized this yet deserves every Last MITE!
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Apr 2014 @ 5:55pm

Immortality?! Dammit, now those copyrights will never expire!
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Apr 2014 @ 5:58pm

Re:
You see Walt Disney is not dead, just faking it. He has already found the secret to eternal life... musta picked it up from Elvis... maybe those 'Elvis ain't dead yet' folks are onto something.

Anyhoo... Disney needs to keep getting those copyrights extended so he can fund his empire after he reveals the truth to us all.

Cha-Ching!
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Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 17 Apr 2014 @ 6:38pm

Re: stuff like better healthcare, clean water, enough food...
...in other words, all the kinds of stuff that prolong life.
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vegetaman (profile), 17 Apr 2014 @ 7:48pm

Re:
And just remember -- You're never too old to have the government treat you like a child!
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Mark1 (profile), 17 Apr 2014 @ 8:06pm

Saline solution - suspended animation. That is amazing.

If anyone is going to make it possible for me to live forever they will need to create a time machine too.

I'm 45 years old, overweight, and a bunch of other stuff. Who wants to be preserved in this condition?

That was a cool post. I had no idea that kind of stuff was being done.
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Moses, 17 Apr 2014 @ 10:58pm

It's not that important.
What people should focus on is quality. There are some people who have accomplished amazing things in a short period of time in their lives and others who wasted most of their life away. I highly doubt that humans once lived that long.
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zip, 18 Apr 2014 @ 3:23am

Who needs long life? Live an unhealthy lifestyle, die young, then have your chopped-off head sent to ALCOR to be frozen until some distant century when you can be brought back to life, complete with a whole new body as well as a cure for whatever ails you.

... assuming the company is still around by then. And assuming the whole scheme was not just some moneymaking scam.
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Anonymous Coward, 18 Apr 2014 @ 7:28am

Re: Priorities
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that because someone is researching one particular subject, nobody is researching *other important subject*, but I can assure you that it's entirely fallacious.
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