Today we wish a very happy 116th birthday to Misao Okawa who was born in Japan in 1898, making her the world’s oldest person. When she was young, Einstein hadn’t yet grasped the mysteries of a relative universe, cars were becoming affordable and were thought as the saviour of horse-polluted cities and the telephone was the next big thing in communication.
More than a hundred years later, we oft cite Einstein’s famous equation of relativity without understanding it. Cars are tools of pollution and most cities tax their presence. And a great many people shun voice communications for instantaneous texts. A lot has changed in our understanding of the universe, technology and our morality over the past century. But when it comes to living longer lives, we seem to collectively forget some basic biology.
Mind the generation gap. Itsuo Inouye/AP
The media obsesses over the inevitable “secret” that centenarians (and super-centenarians, like Okawa, who live past 110) reveal as the reason for their exceptionally long life. In the case of Okawa, lots of sushi and eight hours sleep a day. Scientists study centenarians and their families to isolate the causes for longevity – so that we may be able to distribute it to everyone.
But centenarians are not the key to unlocking the mysteries of health and longevity – on the contrary, they epitomise our fears of growing old.
Centenarians and Tithonus’ curse
In Greek mythology, mortality was the distinguishing feature between gods and men; gods were immortal while men suffered from death (that, and the whims of the gods above them). In the story, Eos, the goddess of the dawn falls in love with a mortal man called Tithonus. Eos cannot bear the thought that Tithonus will die, so she asks Zeus to make him immortal, to which he agrees. The only problem is that she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus cannot die, but he progressively suffers from all the ill health and frailties of old age.
Centenarians are the living embodiment of Tithonus’ curse. Contrary to what the media would like to portray (and some studies), many centenarians suffer ill health and frailty associated with old age, which can also affect research. Most are wheelchair or bed-bound, many suffer from dementia, muscle loss, hearing loss, eyesight loss and lack control of their orifices.
When given the choice between healthy life and long life with ill health, most people choose the former. Centenarians are not a mystery of nature; they are old people who happen to suffer the damages of ageing a bit longer than others.
Mortality law and the lifestyle delusion
Like the rest of us, centenarians are governed by the “law of mortality”, which simply states that no matter who you are or where you live the chances of you dying double every eight years.
This doubling of our mortality rate starts from the moment we are conceived until our inevitable demise. And with each eight-year period we accumulate more damage generated by the process of sustaining our life (our metabolism). Initially, during youth, the damage is limited and doesn’t affect our health and well-being but as we get older the damage starts to accumulate and our probability of dying from any given disease of ageing increases exponentially.
We certainly know how to decrease our mortality rate by using vaccines and antibiotics and by not smoking. But unfortunately the converse is not true, we know of nothing that can reduce our rate of mortality. Lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise do not significantly reduce the mortality rate of a normal person.
Another way to think about this is to imagine we are all born with a certain number of chips that we can spend during life, and when the chips run out, we die. So in this thought experiment, I’m born with 2,048 chips while Anders is born with 8,192 chips.
Applying the law of mortality, we remove double the chips every eight years, so two chips go on my eighth birthday, four on my 16th, eight on my 24th and so on.
I’ll die when I run out of chips on my 88th birthday, while Anders will be around until his 104th birthday. Although Anders is born with many more chips than me, in the later years of his life he uses ever more chips to remain alive. These chips are analogous to genetic inheritance. Centenarians are born with better genes which help them maintain their frail state a little bit longer compared to the average Briton who lives to about 80.
By the time someone has reached 90 or 100 years of age, they will have accumulated a lot of damage as a by-product of their metabolism. Their biological systems teeter at the edge of systemic collapse and each additional year brings with it the probability that something will tip it over the edge. This may help explain the fact that although the total numbers of centenarians are increasing, the numbers of super-centenarians like Okawa have remained constant.
Male mortality in England and Wales over the last 160 years. Avi Roy, CC BY-SA
Regenerative powers
If we are to grow old and remain in good health, we have three options. We can try to improve our metabolism such that it generates less harmful byproducts or we can find a way to clean these up these byproducts. Or, we can deal with the consequences of this accumulation of damage over time. Medicine has mainly focused on the third option, dealing with the consequences of ageing disease such as dementia, cancer and diabetes. But though we may have added few years to our lives, we certainly haven’t added life to our years.
We have tried to understand how to improve our metabolism by studying longevity genes in worms – in one experiment, increasing the life of nematode worms five times – rodents, and centenarians. But these studies rarely generate consistent results and we still do not know how to implement the finding in humans. Improving our metabolism to mimic those of long-lived mammals such as bowhead whales (thought to be the oldest living mammal) is certainly an interesting avenue of research, but won’t be clinically useful for a very long time.
The field of regenerative medicine is trying to hedge our bets. Instead of waiting until we can overhaul our metabolism, it aims to clean up the damage we accumulate in our cells, tissues, and organs. There are several current projects to grow organs from one’s own stem cells or even skin cells. There are patients around the world with trachea and cartilage replacements made using this technique. Soon, regenerative medicine will target therapies beyond organs and at the cellular level. If our cells are always in tip-top shape we may not need to replace our organs.
But as it currently stands, the best chance for you to reach 100 years of age, with all the baggage of that it comes with, is to have parents and grandparents who are centenarians. Sushi, sleep, a whisky a day is unlikely to make the difference besides improving life quality. But for our money, regenerative medicine will be what finally cures the old of the Tithonus curse, where we might live to ripe old ages but in much better health.
I have no conflicting interests related to this topic (besides being subject to ageing).
Avi Roy does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
QUOTATION(S): “…The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable…”
CITATION(S): “…If you plot the basic measures of the price to performance and capacity of information technologies (for example, computer instructions per second per constant dollar, bits of memory per dollar, or the total number of bits being moved around over the Internet), they follow remarkably smooth — and foreseeable — trajectories. This observation goes well beyond Moore’s Law (which says you can place twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every two years); in the case of computation, it goes back to the 1890 American census, long before Gordon Moore was even born .… What’s predictable is that these measures grow exponentially, not linearly, though our intuition about the future is linear, which is hard-wired in our brains. This makes a remarkable difference. Thirty steps linearly gets you to 30, whereas 30 steps exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16…) gets you to a billion .… And it’s not just electronics and communications that follow this exponential course. It applies as well to health, medicine and its related field of biology. The Human Genome Project, for instance, saw the amount of genetic sequencing double and the cost of sequencing per base pair come down by half each year .… A computer that fit inside a building when I was a student now fits in my pocket, and is a thousand times more powerful despite being a million times less expensive .… In another quarter century, that capability will fit inside a red blood cell and will again be a billion times more powerful per dollar…”
NEWEST, PRACTICAL PRINCIPALS (TENETS) TO SEIZE SUSTAINABLE PROFESSIONAL, MANAGERIAL AND BUSINESS SUCCESS TENTES: (25) Correlate everything else with the ignored and unthinkable ‘else’ of everything else forever.
BOOK(S): The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. ISBN-13: 978–0316346627.
N.B.: Quotations, Citations and Success Tenets are by the Futuretronium Book.
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
The complexity in biology is astounding. That is why biologists are thankful that model organisms, like the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, can be used to breakdown biological processes into simpler units.
C. elegans is a particular favourite. It grows in the exact same way from a single fertilised egg cell to 959 cells as an adult. Its body is transparent which has allowed scientists to map its growth and study internal changes to great detail.
In a paper published in Nature recently, En-Zhi Shen at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing and colleagues have used C. elegans to make an intriguing discovery. Based on a process that occurs in each cell’s power house, mitochondria, they claim to be able to predict the lifespan of that organism.
In nature, electrons are found in pairs in orbit around the atom’s nucleus. A free radical is created when an atom has an unpaired electron whizzing around the nucleus. Inside mitochondria, there is formation of such free radicals called reactive oxygen species.
The mitochondria produces many types of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as by-products of the normal metabolic process, including superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, and nitric oxide. These free radicals propelled by their unpaired electrons seek to find other molecules in the cells from whom they can steal an electron and thereby damage them. Thus, free radicals can damage DNA and stop proteins and lipids from performing their functions in the cell. This process of stealing electrons from functional molecules by reactive oxygen species and its resulting damage is known as oxidative stress.
Shen thought that if they were able to measure the amount of oxidative stress in the worms they may be able to predict how long they would live. Shen had previously discovered that the mitochondria in cells produce sudden short bursts of free radicals which could be counted.
When Shen studied C. elegans with added proteins that glow in the dark because of oxidative stress, she could detect levels of oxidative stress by measuring the flashes of light, termed mitoflash, emitted by proteins which detect free-radicals produced by the mitochondria. The more mitoflashes that happen within a certain window of time, the higher the amount of free radicals produced by the mitochondria.
Using the mitoflash method, an individual worm can be observed during the entirety of its 21-day lifespan. These worms are at the peak of their reproductive ability during the second and third day of their lives. Soon after this, the worms start their steady decline towards old age and by about the fifteenth day most of them are considered old.
Shen discovered that there were two periods in the lifespan of the worm when oxidative stress increased. The first was around the third day, when the worms are laying their eggs and the other was around the fifteenth day when the worms were old.
They then compared these finding using other worms who were engineered to have longer or shorter lifespans. Consistently, they found that worms with low amounts of mitoflashes during the third day of their lives lived longer compared to worms with higher mitoflashes. Interestingly, the number of mitoflashes on ninth day was not predictive of lifespan. Shen, therefore, thinks that oxidative stress levels of a worm during early life can determine how long they can live.
Telling age in a flash
Shen’s work improves on previous worm studies by hinting that free radicals produced by mitochondria especially in early life may be a central mechanism driving the decline during ageing.
Also, the results of this study agree with the free radical theory of ageing, which assumes that the diseases of ageing result due to the increasing inability of cells to repair damage caused by oxidative stress. This theory predicts that organisms that have long lives must lower their oxidative stress by producing more antioxidants.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in real life. Human beings live much longer lives in spite of producing much fewer antioxidants compared to rats, hamsters, mice and rabbits. And studies involving dietary supplementation of antioxidants show an inverse relationship between antioxidant levels and life span. The claim that oxidative stress in early life may be a predictor of lifespan may work in some worms but it will certainly be of no use in humans.
The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.
THE OMNISCIENT TRUTH ABOUT OUTER-SPACE INTELLIGENCE AND WHAT THE OFFICIAL ESTABLISHMENT HAS TO DECLARE ABOUT IT! BY MR. ANDRES AGOSTINI.
I have the glory to have read every book by Dr. Raymond Kurzweil with the sole exception of “Transcend.”
Dr. Kurzweil is an engineer graduate from grandiose M.I.T. (the technological avant-garde within the Ivy League universities).
Beyond his many inventions, patents, and scientific breakthroughs and discoveries, please remember that Ray holds 19 doctoral degrees among many other amenities.
I exactly relish the way he exercises his mind. And instead of fighting sourly against his contrarians, he kindly and respectfully invites them to lavishly publish the opposing views on books and blogs.
Ray is a pervasive sage by any known or unknown measure. He is now the Chief Engineer Officer at Google and the Chairman of the Singularity University (founded by him with the institutional backing of NASA and Google).
We all like the Founding Fathers, especially Jefferson and Franklin. But tons of Americans and others seem to frequently and prevalently ignore this Hi-Tech Founding Father.
Within his duties at Google, he is embarked into the greatest scientific advancement in order to transform any illness or biological cause of death (natural death) into a superseded cure (outright state of well-being), radically.
HE IS INTO STRINGENT R&D&I TO MAKE HUMAN DEATH A THING OF THE PAST.
I also argue that he will be auspiciously fighting against challenges and problems in order to systemically and systematically reverse-engineer biology and the human brain with the utter purpose of seizing the correct software templates for Strongest Quantum Supercomputing.
In “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” (ISBN-13: 978–0143037880) book, Ray argues that most extraterrestrial beings might, just might, exhibit a grayish look because they are the trans-exobiologicals stemming from [outer-space and infinitely beyond] advanced exobiological civilizations.
Trans-exobiologicals are exobiologicals who have transcended their own exobiology.
Having said that and since the advent of his landmark book (I wish all fact-driven books were written like this canonical marvel), he has given many interviews and speeches about The Technological Singularity.
As a process of that, one day Ray ended up giving a seminal keynote to the upper management and scientists at SETI Institute. SETI, an American Organization, stands for Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Conversely, the about one-hour talk was about the Technological Singularity and the Law of Accelerating Returns as it posited by Ray himself.
Towards the end of the keynote, one or two SETI scientists told Ray that, as per their own research, they were considering as a probable and plausible scenario to be that extraterrestrials’ domicile was within the immeasurable limits of Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
AS A CONSULTANT, MANAGER, STRATEGIST AND RESEARCHER, ANDRES WORKS AND HAS WORKED WITH INSTITUTIONS ─ AND THE RESPECTIVE EXECUTIVES OF SAID ORGANIZATIONS ─ SUCH AS:
► Toyota,
► Mitsubishi,
► World Bank,
► Shell,
► Statoil,
► Total,
► Exxon,
► Mobil,
► PDVSA, Citgo,
► GE,
► GMAC,
► TNT Express,
► AT&T
► GTE,
► Amoco,
► BP,
► Abbot Laboratories,
► World Health Organization,
► Ernst Young Consulting,
► SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation),
Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps
Three rules for success: Michael Raynor at TEDxUniversity
QUOTATION(S): “…It reminds us that, in our accelerating, headlong era, the future presses so close upon us that those who ignore it inhabit not the present but the past …” AND “…The future is not a privilege but a perpetual conquest…”
CITATION(S): “…The world has profoundly changed … The challenges and complexity we face in our personal lives and relationships, in our families, in our professional lives, and in our organizations are of a different order of magnitude. In fact, many mark 1989 ─ the year we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall ─ as the beginning of the Information Age, the birth of a new reality, a sea change of incredible significance ─ truly a new era ─ Being effective as individuals and organizations is no longer merely an option ─ survival in today’s world requires it. But in order to thrive, innovate, excel, and lead in what Covey calls the new Knowledge Worker Age, we must build on and move beyond effectiveness [long-held assumptions, fallacies and flawed beliefs and faulty conventions]…Accessing the higher levels of human genius and motivation in today’s new reality REQUIRES A SEA CHANGE IN THINKING: a new mind-set, a new skill-set, a new tool-set ─ in short, a whole new habit…”
BOOK(S): The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage by Yossi Sheffi. ISBN-13: 978–0262693493
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
QUOTATION(S): “…By mid-century, computers will be linked directly into our nervous systems via nanotechnology, which is so small it could connect every neuron in our brains. By about 2040, there will be a backup of our brains in a computer somewhere, so that when you die it won’t be a major career problem…” AND “…The future is being colonized all the time by people who have the resources, who do spend time thinking about it, planning for it and trying to shape it in their direction…”
CITATION(S): “…By the end of the twentieth century, science had reached the end of an era, unlocking the secrets of the atom, unraveling the molecule of life, and creating the electronic computer. With these three fundamental discoveries, triggered by the quantum revolution, the DNA revolution, and the computer revolution, the basic laws of matter, life, and computation were, in the main, finally solved .… That epic phase of science is now drawing to a close; one era is ending and another is only beginning .… The next era of science promises to be an even deeper, more thoroughgoing, more penetrating one than the last .… Clearly, we are on the threshold of yet another revolution. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS]. In the past decade, more scientific knowledge has been created than in all of human history. COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS. Almost daily, the headlines herald new advances in computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, and space exploration. In the wake of this technological upheaval, entire industries and lifestyles are being overturned, only to give rise to entirely new ones. But these rapid, bewildering changes are not just quantitative. They mark the birth pangs of a new era .… FROM NOW TO THE YEAR 2020, SCIENTISTS FORESEE AN EXPLOSION IN SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY SUCH AS THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE. IN TWO KEY TECHNOLOGIES, COMPUTER POWER AND THE DNA SEQUENCING, WE WILL SEE ENTIRE INDUSTRIES RISE AND FALL ON THE BASIS OF BREATHTAKING SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES. SINCE THE 1950S, THE POWER OF OUR COMPUTERS HAS ADVANCED BY A FACTOR OF ROUGHLY TEN BILLION. IN FACT, BECAUSE BOTH COMPUTER POWER AND DNA SEQUENCING DOUBLE ROUGHLY EVERY TWO YEARS, ONE CAN COMPUTE THE ROUGH TIME FRAME OVER WHICH MANY SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS WILL TAKE PLACE .… BY 2020, MICROPROCESSORS WILL LIKELY BE AS A CHEAP AND PLENTIFUL AS SCRAP PAPER, SCATTERED BY THE MILLIONS INTO ENVIRONMENT, ALLOWING US TO PLACE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS EVERYWHERE. THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING AROUND US, INCLUDING THE NATURE OF COMMERCE, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, AND THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE, WORK, PLAY, AND LIVE…”
BOOK(S): A Fire Upon The Deep (Zones of Thought) by Vernor Vinge. ISBN-13: 978–0812515282
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
uArm, A Mini Robotic Arm You Can Assemble and Control http://singularityhub.com/2014/01/28/uarm-a-mini-robotic-arm…d-control/ QUOTATION(S): “…It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring…” AND “…Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion…”
CITATION(S): “…HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS].…COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS…”
BOOK(S): Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku. ISBN-13: 978–0307473332
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
PayPal Is Cracking Down on Bitcoin Sellers http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/05/idUS371088795720140205 QUOTATION(S): “…Change is hard. Change is hardest on those caught by surprise. Change is hardest on those who have difficulty changing too. But change is natural; change is not new; change is important…” AND “…Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition…”
CITATION: “…BEGINNING WITH THE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE KNOWN WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST, STUDIES HAVE ESTIMATED THAT THE FIRST DOUBLING OF THAT KNOWLEDGE TOOK PLACE ABOUT 1700 A.D. THE SECOND DOUBLING OCCURRED AROUND THE YEAR 1900. IT IS ESTIMATED TODAY THAT THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE BASE WILL DOUBLE AGAIN BY 2010 AND AGAIN AFTER THAT BY 2013…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK(S): Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier. ISBN-13: 978–1451654967
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
QUOTATION: “…Thirty-five years ago, psychologist and visionary Dr. Abraham Maslow warned, ‘life is moving far more rapidly now than ever before in the rate of growth of facts, knowledge, techniques, and inventions. We need a different kind of human being able to life in a world that changes perpetually, who has been educated to be comfortable with change and situations in which he has absolutely no forewarning. The society that can turn out those people will survive. Societies which do not will die.’…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae. ISBN-13: 978–0312367077
QUOTATION: “…The flattening of the world is going to be hugely disruptive to both traditional and developed societies. The weak will fall further behind faster. The traditional will feel the force of modernization much more profoundly. The new will get turned into old quicker. The developed will be challenged by the underdeveloped much more profoundly. I worry, because so much political stability is built on economic stability, and economic stability is not going to be a feature of the flat world. Add it all up and you can see that the disruptions and going to come faster and harder. No one is immune ─ not me, not you, not Microsoft. WE ARE ENTERING AN ERA OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION ON STEROIDS. Dealing with flatism is going to be a challenge of a whole new dimension even if your country has a strategy. But if you don’t have a strategy at all, well, again, you’ve warned…”
RECOMMENDED BOOK: The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business by Arie De Geus ISBN-13: 978–1857881851
