Critiques of this potential immortality method

Ryan_m_b

Are requirements are for peer-reviewed, published literature. This is a sensible standard when discussing scientific issues as it is the standard used in the scientific community. Second hand sources run the risk of being wrong, overly-simplified, biased etc.
In my opinion the biggest problem with the rules is that people don't read them and then backtrack when they realise this site is not a place where anything goes for discussion. It has a specific aim which is not served by lower standards.

immortalist

About the telomeres. This ties in with what I was looking for about focused ultrasound or cyberknife. If there is a risk of cancer with the regrowing of telomeres, that risk can be mitigated by regular targeting of cancer with the beams. So a steady state of continual safe regeneration occurs.

Ryan_m_b

Whilst focused ultrasound and this cyberknife systems could have good applications in specific cancer treatments they are not panaceas. Furthermore the risk of cancer would be for the individual's lifetime after such a treatment, not during.

immortalist

My original post was about regular, even daily, treatment with beams. Get the cost down to a few hundred/thousand dollars and have them in everyone's home. Fighting cancer would be a continual everyday affair, like eating food, to sustain life. Furthermore, I don't see why all cancers couldn't be dealt with in this way, after all, they are just masses of cells that you kill with the beams.

Evo

Cancer is very low on the list of causes of death.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310.pdf

immortalist

But we're not talking about cancer only here. We're talking about kickstarting regeneration with telomerase so things like hearts and lungs and pancreas regrow, then making sure too much growth or cancer doesn't occur by zapping it with beams.

Ryan_m_b

Cancer identification and treatment is not so simple. In some cases by the time a tumour is identified it is too late and simply excising the tumour can kill the patient. You can't just hack away at the body and expect the patient to recover. In addition in other forms of cancer like leukaemia tumours do not present. That's tap dancing past the assertion that these things could be sufficiently automated.
Telomerase treatments would not regenerate anything nor regrow organs (and how exactly would an in vivo regrowing of an organ like a heart work it's not like you can wait for it to grow), at best they would slow down the degradation.

EDIT: I should also mention that telomerase treatments for life extension might not work if the telomerase theory of ageing doesn't hold strongly or if there are additional currently unknown side effects of messing with the Hayflick limit (given the highly interlinked nature of biological systems the latter would not surprise me).

immortalist

You earlier indicated telomerase was a potential treatment with side effect risk of cancer. And your arguments about hacking away are disingenuous. The cyberknife system is a commercial and automated cancer therapy. Focused ultrasound is also being commercialized. You might have a point about leukemia but I'm not sure of that since you seem to be blindly arguing against anything I say. You need to calm down pal, I'm not your enemy.

Ryan_m_b

You seem to be treating any criticism as a personal attack, this would suggest that it isn't me that needs to re-evaluate how to post.
Not really, I was pointing out that cancer treatment is not as simple as destroying the tumour.
It is emphatically not automated. You should fully research an idea before trying to offer it as a potential treatment. It didn't take me longer than a minute to find the nearest cyberknife centre to me, watch an information video and find out that far from being automated treatment with a cyberknife involves case review by a multidisciplinary team and customised programming of a procedure suitable for the patient's condition along with multiple steps of assessment and need for scans and possibly surgery to implant tracers.
http://thecyberknifecentre.com/en-uk/welcome
No I'm trying to get you to think rather than simply throwing out things that clearly you have not bothered to learn about in depth. Your posts imply to me that you are not really interested in learning the science here at all but rather are just filtering in the name of anything that fits within your ideal of biological immortality. When you start with such confirmation bias you aren't going to go anywhere productive.

immortalist

Well, you're unrepentently anti-what-I-say. Kudos for consistency. I'll just let go of discussing those here, I won't get a reasonable response.

Do you have any ideas of your own about potential life-extension ideas. I'm talking about multi-decade extension.

Ryan_m_b

I'm not anti-what-you-say, I'm trying to help you by pointing out why your suggestions are at best incomplete and worst misinformed. Frankly your attitude stinks. You've automatically judged me and others in this thread as being unreasonable seemingly because we haven't told you what you want to hear.
I can't give a figure on how many years something may lengthen a life but aside from obvious things like eating healthy, exercising, practising good hygiene etc future advances in life expectancy will come naturally from better medical treatments. Regenerative medicine as a field offers huge potential in being able to replace damaged tissues with healthy ones whilst avoiding many disadvantages of transplants such as the scarcity of donor tissues and organs and the need for immunosuppressants after the operation. Similarly better treatments for age-related diseases and cancer (of which the two methods you suggest can be part of) will push life expectancy further still.

immortalist

That's great, but you've just glossed over everything I was interested in hearing. I could have read that in any newspaper.

I'm more interested in -

What are the fundamental roadblocks? What exactly is stopping immortality? What kinds of machines could accelerate research or make things possible? Could industrialization of some aspect of research accelerate it?

Evo

Again you are not listening. You need to go do some research. Learn about the basics, then ask specific questions about specific items you do not understand. We are not set up to write courses on broad topics. There are books and websites that do have literature pertaining to the broad area in which you are interested. That's not what we do.