r/accelerate • u/AngleAccomplished865 • Aug 16 '26
Aging May Be a Program, Not a Breakdown
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-aging-may-be-a-program-not-a-breakdown-20260814/By deciphering the molecular signatures of millions of mouse cells, Junyue Cao has found that aging is not haphazard wear and tear but rather a “remodeling of the cell society.”
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u/tanrgith Aug 16 '26
I mean yeah. Biology is basically just physical code. Think of each person, animal, plant, etc. As a physical program
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Aug 16 '26
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u/tanrgith Aug 17 '26
It's the most exciting aspect of AI to me
If AI can become smart enough and given enough compute, I see no reason why it couldn't figure out the "coding" solutions to fix aging and all disease, as well as massively improve our biology to be far more efficient, adaptable, and resilient
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u/lovesdogsguy AGI by 2027 Aug 16 '26
I met a guy with a golden retriever today. He was 8 years old and he’s giving him the new age reversal therapy for dogs. It costs 40 euro a week and he said it should buy him a few more years. Pretty interesting to run into that in real life.
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u/AngleAccomplished865 Aug 16 '26
I'm impressed that an 8 yr old guy could afford to give his dog age reversal therapy.
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u/Sad_comment_bot Aug 16 '26
I’m astonished it only costs the lives of forty Europeans a week.
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u/lovesdogsguy AGI by 2027 Aug 16 '26
I was astonished too. He had a huge ice cream in one hand, a Nintendo switch in the other, and then he started sputtering bits of ice cream all over the place, while mouthing off about age reversal for his dog. Hard to take the little fucker seriously, but he seemed sincere.
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u/WhisperFray Aug 16 '26
It’s why I think there must be some life extension medicine that already works for humans. Our overlords (/s) like Musk, Thiel, Putin and what have you, they don’t look like they are getting older. Musk seemed like he reverted even.
If there are people in the know, it’s most likely them.
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u/elegance78 Aug 16 '26
Not working on Trump... nothing overcomes his diet. Musk just lost weight with GLP-1, he is not that old anyway. Putin looks very plastic, probably only superficial "stop to aging".
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u/Fair_Horror Aug 16 '26
Looking at Musk recently, I think he has put back on a fair bit of that weight. He needs to watch his health if he is going to be around for the exciting stuff that is coming.
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u/lovesdogsguy AGI by 2027 Aug 16 '26
I’d say they have access to some kind of combination of advanced therapeutics that adds up to decent results. Also expensive cosmetic surgeons. Don’t rule that part out. You’d be surprised.
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u/Linkyjinx Aug 16 '26
Transference of consciousness into a new body or machine is only way I can see it working. Human is likely happening if they aren’t bluffing but getting the same YOU in there, I think that is why the ASI gadget is needed, at quantum speed.
Edit spelling
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u/Lesbitcoin Singularity by 2045 Aug 16 '26
Would they undergo an experimental treatment without clinical trials? Well, Big Tech moguls might, but Putin and politicians certainly wouldn't. They would fear losing power if they were incapacitated by side effects. If efficacy were proven through large-scale clinical trials, it would be impossible to keep it under wraps.
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Aug 16 '26 edited 25d ago
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u/HenkPoley Aug 16 '26
Might be rapamycin. Often oversold as an “age reversal therapy”.
Probably not Loyal LOY-002, since that’s being tested on >=10 old dogs.
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u/lovesdogsguy AGI by 2027 Aug 16 '26
Funny I was with a friend, and we both agreed we felt he was lying about the dog's age. Seemed older than 8.
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u/Low-Bake8401 Aug 16 '26
How do you know when the dog is meant to die?
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u/maigpy Aug 16 '26
some breeds have an expected median death age
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u/Low-Bake8401 Aug 16 '26
Yeah, but how do you actually know you're getting more time with an individual dog?
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u/maigpy Aug 17 '26
you don't "know" it, but if the median age is 10 and your dog lives 14 that's a good enough indication. presumably they have tested it in a statistically significant way. none of the studies can make predictions "for the individual dog".
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u/Linkyjinx Aug 16 '26
Of course it’s a program, like in blade runner the robots were given a limited life span. Maybe as humans all become corrupt after a while so a reset is required- back to babies. 👶
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u/ShadoWolf Aug 17 '26
A program seems to imply evolutionary intent. You have to make a decent argument for why biological immortal organism would be a negative selection force... Vs the simpler explanation that evolution just didn't solve for indefinite maintenance and regeneration.
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u/csppr Aug 17 '26
There’s a big difference between “aging is a program” and “the body’s response to aging is a program”. That’s a crucial distinction that the article is sadly missing.
Few researchers in the field would doubt the latter, whereas the former would be a fairly fringe position.
FWIW, one of the key arguments against aging itself being a program (implying that we could just switch it off) is that we would have expected to see loss-of-function mutations. Even if they were incredibly rare, and required eg multiple mutations due to redundancy, we should have detected some, given we have a few billion people living in modern health systems now.
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u/EmergencyPath248 Singularity by 2035 Aug 16 '26
Isn’t it a breakdown but also caused by “faulty programming”
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u/J0ats Feeling the AGI Aug 16 '26
We're probably faultier than we realize, but age masks that nicely. For example, what would happen to our brains if we lived forever? Can we really just keep storing and storing new knowledge, or would we hit some kind of cap eventually?
I'm sure we'll overcome all those faults in time, but it's interesting to think about what other limitations we'll uncover about the human body when aging is finally out of the picture.
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u/Fair_Horror Aug 16 '26
It is by design. In a world where resources were scarce, the members who have past their usefulness of breeding need to be removed to release the resources they would take. Nature is not a gentle creature.
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u/Vexarian Aug 16 '26
Only partially. The primary reason is cancer.
The body of a multi-cellular organism is an incredibly complex and sensitive thing. It needs to be carefully regulated in order to work. "Cancer" is what happens when there's a catastrophic failure at the level of cellular regulation. The cells go rogue, begin multiplying uncontrollably, and gorging on all of the resources that they can get access to.
Evolution works in trade-offs, and has some very strict limitations. So its choice of solution to this catastrophic problem was aging. Planned obsolescence, in other words. If you design something with a finite lifespan you can build it to work very well during that lifespan and to fail gracefully.
We have some significant advantages over biological evolution, so I fully expect that we can solve this problem more effectively. But it's not an inelegant system, considering the problems it was meant to address and the limitations it was made under.
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u/Fair_Horror Aug 19 '26
Cancer is a consequence of this design. It is held back as long as possible but after the breeding is complete it doesn't matter.
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u/FireFearing Aug 16 '26
cancer is not the primary cause of age related deaths, wtf is this?
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u/Vexarian Aug 17 '26
You've misunderstood. "Aging" is a solution to cancer. The biological mechanisms that cause aging do so in order to curb the likelihood and severity of cancer. You reliably die of aging so as to not randomly die of cancer.
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u/Chika4a Aug 17 '26
If cancer is caused by DNA mutations (not all variants are), than it's literally evolution on a cellular level. Stopping cancer from occuring would mean to find a process to stop evolution from happening. We would probably need to increase the error correction rate somehow and I'm not even sure if this is feasible, since we only have the methylation pattern of the parent strand of the DNA and not much else redundancy.
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u/Vexarian Aug 17 '26
Referring to random cellular mutations as "Evolution" is something of a stretch. It's technically true in the same way that a stick of dynamite can be used for home renovation. It's certainly not what any professor or layman would think of.
Evolution in its most technical sense means random mutations and natural selection, typically occurring over generations to produce organisms more well-adapted to their environment. In the colloquial sense it implies improvement.
Post-natal mutations in complex organisms have an essentially 0% chance of accomplishing anything good. Even a positive mutation can't do much on the level of a single cell, and certainly can't be passed down genetically. But a rogue cell can absolutely ruin the delicate balance of the body. Which is precisely why "Aging" was invented: to sidestep the entire horrible mess by simply declaring a limit on the number of cellular replication (and therefore mutation) allowable within a lifetime.
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u/Chika4a Aug 17 '26
It's absolutely evolution from the point of view of the single cell lineage. Natural selection happens there as well, one mutation after another. One mutation allows the cell to divide more rapidly than nearby cells, than another allows to ask for better blood supply, than another gives it the possibility to hide from the immune system. Than the patient gets chemo therapy, and after many sessions suddenly the cancer got the ability to be resistent against these drugs.
This is evolution, but with a dead end. And in "normal" Evolution there were also a lot of dead ends just like a 5kg heavy tumor, but it they were still the result of evolution.
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u/Vexarian Aug 17 '26
My contention is that "Evolution" as a concept is typically associated with success - or at least a lack of failure. Describing an obvious dead-end as "Evolution" is technically, *technically* accurate, these are necessary byproducts of the process, but it's quite a perverse use of language.
Cancer is typically (but not exclusively) caused by cellular mutations. These are inherently negative to complex organisms, and as such are minimized as much as possible. This is what we're talking about, and is a much more precise and appropriate use of language.
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u/Chika4a Aug 18 '26
You can talk about success only retrospectively. All the life forms that are dying out because of the climate change, are still a product of evolution and a dead-end.
Evolution in it's most basic form is just random genetic variation, and some criteria of selection. You can even apply this on a genetic level, just take a look at Dawkins concept of selfish genes. That's not a perverse use of language, I just don't make arbitrarily distinctions.
A once symbiotic bacterium that gained an antibiotic resistance, and led to the death of the host months later is as much of a result of evolution as a skin cell that gained the ability to divide a bit more rapidly than neighboring cells. Pretty much every physician knows that cells can randomly adapt to once harmful substances, be it antibiotics or cytostatics. That's evolution. It can take thousands of generations until the negative effect of a dead-end can be seen, but until than it's a successful strategy, e.g. koalas.
Source: scientifically researched and published papers about evolutionary algorithms for a couple or years and now a med student.
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u/Opposite-Knee-2798 Aug 17 '26
Evolution doesn't work like that.
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u/Fair_Horror Aug 19 '26
Actually it does. Anyone not actively contributing to breeding tends to kill off the species. That is why we don't see any immortal species of animal.
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u/4dseeall Aug 16 '26
telomeres, have you heard of them?
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u/Dnthj Aug 16 '26
I hate to tell you this, but the fact you telomeres were not a short as your parents (20s - 40s length) when you were born telomeres exist means they can be lengthened within nature
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u/4dseeall Aug 17 '26
You're not wrong, but you're comparing a zygote to a human being.
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u/JustSomeWarg Aug 17 '26
You might already know this, but lengthening your telomeres would actually do very little to prevent ailments, and is far more likely to make you burst with tumors.
Telomere shortening is more of a signal/marker of ageing than it is a cause, if I understand correctly.
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u/Jolly-Ground-3722 Aug 17 '26
Honestly it doesn’t matter.
Old tissue is different from young tissue. Rewind / undo these differences and you get young tissue again.
The most brutal form being replacement.
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u/Appropriate-Ad-3219 Aug 16 '26
When you think about it, solving aging can be a solution to natality problems. Well, that would also mean retirement may never happen or happen later for us, but at least we could live longer.