Jacob Kimmel: commitment

Transcript context

…A concern you might have about the effects of longevity treatments on your own body is that you will fix some part of the aging process, but not the whole thing. It seems like you're saying that you actually think this is the default way in which an anti-aging procedure would work, because that's the reason evolution didn't optimize for it. We're only fixing half of the aging process and not the whole thing. Whereas sometimes I hear longevity proponents be like, “No, we'll get the whole thing. There's going to be a source that explains all of aging and we'll get it.” Whereas, your evolutionary argument for why evolution didn't optimize against aging relies on the fact that aging actually is not monocausal and evolution didn't bother to just fix one cause of aging. That's correct. I don't think that there is a single monocausal explanation for aging. I think there are layers of molecular regulation that explain a lot. For instance, I have dedicated my career now to working on epigenetics and trying to change which genes cells use because I think that explains a lot of it. But it's not that there is some upstream “bad gene X” and all we have to do is turn that off and suddenly aging is solved. The most likely outcome is that when we eventually develop medicines that prolong health in each of us, it's not going to fix everything all at once. There's not going to be a singular magic pill. Rather you're going to have medicines that add multiple healthy years to your life, years you can't otherwise get back. But it's not going to fix everything at the same time. You are still going to experience, for the first medicine, some amount of decline over time. This gives you an example, if you think about evolution as a medicine maker in this sort of anthropomorphic context, of why it might not have been selected for immediately. So evolution didn't select for aging. What are you doing? What's your approach at NewLimit that you think is likely to find the true cause of aging?…

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