X-Message-Number: 18552
From: 
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 09:16:53 EST
Subject: New aging theory?

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Michael LaTorra writes in part:

>Authors Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, in their paper, "The
>Reliability Theory of Aging and Longevity," published in the Journal of
>Theoretical Biology (213, 527-545), have offered a comprehensive,
>groundbreaking theory to understand why people (and other biological
>species) deteriorate and die more often with age.
> 
> I haven't read the paper, so I could be completely off base, but from the 
> description given it is neither comprehensive nor new nor ground-breaking, 
> nor does it provide any understanding, nor much of any clue for 
> intervention.

In fact, it appears to be nothing but the very old and discredited 
"wear-and-tear" theory. You get old because damage accumulates which is not 
repaired, or not repaired fast enough.

This tells us nothing about inter-species differences, or why a few species 
don't seem to age at all, or about changes of metabolism with age. 

In the very worst case, of course, reversal of aging (as for cryonics 
patients) could be accomplished with a brute-force approach, using nanotech 
to repair bad molecules or replace bad molecules with good molecules. But in 
all likelihood much more elegant approaches will be found, with just a few 
key systems or key genes that need changing.

Robert Ettingerr
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
www.cryonics.org 


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