Re: Antioxidant hype, was Re: [DIYbio] Need a paper please

On 04/23/2014 03:55 PM, Matt Harbowy wrote:
> The best thing that the DIYBio community could do is expose these borderline fraudsters for what they are, and disavow participation in the hype cycles currently at work in the transhumanist/singularity/SENS communities. I know such a potent accusation puts me at risk for backlash from these well monied interests. There's no money in disproving bullshit, because bullshit and the promise you can live forever is just too damn seductive. But that's what our community should be about: using the power of citizen scientists to fight the hype cycle of "natural", "GMO free", "vaccines/xyz is a plot to harm kids", etc, by operating without the stain of corporate shilling.
I would say that the SENS crowd has no opinion on any of what you've
been talking about other than to note that it's all a pointless waste of
time. It is burning money arguing over penny-ante biochemistry that has
no relevance whatsoever to whether or not we'll produce meaningful ways
to reverse aging.

Seriously: tea or berries? What is this, the 1600s of the alchemist
academics of the Royal Society? It boggles the mind that serious
scientists waste their time on this sort of thing when we can accurately
describe the root biological differences between old tissue and young
tissue and the means by which those differences might be reversed.

Among the broader transhumanist community - which really is very broad
these days, not much commonality between any two opposite edges - there
are the same proportion of people who listen to the output of the monied
interests in the "anti-aging" market (antioxidants are great!) rather
than the scientific community (antioxidants shorten life!) as there are
in any other group. I've no idea why you feel the need to single them out.

To complicate matters it is quite clearly the case that antioxidants
targeted to mitochondria do in fact slow aging. One research group even
has a class of such compounds that is orally ingested. That will no
doubt muddy up the messaging further once it becomes widely available,
while still being pretty much irrelevant to any serious effort to
greatly extend human life spans.

Reason

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