Bedenken wegen Überbevölkerung bei Tests lebensverlängernder Medikamente an Menschen
Ein experimentelles Medikament hat die Lebensdauer von Labortieren um fast 25 % erhöht. Wissenschaftler hoffen, dass diese Entdeckung auch die menschliche Alterung verlangsamen kann.
Die behandelten Mäuse, die im Labor wegen ihres jugendlichen Aussehens als „Supermodel-Omas“ bekannt sind, waren gesünder, stärker und entwickelten weniger Krebs als Mäuse, die nicht mit dem lebensverlängernden Medikament behandelt wurden.
Das Medikament wird bereits an Menschen getestet und obwohl noch nicht bekannt ist, ob es die gleichen Anti-Aging-Ergebnisse erzielen würde, gibt es bereits Bedenken hinsichtlich der Auswirkungen auf Bevölkerungswachstum.
Die Suche nach dem Geheimnis eines längeren Lebens ist nichts Neues, wie die Geschichte zeigt. Und Wissenschaftler wissen schon lange, dass der Alterungsprozess veränderbar ist – Labortiere leben länger, wenn man ihre Nahrungsaufnahme deutlich reduziert.
Derzeit boomt die Alterungsforschung, da Wissenschaftler und Forscher versuchen, die molekularen Prozesse des Alterns aufzudecken und zu kontrollieren.
Die Forschungsteams der Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapur und des MRC Laboratory of Medical Science am Imperial College London untersuchten ein Protein namens Interleukin-11. Der Interleukin-11-Spiegel im menschlichen Körper steigt mit zunehmendem Alter an, was zu vermehrten Entzündungen führt, die laut den Forschern mehrere biologische Schalter umlegen, die den Alterungsprozess steuern.
Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Ergebnisse Naturzeigte, dass die Lebensdauer je nach Experiment und Geschlecht der Mäuse um 20–25 % verlängert war.
Alte Labormäuse sterben häufig an Krebs. Bei den Mäusen, denen Interleukin-11 fehlte, war die Krankheit jedoch weitaus seltener. Sie waren schlanker, zeigten eine verbesserte Muskelfunktion, hatten ein gesünderes Fell und schnitten bei zahlreichen Gebrechlichkeitstests besser ab.
Längeres Leben, größere Bevölkerung
Einer der Forscher, Prof. Stuart Cook, wurde gefragt, ob die Daten zu gut seien, um wahr zu sein. Er antwortete: „Ich versuche, nicht zu aufgeregt zu sein“, und fügte hinzu, dass es „Es lohnt sich auf jeden Fall, es bei der alternden menschlichen Gesundheit auszuprobieren.“
Cook ist überzeugt, dass die Wirkung transformativ sein würde, und erklärte, dass er, wenn es klappen würde, bereit wäre, das experimentelle lebensverlängernde Medikament selbst einzunehmen.
Prof. Anissa Widjaja von der Duke-NUS Medical School sagte: „Obwohl unsere Arbeit an Mäusen durchgeführt wurde, hoffen wir, dass diese Erkenntnisse für die menschliche Gesundheit von großer Bedeutung sein werden, da wir in Studien an menschlichen Zellen und Geweben ähnliche Effekte gesehen haben.“
Widjaja fügte hinzu: „Diese Forschung ist ein wichtiger Schritt hin zu einem besseren Verständnis des Alterns und wir haben an Mäusen eine Therapie nachgewiesen, die möglicherweise das gesunde Altern verlängern könnte.“
Ilaria Bellantuono ist Professorin für Muskel-Skelett-Alterung an der Universität Sheffield. Sie sagte: „Insgesamt scheinen die Daten solide zu sein. Dies ist eine weitere potenzielle Therapie, die auf einen Alterungsmechanismus abzielt und Gebrechlichkeit lindern könnte.“
Die Versuche am Menschen befinden sich noch in einem frühen Stadium und werden wahrscheinlich noch weit davon entfernt sein, das menschliche Leben tatsächlich für einen nennenswerten Zeitraum zu verlängern. Aber wenn es in naher Zukunft tatsächlich gelingt, die menschliche Alterung zu bekämpfen, welche Konsequenzen hat das für Überbevölkerung?
Die Weltbevölkerung wird voraussichtlich 11 Milliarden bis zum Ende des Jahrhundertsgibt es wahrscheinlich viele, die es vorziehen würden, wenn es keine weiteren lebensverlängernden Versuche mehr gäbe.
What will the world look like if we all live 20 years longer?
byu/Yan_Vana_Author inFuturology
35 Kommentare
The rich people will be able to afford it, the masses probably not
I’ve seen articles about the population boom followed immediately by articles that talk about the impending baby bust all over the world. I think we might need to work out which one of those is more likely before we blame anti-aging tech for population problems.
They’ll continue to fuck with the economy and federal deficits so people are forced to work until they’re 80 to avoid retiring in poverty. Enjoy your 60 years flipping burgers, everyone!
Honestly, I would love research into extending child-bearing age (including extending energy/mobility into later years). Imagine if we could work from 18-60, get ourselves emotionally and financially secure, and then raise children in some kind of part-time retirement. Like, have kids from 60-80 when you can devote time and energy to your kids and maybe make some money and keep busy during school hours with a part time job (the types of jobs late-career people tend to have: consulting, supervising, speaking, teaching, etc.). Then use 80-120 to have full retirements.
This is what already happened in the 20th Century in most developed countries–life expectancy increased 20-30% between 1900 and 2000. What happened is the development of pension schemes and health care options. If people are living longer lives with higher quality of life, they will live longer, work longer, (hopefully) save longer, and be retired longer. It’s not a catastrophe, we just have to adapt as a society.
If life extension isn’t coupled with forced sterilization it would lead to societal collapse and/or ww3.
What is going on with this „overpopulation“ trolling recently on Reddit? There is a catastrophic collapse of the population in progress. Who is still hiding under the rock? Who is paying for this?
How are we going to have over population when no one can afford to have kids ? Need two incomes to survive as is and daycare is another mortgage payment.
Seems like a solution to plummeting birth rates and aging population.
We can’t be overpopulated with a declining birth rate. Nice try
The world would almost certainly just be worse off with longer living humans, especially because they’d probably still face mental degeneration so now you just have older crazier ppl than ever who look younger.
I hope we don’t get too much life extension and we skip right to brain copy since that would be a lot more efficient and not over-crowd the planet and you could backup people’s minds in the prime instead of extending their neurodegeneration.
Lol. Like the elite will give it to the masses. Think dummies, think.
Living longer would be great if we can decrease our stable population to match
5 Billion people living 150 years is better that 10 billion living 75 yrs
It would be naive to think that if such a drug did exist, the rich wouldn’t gate it from the poor and middle classes for as long as possible
All we need now is for a drug that means women can have babies until they are 75, and a drug that stops us being tired at 3am because the baby won’t go to sleep.
Seems easy. If you take life extending drugs, you have to abide by a one child policy like China did. If you have a second, you lose the drugs plus a massive fine relative to your income.
There are concerns about population decline all over the world. No worries, it would be good if anything
Countries everywhere will increase the legal retirement age to 10-15 years of the average life expectancy.
I used to think this would be a wonderful thing, but having seen how the world is going recently…
I’m 57, and no way I’d have kids at this age, regardless of my level of health. I’ve done that, had fun, moved on to other things.
This doesn’t matter much at all. Of course the media will tell you gloom and doom. Regardless, the youth are not having children, they just aren’t. So if this drug does become a thing, most if not all baby boomers will die before it gets rolled out and the youth still won’t be producing. Also if the youth are not producing because they think the future is bleak, then they would not want to take this drug to live longer in this bleak world.
A lot of doomers on here like to say it would lead to the end of civilization. But if anything life extension treatments would be the one thing to save our society from population collapse.
Suddenly you don’t have to choose between raising children and personal growth. You can afford to do both, at once, or one at a time.
Current lifespan is really lagging behind the modern lifestyle.
Create a population stasis as fewer are opting to have children.
Everything will be more expensive, salaries will be basically the same they are right now (which means people can afford far less), PhD is the new bachelor’s, corporations are even more powerful, weather gets worse and worse: hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, you name it.
Cynical corporations will whine that “nobody wants to work anymore” even though a month’s pay for the average white collar job won’t cover rent in most places, and automation/Ai does most jobs now
We sometimes need generations to die off to get social progress. I am in my 50s and as much as I miss them I wonder if gay marriage would be legal if their generation had another 20 years.
There are presently 3,667,758 births per year, and 3,279,857 deaths per year on Earth.
There isn’t sufficiently thorough data on the causes of all deaths, but parsing through what we have, maybe a third have a very strong causal link to age. So even we if we assume a treatment that is 100% effective, applied to 100% of all humans and gives complete agelessness (rather than merely adding ~20 years), that means reducing deaths per year to 2,186,571.
Should this not affect the age of fertility, we’re talking about 1 million more people on Earth per year, for every year henceforth. Meaning that it would take a millennium before there are a billion ‚extra people‘ alive. Even this is frankly not an issue. The UN estimate for 2100 used to be 11.2 billion, it’s had recently to be reviewed down to 10.4. The accumulated change from complete biological immortality starting tomorrow would be updating this number to 10.5. We already make enough food for 12.
Complete non-issue.
What we’re actually seeing in what’s discussed is a treatment that only some people will get, and even assuming is 100% effective (which is absurd, btw), shouldn’t add an excedent of more than some tens of thousands of people per year. Meaning that the length of time before this has a very large impact on world population is longer than the time that human civilization has existed.
11 billion by 2100 is likely not happening without some drastic life extention. Every year the max predicted pop drops thanks to declining birth rates worldwide. Some of the most recent estimates have us peaking by 2061 at only 9.4 billion. And that prediction will probably drop too in the coming years.
Life extension would benefit society. Healthier people for longer is good for pretty much every facet of society.
Longer lives, more prosperity – – – > Lower birth rates.
That’s the trend, folks. Overpopulation will NOT be a problem for most of humanity moving forward.
Considering the worldwide drop in birthrate I don’t see much of an effect.
Depends on what longer means. Like, healthy 100 old, or our natural aging is spread over 100 years? So a 60 year old will be more like our 45 year Olds? If anyone works in health care, I do not want to be a „healthy“ 100 year old. Talking about the average healthy geriatric patient, I’d prefer to just die at 75-80. No need to be 90-100. If you’re saying I can slow aging down significantly, then yes. I wouldn’t mind living my prime years longer, then performing medically assisted death at 80 (in the body of a 60 year old). I don’t need to take up more resources. Also, the world would be messed up. Enjoy working even longer…. Right now, America is considering raising the retirement age just shy of average life expectancy. Anyone feel like working from 18 to 90 in a world where we live to 100?
Tests show the mice were healthier.
But it won’t necessarily translate to making humans actually „look younger“.
Considering most of the advanced world is flatlining or heading toward population decline I’m not the least bit concerned.
Extending human life expectancy is utterly selfish and short sighted and is hurtful for the human genus. You don’t need to live longer, just live a more meaningful life.
People die. Deal with it.
Fun fact: around 90% of the drugs that perform well in animal experiments fail in clinical trials because people are not mice. That being said, I’m fairly certain we will get to effective and affordable longevity treatments in the foreseeable future. A 20 year boost is something I would consider minor, actually – as of now, life expectancy increases about 1 year every 5-6 years. A 20 year boost is just something another century or so of the current trend would bring about. I know, I know, trends can’t be projected into infinity, but a 20 year boost would still be *well* under the theoretical limit of 120, and would result from essentially the same incremental developments that drive longevity increase today.
If we assume that the relatively new field of longevity research matures into something clinically effective, I would assume we’ll see much more than that.
**Population boom:**
I consider this unlikely, at least in within the span of a century or so. There seems to be a strong negative correlation between human development index and fertility rate. It looks like when you provide humans with the knowledge and the means for effective contraception, let women have careers, and give people enough financial independence to nor rely on children for support in old age, they will stop having kids beyond *maybe* 1-2. It also looks like that people have kids later and later in life, if that becomes biologically feasible. Almost as if people weren’t mindless replicators that pump out 2x offspring in 2x time, but K-strategists through and through, who use extra resources to maximize the quality of their offspring, rather than their quantity.
It is possible, that *given enough time*, fertility rates would actually increase as people decide to have kids again after raising some, but for several decades after radical longevity comes around, it should slow down population decline rather than create a boom.
Population boom could prevent population decline / collapse due to lower birth rates.
But when the average age increases there would be high impacts on retirement age or pension / retirement systems that rely on younger generations to pay for the older population, no?