Original publicity materials: http://www.salk.edu/news-release/turning-back-time-salk-scie...

As I've said in the past, it has always been pretty random as to what the popular press picks up versus what they ignore in the output of the aging research community. Possibly it doesn't much matter, as they'll horribly mangle the significance and meaning regardless.

In this case, this is an intervention which falls into the same general area as telomerase gene therapy and stem cell therapies that work via temporarily altering the signaling environment rather than integration of transplanted cells. It is putting damaged cells back to work, getting them to do more than they would otherwise have done.

The question mark on all of these things has been the degree to which they'll produce cancer - and certainly, inducing pluripotency in random cells throughout the body sounds very much like a terrible idea on that front. The decline in tissue maintenance in response to rising levels of cellular damage (e.g. over the course of aging) is thought to be an evolved balance between death by cancer and death by frailty. So far it seems that there may be more leeway than was feared when it comes to putting a thumb on the scales to shift things back to increased cellular activity.

But this isn't rejuvenation. This isn't reversing aging. This is (very) partial compensation for downstream effects of aging, achieved without addressing any of the root causes. The outcomes are going to be limited because root causes are allowed to continue as they are. The outcomes only look good by comparison to present day medicine for age-related conditions because that is even more limited, since it acts on consequences even further along the chain.

A variation on this idea of an "evolved balance between death by cancer and death by frailty" is described here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/octopuses-...

basically that evolution favours traits that are beneficial during reproductive age, regardless of negative effects later in life

Right. The notion that aging is natures way of fighting cancer is quite interesting.

I've heard it suggested that curing cancer is probably a necessary step on the road to stopping/reversing aging.

> This is (very) partial compensation for downstream effects of aging, achieved without addressing any of the root causes.

That sounds a lot like what medicine does against most of diseases anyway.

Progress is a journey of many small steps.

My god the clickbait is getting bad. This is the kind of title I would expect to see in a supermarket rag

For some reason all topics involving the ageing progress have clickbaity headlines when repeated by the news. How come that they always call it 'reversing', when it obviously can't be nothing more than 'slowing down'?

Why can't it be 'reversing', or at least reversing effects of ageing? A major part of ageing is the progressive degradation of the body's ability to repair itself, resulting in illness. If a therapy improves the ability of the body to repair itself, and age related illnesses are thus overcome, then arguably ageing has been reversed.

So true ... and it's making it to the front page!

My next article is going to be "Get the bald look naturally" followed by a paragraph or two of text that says nothing and a countdown timer for 50 years.

Would it be possible to apply machine learning to the human genome to discover other therapies similar to this one? I'm sure there are groups working on something similar, does anyone know of any offhand?

People have been applying ML to genome analysis ever since it was first sequenced.

Arguably, bioinformatics was one of the driving forces which differentiated early machine learning methods from classical statistical methods.

What does a light grey comment mean on HN? I've always thought it meant the post had received some downvotes, but this one is grey and is a perfectly fine post. I've been seeing a lot of this for a week or more now.

I think it's because people are tired of "but what about ML applied to [OP topic]?" It's quite frankly tiresome to keep seeing the world from the same lens, as if software trends are applicable to all other scientific advancements.

We should use ML to identify other possible lens through which to view our world perhaps even..

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/678/

Title: Researcher Translation

Alt: "A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely."

And obligatory SMBC http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623

Just what we need: baby boomers who never die.

I'm not proud to say I'd have a lot of schadenfreude if they wait until after Kurzweil passes before they make the world changing breakthrough which eliminates natural death

I see some mean spirited stuff on here from time to time but this really takes the cake.

Hmm, like some kind of karmic-payback on behalf of all the people who have (and will-have) believed his recurrent predictions and then died because the predictions were too optimistic?

> Obviously, mice are not humans and we know it will be much more complex to rejuvenate a person.

No, not really.