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Footnote on Age essay.
“how hard is it? And fair point: up until the ’70s, I would have been like, damn, probably. I think as a kid, my youthful enthusiasm might not have translated as a practical adult into the same belief. I might have been like, really, if you look at what we have to work with, there’s just nothing that’s making anything live longer: lifespan empirically seems pretty fixed. And so while this might be physically possible, it seems practically impossible.
The really, really weird thing — and I honestly sometimes just kick myself for what decade I got to be born in — is this is the decade where we saw a bunch of things happen that were really surprising. And I can’t emphasise how surprising they are. Again, as a child, not knowing anything about biology, I kind of expected these things to potentially be true. But as an adult, knowing a lot more about the number of atoms that are working together to make us humans, it’s completely mind-blowing.
168 words meaning: (my paraphrase)
I’m surprised how much research has progressed in the past 50 years.
Footnote on Age essay.
Interviewer: Can you just talk a bit about what ageing is exactly?
Deming:
I think I can, but I want to object the question and say something else first. But I will answer your question.
The thing that I want to say is I just don’t think about it that way. I mean, I do in many practical ways — you have to frame things that way in the context of drug development. But the question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I’m 80, how strong do I want to be? OK, and then if I want to be that strong, how well do my muscles have to work? OK, and then if that’s true, what would they have to look like at the cellular level for that to be true? Then what do we have to do to make that happen? In my head, it’s much more about agency and what choice do I have over my health. And even if I live the same number of years, can I live as an 80-year-old running every day happily with my grandkids?
That’s much more the question in my mind than the scientific question — which is at the core of our field and very interesting, but different — of “What is ageing?” Now, the reason the “What is ageing?” question is hard is because we have a million different definitions and they’re all for different use cases. Ageing is partially programmed in many organisms that we see, and partially a random accumulation of damage. I think you can try and answer that question with: How much of it is programmed and how much of it is not programmed? You can answer it a lot of different ways.
But I really don’t care about… I mean, I care about the question — obviously a lot, with my whole life. But the question I really care about is: What do I want to be doing at what age and how well? And it’s really more of an engineering approach, almost, to then work backwards from that question to: What do we have to do to get there?
345 words. edited down to 48 by me by simple omission:
Ageing is partially programmed and partially a random accumulation of damage. But I really don’t care, the question I care about is: What do I want to be doing at what age and how well? Then work backwards to: What do we have to do to get there?
