Amazing. Also neat that we may actually learn to treat human infections better after this discovery.
"Erik Frank. Laurent Keller also adds that these findings 'have medical implications because the primary pathogen in ant’s wounds, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is also a leading cause of infection in humans, with several strains being resistant to antibiotics'."
Love imagining leading scientists from big pharma rushing to investigate the compound cocktails ants are using to make the next blockbuster drug.
This is a pedantic note, but in general Pharma does not care about antibiotics drug development - It’s an economic desert. If it was a cancer or serious rare disease drug, they’d be grinding up buckets of ants yesterday.
Well rare disease is also an economic desert.
Its only because of Government regulation big pharma started to care about these.
Mainly the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 with provided tax incentives as well as subsidized research. There is also the Rare Disease act of 2002 but that IMO is less signifigant.
Don't forget that for rare diseases affecting children the government awards fast track vouchers. These allow you to shorten the approval time of another drug (or sell it for a few hundred million for another company to do the same.
I totally agree. Although I'm not sure similar vouchers for antibiotics would be sufficient for the same success, as there are also logistical, financial and scientific advantages that have enabled rare disease drug development. Many rare disease being targeted are monogenic, providing a very 'clean' scientific mechanism, and higher success rates. The clinical studies can be small well defined population as pre/neonatal genetic testing is now routine, and supportive Foundations are often instrumental. Financially, insurers/payers have been amenable to huge per-patient prices in rare diseases because of low volume and often impressive efficacy.
Developing antibiotics has lower technical success rates. The medical need is more acute and distributed across more broad populations with much of them poor making patients 'harder to find'. Any novel antibiotic are typicaly held in reserve until after generation of resistance to all the current drugs, limiting volume. Commonly, physician and patient over-/mis-usage of antibiotics generates resistance, generating a limited 'valuable' life span of the drug.
There are many governmental/regulatory incentives being developed, and at least one industry-backed fund (AMR action fund) supporting early research but it’s still a challenge to build business plans for this.
If we could have solved the really big problems that remain with SaaS apps, we probably would have already. We're really good at building them. Most of the really big problems the world is facing require really hard solutions. Often this involves commercializing core research (like the foundation model companies) or building in atoms and not just bits. The sheer amount of talent and money going into SaaS feels like a massive misallocation of resources.
What we're not good at is overcoming humans. We could have a much better present that needs less fixing if people simply behaved differently, economically, socially, politically. It would be great if these breathless screeds could encourage figuring out how to have tech benefit humanity.
This is huge. Yes it's in dogs but for the first time the FDA has said lifespan extension is an acceptable endpoint for a therapeutic! This could help open the floodgates for longevity therapeutics and will be written about in the history books.
So this is a common argument against longevity -- that dictators would remain in power for even longer.
A simple counterpoint: imagine a world were we all did live until 500 years old. And there were some bad dictators in that world. If you lived in that world, would you suggest cutting everyone's lifespan to 80 years old to diminish the power of those dictators?
Do you support paying the cost of providing healthcare for age-related conditions to everyone who does not get the life-expanding drug? People living healthier and longer is extremely economically beneficial for all.
My take is that if the cancer doesn't get you, the angry subjects will. Right now, medical science is what imposes term limits on dictators. But it's likely that humanity will impose their own, like they have in less dictatorial regimes. (Everyone's worried about dictators, but I'm just sitting here thinking about the Supreme Court.)
I guess the fear is that only dictators would live for 500 years. But that’s still an argument for longevity research I think. If living to 500 years is a war crime, only war criminals will live to 500 years, and all that.
I see nothing wrong with letting dictators live forever, and stay in power forever, if that's what their people want.
If the people don't like the dictator, it's entirely in their power to remove the dictator. How exactly can one person stay in power over an entire nation of millions? It's only because the people there tolerate it.
If the society needs a lifespan limit to limit the damage dictators can do, the problem isn't the lifespan.
Or they're too poor to leave for greener pastures. Dictators are in power not because their people tolerate them, but because they don't have a choice in many cases. There's exceptions, but generally the stigmatized term "banana republic" aptly describes many of these places dictators control for a reason.
>Dictators are in power not because their people tolerate them, but because they don't have a choice in many cases.
They absolutely do: they can rise up and revolt. How is a dictator going to stop them? He's one person. How exactly does one person stay in power over millions? No dictator in history has ever been a Marvel-comics-style supervillain with fantastical powers. Dictators stay in power because their people tolerate them.
I think the issue is as you get older, you amass more wealth and power but you amass less open mindedness. You become more conservative, set in your ways.this would permeate every process and institution in our lives.
I can't imagine a world where everyone will live for 500 years because there is zero chance that's how such a magic drug will be distributed. Life is the most valuable commodity we have, and it will absolutely be hoarded by the top 1%.
By that logic things critical to life like water and food would be extremely expensive while useless things like diamonds or gold bars would be cheap.
What benefit would the rich derive by hoarding life extension drugs? Other people taking the same drug as you doesn't make your dose any less effective, nor vice versa.
Even if they could profit by hoarding such drugs, what's going to prevent people from manufacturing the same thing elsewhere?
It's just like software "piracy": once the information gets out, there's no way to stop it. Drugs aren't that difficult to manufacture, which is why lots of pharmaceuticals are manufactured, ignoring patent protections, in places like India.
You don't need to do some crazy speculation to reach this conclusion. People in the richest countries in the world are dying because they can't afford a shot of insulin or an ambulance or the most basic preventative care. Why will life extending drugs be any different? The only concern will be to maximize profit and not much else.
The rich aren't hoarding insulin, pharma companies are exploiting a specific US patent law loophole to make everyone overpay. Outside of the US, insulin is cheap.
> They'll almost certainly be cheaper than the costs of treating the effects of aging.
Will they really reduce the medical costs of aging when you take into account the longer lifespan?
To borrow an argument from a different branch of the thread: if everyone lived to be only 20, would you expect that medical expenses would be more than they are today, or less?
Anybody who withholds large scale distribution of these drugs while taking the drugs themselves is just painting a huge target on their back.
No rational person is going to respect intellectual property rights for these sorts of substances and if they're relatively easy to produce then people will make them themselves.
Anyone who tries to stop the production and distribution of them will basically be killing people with more steps and people don't take too kindly to that.
These people may be living twice as long with these drugs while others die, but that doesn't make them immortal.
Russsia has a rich cultural history of assassinations. The long lived single party in Japan with the oldest population isn't immune to the disease of assassination either.
If you ignore Putin's political assassinations, the assassinations during eras such as the red terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror where Lenin and trosky were killed, and Nikolas II's 1918 assassination as well as the whole royal Russian family, sure.
I do wonder, let's think about that. People can change, 500 years is a long time. One could argue living that long may tame or completely change him. Get bored of doing what you did the past 200 years and try something else.
We do have to understand that humans are humans after all. Eventually you will get bored of the same nonsense day in and day out and do something else.
This seems incredibly naive. You seem to think a longer lifespan will somehow make a brutal tyrant more caring, but I think the cruel will likely just get more monstrous with age. A long life means power must be held that much more tightly: what good is your near-immortality if rebels or rivals dethrone and kill you?
Ah yes, surely the Robber Barons would have eventually got "bored" of being in control of all money and politics. Surely that would eventually be something they don't want!
Just as silly as the people who somehow think a billionaire can't be bought and so make better politicians. Surely they became a billionaire because they have a reasonable relationship with money right? Surely you or I can relate to how they think of money!
Why are we focusing on the negative examples? Would you not want George Washington to live to 500? Lots of bad political figures were stopped by good political figures who would also benefit from life extension.
This seems the exception that proves the rule- Washington was good in no small part because he stepped down. He did not rule America as king, even when he had the popularity to claim the throne. He served his stint as president, and then stepped aside.
An immortal Washington would not want to be the permanent head of state.
Maximum human lifespan is still roughly 120 years. All the advances in medical science over the past century has been about getting more people to live longer. The actual maximum lifespan hasn't budged.
Maximum possible? Sure, but the average has gone up considerably.
If you just boost everyone to the maximum possible you'd be adding 40-60 years on many people's lives.
This is a plot point in Cyberpunk 2077.
A main executive/dictator is 158 years old due to medical advancements. The inability of his son to escape from his shadow leads to murder.
The reason is that this is an animal medicine so the study endpoints are much more lax than would be allowed for a medicine targeting a human indication.
True. And you're likely to lose your team's trust to. If employees see a leader telling white lies to potential customers (or to anyone) they're likely to ask "I wonder what white lies they're telling me?"
It's also "what else have we promised that I'll have to deliver but don't know about?" and "what else will the executive promise before this ships?"
Those are the real morale killers - knowing that you might need to start stressing and crunching at any moment, and that the roadmaps you have aren't real. Nor are your commitments to anyone working in the company if you get pulled off your planned work to service a white lie. They just complicate everything.
An executive lying to customers is a huge liability. I won't take an ethical stance on it, but in a business sense, the lies incur a debt that must be paid.
A coworker said he worked for a person who did this routinely, inventing whole offerings in the moment. Then demand the team crunch to deliver. Supposedly this was their idea of proving the market.
Post author here. If a customer asked "and I'll be able to upload my own data?" and the response was "absolutely" even though that functionality didn't exist yet because we knew we could build it before they launched, that's nothing approaching fraud. I don't believe we ever once didn't have a feature like this that a customer wanted before they actually launched. The disagreement is whether it's ok to just say "absolutely" or whether it's important to say the full "just to be clear, the product can't do that today but we can build it before you launch." 10 years later I'd take the latter approach.
I've been on the other side of this. We talked to this startup about their product and they claimed it had exactly the features we needed. We said fantastic and were ready and willing to hand over $10-20k to them for this, and they just kept stalling and making up excuses and demoing things that didn't actually do what we actually needed. Eventually they had to admit that they couldn't deliver the feature we needed. We were rather pissed off and cut all future dealings with them. They could have ended up with at least $50k from us over 2-3 years if they'd been honest and showed willingness to work with us, and instead they got zero.
'Absolutely' is strongly affirmative wording. I'd say it's fraudulent even from an engineer deeply familiar with the level of effort. Language matters and executives should know better.
I know from personal experience it's hard to avoid speaking too quickly, yet it's also important to self correct in the moment. Otherwise why have such people on a call if they cannot communicate accurately and won't even admit when they misspeak?
My experience being a leader in similar situations is that when I say "we will have that in the next release", I mean "the engineers who are tasked with that will have completed it OR I will personally do it."
It absolutely is. What is wrong with you?
It is really normal to lie to people on their face?
I mean, you can perfectly say “The feature is not ready, but will be at X time”
Ready, no need to be dishonest.
Post author here. We did work out a repayment plan for some taxes. Payroll taxes are generally "if you have the money in the account, you have to pay immediately" though, so we wrote a large check for those as soon as we discovered the error.
I felt like folks were getting too optimistic in the early days and now I feel folks are getting way to pessimistic. We don't know if any of these failed replication experiments actually made the same LK-99 the Korean team did. The only way of knowing for sure if LK-99 is a room temp superconductor is if outside labs test the samples the Korean team has made. It's entirely possible that the exact impurities in their material caused by their exact manufacturing process are required for superconducting properties to emerge. Seems like that will be done in the next few weeks. Still betting against it working but keeping my fingers crossed.
"Erik Frank. Laurent Keller also adds that these findings 'have medical implications because the primary pathogen in ant’s wounds, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is also a leading cause of infection in humans, with several strains being resistant to antibiotics'."
Love imagining leading scientists from big pharma rushing to investigate the compound cocktails ants are using to make the next blockbuster drug.