Not just Rapa, but other experimental drugs that may or may not have positive longevity effects on humans. Canagliflozin, etc. take your pick. Our knowledgeable and excellent mod may have a better perspective on this, but fundamentally, aren’t stem cells the better option overall?
Reminds me of that 90’s movie starring Kurt Russell, “Soldier”, where he and his highly trained team get replaced by a superior, next-gen squad of genetically enhanced super-soldiers. It’s like we’re all still looking for a pharmaceutical option, when it’s the cellular reprogramming path that’s shining bright with flashing lights that many of us seem to be ignoring.
I don’t think so. I think everyone universally agrees that exercise, nutrition, and sleep are the holy trinity that come before anything else. I just don’t think there’s much to talk about when it comes to these topics since they’re pretty self-explanatory.
Whether people actually do those things correctly or not is up to them, but I don’t think anyone is in denial that they are the most important factors.
Decades ago, calories restrictions already well known to me for slowing aging, also cold bath, exercise, high mountain hypoxia, etc.
I do most of them before I take metformin and rapamycin. After duodenal ulser I have to avoid full fasting for days, rapamycin and metformin come in place to full fasting.
Drugs only added on to the limitations which currently we cannot break through by natural way. Without drugs we may all died of COVID-19. I see no reason why we cannot reply on drugs…
I think its a good question - and if you define the “We” in the title of your post as the entire longevity community, I think a reasonably good argument can be made that we are overly focused on small molecule drugs.
But if the “We” are the biohackers on this website, I think it’s a tougher argument to make. Ultimately the issues are safety, cost and scientific validation of efficacy. I think the biological approaches (stem cells, yamanaka factors and cellular reprogramming, etc.) likely have much higher potential returns in terms of longevity, but from a biohacker, or early-adopter perspective, the safety is unproven and data is lacking, the cost is extremely high (typically you need to venture outside the USA to shady (i.e. poorly validated and trusted) clinics, and the efficacy is largely speculative and “hype” driven.
So - from a practical standpoint, most people (due to cost, availability, and safety reasons) are limited to supplements and drugs. Drugs go through more rigorous validation than supplements, as well as through higher quality-controlled manufacturing facilities - so are probably safer in many respects than supplements. And the research is better and deeper on drugs.
So, from a short-term perspective, I think drugs are the best targets. Overtime I expect things to shift more towards biologicals, but it takes time for good research to be completed and for costs to come down. Perhaps peptides will speed that process up as they are simpler and cheaper.
CRISPR etc. is currently neither accessible nor affordable so it’s pointless to even think about it.
Drugs may not bring you immortality but they slow decline for individual parts of your body. If you’re a bit of a risk-taker, stack peptides on top of that.
I look at pharmaceuticals as a compact and sometimes cheap (but not always) way to achieve the same result as 10 or 20 different supplements. Unfortunately, it requires going through the process of meeting with a doctor and getting a prescription, or doing something similar online (e.g. Amazon One Medical), which can be annoying to work through – it’s so much quicker and easier to just go to the local Vitamin Shoppe or CVS and get a supplement, at least for the first time (after that you can just go through refills).
In the long run, I suspect that many of the supplements, pharmaceuticals, etc. will get replaced with much more advanced technology, as I’ve said before. So I see supplements, drugs, exercise, etc. (in the right combination) as only a temporary fix that will extend median lifespan 10 or 20 years maybe.
It’s hard to say what will replace the methods people are focused on. One that I suggested before just as a thought experiment was the use of an army of tiny robots – say, each 1 cubic millimeter or smaller (maybe 0.0001 mm^3 or so) – that can swim through the body and do stuff like cut out little pieces of certain organs and then replace them with lab-grown versions that are “younger” (sort of like 3D printing organs from the inside), clean out plaque in arteries very gradually, effectively perform plastic surgery similar to “micro-coring” (imagine little robots cutting through your skin bit-by-bit and popping out little cores of skin), inject drugs right at the target site to maximize their benefit without having to pass through the gut barrier, inspect and surgically remove little patches of pre-cancerous cells all over the body, strengthen the extracellular matrix by removing damaged collagen fibers and replacing them, and lots more. The technology to do something like that is far away at the moment, as many more levels of tools are needed to get us to the point where such robots can be manufactured. But they will arrive eventually…