The body can be considered as a system of many redundant components, with aging as the result of progressive unrepaired damage to those components. This is a model that works very well. For further reading, you might look at the application of reliability theory to aging:
Bodies are complex systems and all complex systems can be prolonged in their period of prime operation by sufficiently diligent incremental repair. Developing a toolkit to do that for humans is the point of SENS the research program, with the point of SENS the advocacy program being to help people understand that the scientific community well understands in detail what needs repairing.
For more on the biochemistry of damage-that-causes-aging, explained for laypeople, you might look here:
I'm a computational biochemistry student, and I don't think this is possible. We can gamify protein folding because this is a well-understood, well-characterized problem. What we don't have the slightest clue about is how to restore original cell state, eg. rid cells of aggregate intracellular waste, repair non-trivial DNA damage, restore the extracellular metabolome, etc.
I think we should stop funding/granting scholarships to liberal arts majors. Let them become STEM majors.
There are really intelligent people out there who could never pass a calculus class, much less thermodynamics. Do you want them in your program taking up all the time of the teacher, stopping those proficient in math from getting the education they deserve?
It seems people get better at what they practice. I suspect anyone (barring genuine mental disability of some kind) could master calculus and thermodynamics if they were sufficiently motivated.
I'm basing it on both my time as a math tutor for Pima Community College and on people I have known.
People like my mother who, if she can quantify the data she can effectively do algebra, but as soon as X and Y appear she shuts down. She cannot make the jump to the abstract thinking of math, and it curtailed her ability to go back to college. It didn't help that her math teacher in 9th grade told her that she would never be good at math, much like many women from poor backgrounds. (I have no study, only the experience in tutoring on how many women said that a teacher told them not to bother, and could never make it over that hump.) Now you say that it's merely psychological for them and that they could. I'm telling you that for as much work as some of these people I tutored put in, they had a mental block that they simply could not overcome, fighting their way to a C in college algebra so they could get to where they're going.
I can give as an example my boyfriend, who can speak and teach two languages better than most people here can in their native language, and is a promising Ph.D candidate in his program. He worked for a month straight (with my help) to raise his GRE math to a minimum score. His limit may be calculus, but certainly not higher math, and not upper level sciences. Yet I have seen this man wake up, read, write, sleep, and repeat for weeks straight.
He's a gifted writer and academic, but even if he could muddle through (say...) managed information systems, he'd never be more than mediocre because his brain simply does not work that way. (He still asks for help with his Mac.) Square peg, round hole.
It doesn't benefit those who have a passion for the sciences to put him and dozens of others in the same class, wearing down the professor because they struggle to grasp concepts that future scientists understood in fifth grade.
1. I worked for a few years in the remedial math centre for mature students in my university, and one of my best friends did his doctorate in teaching mature students mathematics. Based on my experience, had I taken your attitude then I would have just not shown up for work.
2. I disagree that it doesn't benefit the stronger students. It was awfully hard for me to learn to teach mathematics, because I had never really had to learn it in a step by step way myself. However, when I did learn to teach an area, my understanding was orders of magnitude higher because I had the understanding of somebody gifted in the area but the method and the attention to detail of somebody who has learned it the hard way. If you mix classes with high and low skilled students, you just have to make sure you rely on the high skilled students as a teaching resource.
1. Just because I didn't believe they could do differential equations doesn't mean that I didn't believe they could learn college-leve. algebra with some coaching. I had more faith in them than they did of themselves, in many cases.
2. There have been many studies that have tried what you say. The problem is that the class must go slower to accommodate the slower students. Engineering degrees already have so much packed into them that they often can't take classes of interest -- are we going to make it even longer?
My argument is that we have a surplus of humanities majors and the funding for them is disproportional to our basic need to advance scientific knowledge. Additionally, we must remain competitive with other countries that realize that STEM is the way to economic dominance.
The humanities are subjects that can be explored at home by anyone who has the luxury of free time. While I admit that a hand-holding professor can help you traverse the field quicker and lead you to insight that would be difficult to divine on your own, there are books and audio lectures that can do the same job. And what's stopping anyone from joining a mailing list on the topic of interest?
Even "big" art projects pale in comparison to the funding requirements of basic science research. We need to make sure every lab is fully-stocked with not only minds, but the latest equipment necessary to keep pace with the advancements being made at the top institutions.
The commenter did not say kill the liberal arts, he said to stop funding them. Many of the best thinkers and artists I know are self taught. Liberal arts costs a lot less to learn and teach than most STEN subjects.
Liberal arts should be clearly defined as a leisure activity, one that everyone has a right to, but not something that we should subsidize at the expense of advances in human health.
You can enjoy the liberal arts if you're dead. It's just a matter of priorities.
The fact that it's so much cheaper to teach the liberal arts, yet the same tuition is charged, means that they are already much less subsidized. If you work out tuition paid by students and compare it to department salaries/expenses, humanities departments often turn a net profit for their universities (http://campuscomments.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/ah-bartleby-a...). If you charged students proportionally to the amount it cost to educate them for every credit-hour (i.e. equal subsidies across fields), STEM tuitions would be 20% to 50% higher.
On the other hand, I don't see much reason to subsidize medical education or research across the board, given the huge profits in it; income from patent royalties ought to be sufficient to pay for most of the needed research and education. An exception is harder-to-monetize research, like running clinical trials for old generic medications where it's not profitable for the private sector to do so (since they wouldn't be able to patent the result), or studying diseases that primarily affect poor countries.
Studying engineering isn't the same as innovating, but you accept that people need to know the field first. the same is true for other fields, even if the domain knowledge isn't obvious to you.
Can you point to some great artists and writers who studied art history or literature? I agree that formal study and practice of music (not the same as studying music history btw) has lead to a lot of great music.
What about editing, critiquing, or writing pop novels(perhaps somewhat equivalent to overseeing new devices or just engineering common devices). That also needs to get done.
Unless we're just talking about adding an aspect of fun to research so existing scientists enjoy their work more (or tend to pursue it more eagerly, etc.), a necessary but insufficient condition for gamification is simplicity; and if we can find a way to break complex research down into tasks that are simple enough for almost anyone to complete, why not just underpay people on Mturk to do it and skip having to make it fun?
Not living to (say) 150 is humanity's greatest problem?? And you're serious??
Ever stop to think of world hunger? Malnutrition still is the global leading cause of mortality in the world. And you're arguing to crowdsource a solution to aging which is supposedly "humanity's greatest problem" because us first-worlders can't live to 150, because having their genes fortified (or whatever) most certainly is not going to do much good for those that simply can't get enough nutrients.
This is only a problem to that tiny privileged part of humanity that has no worries whatsoever about the two lowest levels of the Hierarchy of Needs. And you must be well aware which side of the fence you're on, how many there are suffering on the other side, and you have the gall to pose THIS as humanity's greatest problem?
No. I don't easily use a "but the starving kids in Africa have it so much worse" argument, except in this case it's directly relevant.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not against longevity research, cancer research or any kind of medical advances but at least they don't fucking claim they're solving a greater problem than fucking World Hunger.
Aging kills something of the order of 100,000 people every day, about twice as many people as all other causes put together: hunger, violence, accidents, etc.
The majority of those deaths are amongst the poor. Aging also causes great suffering for hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis. The majority of those people are also poor - the poor suffer far more greatly than the wealthy because of degenerative aging due to their comparative lack of access to what palliative treatments do exist.
If not for aging, the poor might have a far better chance of bettering their lot in life - they'd have no imposed time limit on working their way out of poverty, no need for large families to support them in their old age, and so forth.
So your hair shirt view of the world is completely wrong. Aging is the greatest problem, and like all universal problems falls most heavily on the poor.
That's an interesting point about large families...birth rates would probably fall pretty dramatically.
Another potential benefit is that really long-lived people might take a longer-term view on other problems. It'd probably change the global warming debate pretty significantly, for example, if everybody right now had a life expectancy of a thousand.
I can't help solve the world's hunger problems when I'm dead, so in my opinion humanity's greatest problem is death.
Related: in this TED talk[1] Aubrey de Grey makes the assertion that extending life by another 20 years or so is an incredible feat because in that added 20 years science will figure out how to add 20 more, etc.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/05/applying-reliabil...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and...
Once you start to think along the lines of damage and repair, you inevitably end up in the SENS camp. It's the logical place to be.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/11/the-engineers-vie...
Bodies are complex systems and all complex systems can be prolonged in their period of prime operation by sufficiently diligent incremental repair. Developing a toolkit to do that for humans is the point of SENS the research program, with the point of SENS the advocacy program being to help people understand that the scientific community well understands in detail what needs repairing.
For more on the biochemistry of damage-that-causes-aging, explained for laypeople, you might look here:
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes