NFX Bio · A talk by Omri Amirav-Drory, PhD
The plan to
end aging.
There are four plans. Three of them you’re already familiar with. Scroll for the short version, or go straight to the one that works.
Why aging is the target
Aging sucks.
9 of the 10 leading causes of death are due to aging.
- Heart disease
- Cancer
- Accidentsthe one that isn’t
- Cerebrovascular disease
- Chronic lower respiratory disease
- Alzheimer’s
- Diabetes
- Kidney disease
- Liver disease
- COVID-19
That curve is aging, and everyone is on it.
One biology→Many diseases→One lever
Treat aging upstream, not each disease downstream.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke, dementia, diabetes and organ failure look separate, but age raises the risk of nearly all of them.
There are four plans.
Everybody is on one of them.
- DDeath
- CCryonics
- BBioengineering
- ARepair
The default. Everyone is on this plan until they do something about it.
So why not change that?
Lifestyle can extend healthspan. It is not a path to 160.
Sleep, exercise, nutrition and prevention reduce risk and delay disease. They don’t give you system-level rejuvenation. You still age.
Optimize→Delay disease→Still age
Optimization is not rejuvenation.
Freeze yourself now and let a future generation figure out the rest.
Preserve now. Hope the future solves aging, and revival.
Revival of a whole cryopreserved human has never been demonstrated.
Cryonics aims to preserve structure after legal death. The waking-up part is still a movie. Let’s leave it there for now.
Preserve→Wait→Repair + revive?
Better than Plan D. Still a bet on two breakthroughs.
This is most of medicine today. It works, and it adds years.
Disease-specific medicine is the best thing we have right now. It’s just not the whole answer.
Cure one disease. Another becomes the bottleneck.
Aging keeps generating new failure modes across every organ system. Fix the heart and the kidneys are next in line.
Cure one→Next failure→Repeat
To reach 160, repair the system, not only its latest failure.
Only Plan A is designed to outrun aging.
Plan D accepts death. Plan C waits. Plan B fights failures one by one. Plan A repairs the system.