Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause: A Model of the Impact of the Clinical Trials of Simple Interventions
Abstract: The effective altruism movement aims to save lives in the most cost-effective ways. In the future, technology will allow radical life extension, and anyone who survives until that time will gain potentially indefinite life extension. Fighting aging now increases the number of people who will survive until radical life extension becomes possible. We suggest a simple model, where radical life extension is achieved in 2100, the human population is 10 billion, and life expectancy is increased by simple geroprotectors like metformin by three more years on average, so an additional 250 million people survive until “immortality”. The cost of clinical trials to prove that metformin is a real geroprotector is $60 million. In this simplified case, the price of a life saved is around 24 cents, 10 000 times cheaper than saving a life from malaria by providing bed nets. However, fighting aging should not be done in place of fighting existential risks, as they are complementary causes.
Highlights:
● Aging and death are the main causes of human suffering now.
● Simple interventions could extend human lives until aging is defeated.
● These interventions need to be clinically tested before FDA approval.
● A trial of the life extension drug metformin is delayed by lack of funds.
● Starting trials now will save 250 million people from death, at a cost of $0.24 for each life saved.
Please comment on the preprint of the article here: https://goo.gl/WaEYt5
For example, here https://www.medindia.net/drug-price/metformin/diamet.htm one table of 500mg costs 1 rupee, which is 0.0015 USD.
The model was deliberately oversimplified, as actually these 5 billions will be born the whole duration of the 21 century and will start to take the drug in different ages.
I will add more links on previous studies of metformin, as it probably seems unclear from the article that it is already tested drug for other conditions.
If we speak about fortification of food with useful microelements like iodine, fluoride, and some vitamines it probably has very high reach in developed countries. For some life extending drugs was shown that they could be taken in courses and could have effect on life expectancy.
The problem of constant taking a medical drug is not related to metformin, but to any drug which a person has to take constantly, like hypertension drugs, antidepressant, vitamins etc. This is a different important problem which should be solved to improve public health. There is one possible solution in the form of app (already exist) which records what one has taken and remind to take the drug.
1 rupee is $0.015 not $0.0015 by nominal exchange rates. Sales tax must be included, as well as comparison with the lower nominal incomes in India rather than the global PPP standard that I gave. Other metformin manufacturers seem to generally charge more (https://www.medindia.net/drug-price/list.asp). Presumably they are not available in all locations; presumably there are areas where people simply don't have easy access to b... (read more)