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Age A Byproduct of Cancer Defense?
A reader writes "The International Herald Tribune has an article which says, in brief: they have discovered that aging in mice seems to be a byproduct of the chemicals that prevent cancer" If true, that's quite a double edged sword - avoid death, to cause it later.
If true, that's quite a double edged sword - avoid death, to cause it later.
Shouldn't that be to cause it sooner?
Chemicals that prevent or help prevent cancer usually tamper with cell division. If cellular division is in some way interrupted or affected by anti-cancer agents, then aging more than normal can easily occur. It goes back to one's preference. Long, suffering life or short, fulfilled life?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This sort of puts a whole new spin on this whole "Cure for Cancer" thing. The study seems to suggest that cancer is inevitable, and any attempts by our body to avoid it result in our own death.
Seems to me that if this is the case, it would have some serious repurcussions on how we currently understand how our bodies work. What is it about our physiologies that makes cancer such an irresitible force?
It hurts when I pee.
There's a 25 year lifespan discrepancy, in which evolution has no effect, because the population (at least of women) can't reproduce!
In most primate cultures, old females still help with rearing the young. There is a hypothesis that this is the reason that females live longer than males - an old male is useless as a 'hunter' while an old femail is moderatly usefull as a child raiser.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Cancer is defined by the process of uncontrolled cellular division. As a person ages, fewer and fewer cells can divide. If they could divide forever, how would you know which cells are the cancerous ones?
X-Files had an episode with a guy that was basically immortal because he was nothing more than cancer cells. He also never aged. Interesting episode.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
There's a 25 year lifespan discrepancy, in which evolution has no effect, because the population (at least of women) can't reproduce!
That's an oversimplification of evolution. Evolution cares about maximizing survival of the species. Reproduction is only one factor in that. If reproduction were everything, we would never have split into male/female, since that obviously reduces the ease with which we reproduce.
There are many things that people can do after child bearing to help propagation, such as protection, food production, education or labor.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Here's a nice quote on the subject from something I just Googled up:
Richard Dawkins has written about this common misconception at length.Read "The Computer Connection". It's a story about people who become immortal by having a near-death experience...and the one thing they fear most is rampant cancer induced by physical injury (since, as Bester put it, there's a thin line between cells replacing themselves normally and cancer).
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To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
When rats get cancer they get it big time. As in, they get a huge mass that sticks out from their body. It's pretty easy to notice, and it grows bigger and bigger. Some vets will surgically remove it, of course there is no guarantee that it won't just grow back (and it costs quite a bit for a pet you probably paid a few bucks for at most).
The Atlantic Monthly had an article that documented research that stated that human biology is set up to maximize a person's health at age 20 at the expense of later years.
Certain trade-offs are made that sacrifice the health of the future you just to keep the "child-bearing" you at 110%.
This suggested that an individual human would live significantly longer if these trade-offs were not made, but a population group would surive longer and have more/better children otherwise.
This research seems to be more of the same.
If all of the world's six billion people were each guaranteed a 99.9999999% chance of surviving every year, six thousand people would die in the first thousand years. About six million people would be dead in a million years. In a billion years, 3.8 billion would be dead. In ten billion years, only about 270,000 of the original six billion would remain. The probability of anyone being alive after one hundred billion years is about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000002.
One hundred billion years is a loooooong time, but this example shows that if you really want to live forever, you need to make damn sure you don't get into any accidents.
But "helpers" can't be produced "randomly". There has to exist genes or combinations of genes which express themselves as "helpers". This will eventually lead to "Free loaders" or members of the species with no "helper genes" reducing the number of helper genes because they'll always leave more copies of their genes than those who need to expend energy creating "helpers" who don't reproduce.
Clearly the members of a species interact with each other in very complex ways, and these complex ways contribute to the survival of the species as a whole. Wolf packs, for example, have developed successful survival strategies that depend on group behavior.
You're confusing cultural information with genetic information. Just because the members of a species have evolved genes which allow them to interact with each other in very complex ways and pass down a culture of sorts (memes) doesn't imply that the successful reproduction of genes is driven by anything other than genes. The wolf pack passes down memes (hunting techniques) because it is to the benefit of their genes and memes that they do so. do you really think there are no behaviors in nature that are intrinsic to a species that simply foster overall survival rather than simple survival of the individual?
Good point. Maybe not overall survival, but perhaps survival of the behavior itself. That would make groups of common culture (wolf packs if you will) analogous to individuals with reference to memes and genes. That is memes are to culture groups" as genes are to individuals... Hmmm.
Now that I think about it, it is possible for meme's to evolve which mutually benefit the genes which created the conditions for them. But again, the memes are in it for themselves :-). A meme which does not contribute to its (the memes) survival will not perpetuate itself. Maybe this could lead to meme reproduction and evolution which supercedes the need to maintain genes. Perhaps the creation or transference of intelligence to non-genetic vehicle would be such a leap.
Some interesting food for thought. Many thanks for an interesting insight...
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
So what would you do instead? Stick the cancer in people to get really accurate results?
And you do realize that when we study cancer in rats, it's human cancer cells that get put in the rats? Granted, it's not the same thing, but it's a good model to start from. Unless you'd like to volunteer to be a test subject?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
For a population genetics class I took in school, I wrote a draft research grant for a project studying if there were age limiting factors positively selected by nature to limit the age of certain populations. Although my professor did get a good chuckle before "d"ing me, he did say something that caught my ear as blatent established science ego. "That anything would act to limit age goes against the whole understanding of life, that those who live the longest win, produce more young, provide better for them and reflect more of their own genes through greater numbers of offspring". Ok...well, now lets look at cancer. Although the greatest hype (and greatest understanding) of cancer findings revolve around "defective" proteins that cause greater occurances of cancer, the base assumptions about the manner in which cancer forms lies far from the "defective/working copy" model of the body's working.
Copying DNA causes errors, and the body can fix an amazing number of them (end rates: 1 error per 10^9-10^10 bases), although it can't ever fix them all. The more times a cell needs to reproduce to replace damaged or non-functional cells, the more likely it is to lose function in a portion of its working copy of DNA. Cancer forms when these errors occur in specific places, but the general principle is that eventually a certain cell line will accululate enough errors to make it non-functional towards its intended purpose. Does P53 prevent cancer, sure, it lowers the error rate, but as the article mentions, too much p53 and you have other effects. The balance exists and has been selected for because it makes a working body capable of reproducing and caring for its young and then goes away. The premise that there is this one thing, this one chemical or protein or substance that will "unlock" another 50 years of human life is based on the premise that everything else in the human body will remain functioning were it not for that one thing. Evolution has crafted our bodies for their purposes, and none of it has been "tested" after 100 years. So where are we? We prevent a "disease", if you can call something like cancer or heart disease the same as a bacterial infection, only to find...Lo! there's something else that doesn't work after its been churning through our bodies for 80 years.
Geneticists especially are learning the lesson of our war against disease, stemming in large part from the telomerase hype. Hey, look what I found, the cellular time bomb! If we can keep these puppies long, we'll have immortal cells and we'll all live forever! Well, guess what, cell death isn't why we die. Also research into menopausal woman is showing us the same path. Replace estrogen when the body stops making it and we prevent osteoperosis, but estrogen's presense raises rates of heart disease, breast and ovarian cancer. In the end, its all the same message... we die from our bodies falling apart, functioning way past their warranty. And we're just now begining to realize this as we find more and more reasons why one substance doesn't do it all.
According to the alt.folklore.urban FAQ, Disney caused people to believe that Lemmings suicide in march to sea. During the filming of the 1958 Disney nature documentary White Wilderness, the film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.
clotho wove the string, lachesis measured the string, atropos cut the string.