Slashdot Mirror
The Oldest Mouse Contest
Shipud writes "Nature
reports a contest that was launched in Britain today, to produce the oldest laboratory mouse. Current record in 5 years -- 150 in human years. From the page
: ``Researchers can use any technique to boost longevity, including genetic manipulation and stem-cell therapy''. Winners will receive cash for every day beyond the current record. The
Methuselah Mouse contest was created in an effort to boost research into human longevity."
Cry Oh Genix. I Am the Immortal Mousie!
Research increases life expectancy in mice.
Watch experiments like this be embraced by the old school of thought, I will bet the funding flows very well to 'selected' genetic experiments such as this but not so good for genetics feeding the world for example.
/.
I know I am going to get a 'Flamebait' Mod for this post.
(But hey, It is my one hundredth post And I will Sink my Karma If I Want To.)
Little Richard Simmons action there.
Thank you
I have learned so much to get to this point.
I really want to express my gratitude for the positive opinions out there.
You know who you are.
I've had my mouse for nearly 10 years!
All they need is a little care and attention, and maybe cleaning the ball every now and again.
Of course, many people just go rushing after new toys, like PS2 and scollwheels and second buttons...
Well some one was gonna say it anyway I guess
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
We know where this leads us to:
Before pushing the longevity drug, please make sure that it does not make the user infertile. Thank you.
Doesnt he hold the record?
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
If you want to see research about older life, search for lemonparty on $SEARCH_ENGINE, or see the lemonparty page on nero
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
I see the obvious scientific benefits in research like this. What I don't see is if we really would like to live much longer. I for one feel that imortality would be more of a curse than a blessing. Thoughts?
Then again, if we get hints on dementia and other comparable illnesses I'm all for it!
.: Max Romantschuk
A former girlfriend told me, that all laboratory mice and rats are descendants of mice which develop cancer after some time, cutting the normal life span of that animals to a half. Could that be true? Now this longivity contest would remedy the malice, it introduced beforehand.
The *real* oldest mouse is here !
some team will back a mouse that never dies. but within 10 years every part of its body will have been replaced at one time or another....
mousenstein.
(you can welcome our undead mouse overlords if you want but i won't be held responsible for lost karma)
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
Afterall most mice seem to follow doctors orders with a healthy diet of seed/fruit/veg and plenty of wheel running exersise.
Bits List:
1x Mouse
1X Space Ship
Insturctions:
Insert mouse A into Space Ship B. Launch Space Ship B into orbit around the sun. Speed up space ship B to near the speed of light. Allow relitivity to do it's work. Bring space ship back to earth at desired point, and remove very old mouse A.
ESD PRODUCT SERVICE SUPPORT SUBJECT:NEW RETAIN TIP
Record number: H031944
Device: D/T8550
Model: M
Hit count: UHC00000
Success count: USC00000
Publication code: PC50
Tip key: 025
Date created: O89/02/14
Date last altered: A89/02/15
Owning B.U.: USA
Abstract: MOUSE BALLS NOW AVAILABLE AS FRU (Field Replaceable Unit)
TEXT:
Mouse balls are now available as a FRU. If a mouse fails to operate,or should perform erratically, it may be in need of ball replacement. Because of the delicate nature of this procedure, replacement of mouse balls should be attempted by trained personnel only.
Before ordering,determine type of mouse balls required by examining the underside of each mouse. Domestic balls will be larger and harder than foreign balls. Ball removal procedures differ,depending upon manufacturer of the mouse. Foreign balls can be replaced using the pop-off method, and domestic balls replaced using the twist-off method. Mouse balls are not usually static sensitive, however, excessive handling can result in sudden discharge. Upon completion of ball replacement, the mouse may be used immediately.
It is recommended that each servicer have a pair of balls for maintaining optimum customer satisfaction,and that any customer missing his balls should suspect local personnel of removing these necessary functional items.
P/N33F8462--DOMESTIC MOUSE BALLS
P/N33F8461--FOREIGN MOUSE BALLS
The world is more than able to feed itself with current crops.
The problem is political instability; wars, local conflicts, corruption, ethnic genocide etc etc. If there were stable governments everywhere using conventional crops, starvation would be eliminated completely.
Genetically modified crops will make absolutely no difference to famines because yield is not the problem.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Contest organisers insist that clock C travels with mouse A in Space Ship B. Space Ship B returns and organiser's declare mouse to be only 5 minutes older than when it left.
Took me a bit to realize they were talking about actual rodents. I was really puzzled until then: are they trying to locate the oldest mouse device? Are they artificially aging a computer mouse?
Winners will receive cash for every day beyond the current record.
Are we talking about the mouse again? I think some nice cheese would be more appropriate. Although, whatever prize it gets it won't make much of a difference since I'm assuming the prizes are granted post-mouse-mortem. Better make that a cheese allowance for 5 years for wife and kids.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
When DNA is replicated, the transcription occurs not from the start of a strand, but a few "words" into the sequence. Since, this might cut off valuable/active genes, there are telemores "prefixed" to the start of these sequence. These are useless bits of genes that can be safely cut off during cell copying. But as the instance of DNA gets copied more and more, in each succeeding generation, the telomere gets reduced. Eventually coming to the point where during copying, active genes get clipped. The limit is around 50 cell divisions, IIRC. Someone by the age of 60 has roughly 40% of telomere length as compared to birth. There's a gene called telomerase that synthesizes these telomeres at the ends of chromosones. Mice in which telomerase has been re-activated post-infancy have lived thrice as long!!! But there are ill-effects of activating telomerase post-infancy. Cancer tumors require telomerase to work as well. So, it's a double-edged sword. Hope someone figures out a good alternative.
I suspect, given the prize money on offer, that this may not be viable.
However, if you could develop such a craft, I'm sure you could find a way to make some cash elsewhere.
Additionally, surely sending the mouse on a trip round the Earth would be easier and cheaper, without affecting the results.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Fsck that! I have a brand new Logiteh MX .. oh wait, never mind.
I, for one, welcome our new Methuselah Mouse overlords.
Like what I said? You might like my music
That would seem to help with your average lab rat's life expectancy...
I'd also vote for: not growing ears on them, not pushing them through mazes to get their food, not testing drugs on them, not electrocuting them to test their reaction time, letting them get enough sleep/sex/food/water...
that alone would probably give them a few good years. Anyone?
I am a leaf on the wind
I've long been disappointed that biotech is so damn conservative about trying to just go for it and take some chances. We're all dying after all. It's like the absurdity of cancer therapies that can't be tried on terminally patients because they might have side effects. Jesus Christ on a crutch, that's like some kind of absurd joke
Indeed, I'm testing the waters of bionformatics myself lately so I can stop compaining and do something about it. But that's another story.
What caught my eye was the thing about being able to use stem cells. The whole stem cell story is so amazing and yet it seems that there's this amazing potential and nobody wants to try anything amazing with it. The attitude is like, yes this is amazing but we can't use it in amazing ways because it's experimental and we don't know what might happen.
If I had a research budget and I was in this competition, my idea would be to create embryonic stem cells of my mouse and just inject them into the thing like it was a pin cushion. Damn the torpedos.
So what's the worse things that's going to happen? A dead lab rat? What if the thing stays young forever? Let's pick up the pace people!
I raised mice for several years and they [small gene pool] got more and more inbred resulting in cancers and other problems. I would think to avoid tumors and short life spans [which I had problems with], one would need a large breeding stock and keep a new influx of genetic material.
-- Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.
Does it count?
How about this apple mouse?
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
I have a white, Microsoft two button mouse that my parents bought to use with our AT&T6300 in '88 (8086 power). It has an adapter which lets you switch between bus and serial mode. The bus cord was used with the bus card - remember when you used an extra card to hook up a mouse?
Anyway, it still works. One of the buttons is pushed in a bit and I should clean it, but it still works.
Name that immortal quote.
MOUSE BALLS NOW AVAILABLE AS FRU (Field Replaceable Unit)
Not only is this one not true, it's so damn old it rates it's own prize for age.
Could you not have managed it in less than 1000 lines too please?
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Bo Jangles, out of the green mile.. hehehe..
Researchers can use any technique to boost longevity
Flash freezing ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Wouldn't the age of the mouse be just the same as a normal mouse? It wouldn't experience a longer life, it'd just be like the equivelant of crossing a 20 year time zone. Do mice get jet lag?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
haha fanboy, Apple was just a fruit when this mouse came out
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/Archive/paten
Five years? Pah. They've a long, long way to go before they match John Coffey's mad mouse resurrection skillz in The Green Mile...
Are you pondering what I'm pondering ?
McCartney fans pay bus tickets. [...] Lennon fans too, with discretion.
At lease here's Doug Engelbart's patent on the mouse - don't know if a 1964 prototype still exists or not.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Spare your sentiment for the hungry and ill people on this planet that die because pussies like you can't see a mouse in a lab.
They've done that already
I predict the solution will involve "The final front-ear", or something.
Actually, I think the opposite is true.
"Free" lab rats have a two year life expectancy.
A researcher [Dr. R. Moss, I think] discovered that when lab rats are studied in the lab, their life expectancy reduces from two years to 1.5 years.
As a consequence, studies 'based upon tests conducted on laboratory rats' are flawed on face value by 25%. [Apologies to statisticians and mathematicians for that tainted math.]
Note on the obvious: When you see a report that something causes a rat to die at OVER age 18 months, it is a life extender.
I've heard time and gravity have something to do with each other. I doubt anyone can afford relativistic speeds at this point, but maybe an extremely powerful centrifuge?
A cunning plan, were it not for the fact that mouse A would actually be younger than you would naively expect.
I suggest this course of action only when there will be a contest for the highest-mass mouse :-)
Pff, I can't believe the article neglected to mention Mr. Jingles.
Human immortality sounds good, but the human population is already exploding and thats *with* people dying off. If a large number of people are going to become immortal then we need population controls in place, or at least teaching how birth control is used in school ;).
"On your mark... Get set.... age!"
"Derp de derp."
What I don't see is if we really would like to live much longer. I for one feel that imortality would be more of a curse than a blessing.
One nice thing of immortality is that you always can opt-out.
Seriously, I don't mind living a spare century or two. YMMV, of course.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
" mouse A would actually be younger than you would naively expect."
I was expecting to have Mouse A circle the Sun for at least 5000 years.
My Back-up plan involves Mouse D, Klingon Ship E and Star Trek crew F...
Ok, I'll stop now.
(No Whales were harmed in the typing of this post)
Q: Does straight anal sex cause pregnancy?
A: Yes, straight anal sex is known to cause pregnancy for the female participant(s).
--
That explains how I knocked up your mother then.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
My gut feeling indicates that a competition where you can use "any technique" to achieve a goal with animals (including genetic manipulation, etc) could easily turn into something sick and cruel.. or maybe I'm just being too concerned.
This is something that's often puzzled me. Who decided how many 'human years' there are in one mouse year (or cat/dog year for that matter)?
having something orbiting the sun at near light speed will squish
mouse A as the angular velocity will induce a centrifugal force
high enough to.
Maybe if you'd send it to some distant galaxy at near light speed, and then back again? You'll also have to keep de acceleration limited, like 2G otherwise your mouse will also get squished.
Oh, and don't mind the near infinite energy needed to approach even 0.9 c.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I've got one of those C64 mice that's pretty old, bit squeaky and slow to respond but generally still 'alive'.
Can I enter it in the competition?
"The Methuselah Mouse contest was created in an effort to boost research into human longevity"
Yeah, that's what we need, longer living humans who already overpopulate the Earth due to a lack of natural preditors. If you ask me, what we really need is a good plague. (Captain Trips, anyone?)
Mickey's been around for 75 years.
"The Methuselah Mouse contest was created in an effort to boost research into human longevity."
Wow! What a concept! Surely there would be no other reason for scientists to look to extend life than a per-day monetary prize! And of course, no scientist would get recognition otherwise! Ponce de Leon may have looked a lot harder if he was just trying to find an old mouse...
Give me a break.
How about having a contest for reasonable solutions to a problem of overpopulation, or, more importantly, a contest to see if there is a politician with enough backbone to raise the retirement age to 100.
(In all seriousness, I'm of the opinion that the retirement age should be set to a value dependant upon the expected lifetime in the society, as well as some level of job availability. Now this formula would be a good thing to reward.)
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
The hidden party behind the experiment was clearly a wealthy mouse who found himself dying young, and started this contest as a way to extend mouse lives. Now, members of the experiment just need a way to get in touch with each other...
"Ears are short."
"But tails are long..."
"Not 'while the evil D-Con comes not'"
clean their balls.
(Different townspeople try to figure out how to get Timmy O'Toole out of the well)
Falcon Man: Grasping the child firmly in his talons, Socrates here will fly him to safety. Just watch. (falcon flies away) I don't think he's coming back.
Fisherman: With this hook, and this hunk of chocolate, I'll land your boy. And I'll clean him for free.
Professor Frink: Although we can't reach the boy, we can freeze him with liquid nitrogen so that future generations can rescue him.
If so, I call dibs on Darl McBride...
Well if has two eyes, then I call it an "optical mouse".
See my journal, I write things there
Found it!
-B
I've always hated putting things in to X dogs years. Its confusing as heck. Now mouse years?
What's wrong with plain, average, everyday old years, i.e. clock time?
...is one determined kitten to throw another team off-track!
I (obviously) know nothing about this, but do you define a mouse as something that emerged from a mouse's womb? Surely by applying this recursively you could slowly genetically alter a mouse into, say, a tortoise that lives 100+ years... in theory, at least.
Noims the ignorant
This is not the greatest sig in the world. This is just a tribute.
I've also heard that rats have a life span of around two to three years. When I heard that they were affectionate as well as intelligent, I wanted one as a pet, but their short life span deterred me as it would kinda suck to get attached to an animal and not have that much time with it. That, and the fact that the cat keeps laughing at me every time that I bring it up...
The article is slashdotted, so forgive me if this is mentioned... Do they define what "life" is for a mouse? I mean, you could probably keep all of its systems going, but it might be in a comatose state for example. Ie, maybe the drugs they pumped into it completley frag it's brain functions. I think the mouse should have a decent quality of life in addition to having a long one. :) What good would having a long life be if you were immobilized, could only eat chease and crap your cage for the rest of your days? (OK, thinking about it, this might not be so bad...)
So what's the worse things that's going to happen?
The worst thing is that you shouldn't be fucking around with life unless you're very serious about doing it for the express purpose of helping other, better (arguably), kinds of life. I can't stand PETA as much as the next guy, but shooting a mouse full of cells just to see what happens is irresponsible, and downright mean.
c-hack.com |
According to this article, scientists are going to have a hard time getting their mice to live longer. Because cancer tends to "take over" as an animal's age increases, scientists have tried using cancer-preventing proteins to prevent this. The problem they found, however, was that it accelerated the aging process for mice. That's not to say that some other method may find a way around this, but scientists do still seem to be grappling with the issue.
:^)
Besides, didn't anyone read Brave New World Revisited? Overpopulation is not the answer.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
They're already starting to take over:s ue=5659510
http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/0/28.html?menu=1&id_is
When you are immortal - the stakes are just too high to take a gamble on the rest of your life.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
The third world needs patents on its food supply like a moose needs a hatrack.
Are there conceivable benefits? Sure. Is it worth having a single multinational owning---in what sense, exactly, is the rice grown owned by Monsanto? I'm not exactly clear on this---the food stock of an impoverished nation, capable of threatening famine to beat another few bucks out of the country.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
My pet mouse lived for 2.5 years (before getting the deadly neurological/arthritis problem most mice get at that age) and I have seen others live that long easily. I thought mice were the animals that were tested with the low cal diet that made them live 3 times longer. I remember the news film having mice.
Shouldn't it be at least 7 years if mice were in that test? Something is strange here.
Pardon my asking, but couldn't you just keep cloning your mouse every couple years? It would then have the same DNA as the original mouse and would therefore be indistinguishable by the contest enforcers.
[FX: drum roll, nervous coughing as the MC rips the envelope]
Mr Paul Edgecombe, Mr John coffey, M. Edouard Delacroix and Mr Jingles!
T&K.
Political language
"Squeak Squeak Squeak." Translation: "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
Eat at Joe's.
For example, this could spawn the development of cryogenic storage. (Don't try this... it'd be cruel to the mouse.)
Yeah, it's alive, and it's 50 years old. It just breathes very, very slowly.
However, for my dollar, I think I prefer quality of life to quantity, which is why I take my Christianity seriously.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
That would work, but you would en up scrapping your mouse from the centrifuge walls.....
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
We keep killing them...
They keep coming back...
Oh wait, nevermind. They want lab mice. My basement is nowhere near lab conditions.. Oh well.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Mice have very short life spans. They die of old age within a few years. So I question how much can be learned about increasing human longevity by trying to create a Methuselah mouse. Bats, on the other hand, are about the same size as mice and naturally live for three decades or more. It would be more useful to know why a bat can live to age 30 "out of the box" than how we can manufacture a mouse that lives to the ripe old age of 6.
Tell you what. After I've stood on an airless planetoid in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and watched the Milky Way rise over its horizon, then you can ask me if I've seen everything worth seeing.
The root behind all this would be that since you've lived for centuries/millenia, your understanding of human behaviour would be sufficiently mature to dull the curiousity related to the fruits of human creativity.
So, a citizen of the Roman Empire circa 0 A.D. wouldn't be a bit surprised at the world of 2003? In any sphere; not just science, but art, politics, culture, etc.?
Just because you can't imagine that genuinely new things will come up...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I'd say the mouse next to my Next cube workstation here in the lab would be right up there...
That require more resource to maintain the same level of evolution of human. Do you really want that?
"The Methuselah Mouse contest was created in an effort to boost research into human longevity."
Wouldn't the prospect of living longer yourself be motivation enough?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Tha chance of you or I becoming immortal superhumans with the help of this mouse-tested science seems less likely than just a handful of rich guys becoming immortal superhumans. The bumper sticker "Cure AIDS: Infect the Rich" makes me laugh. Then it makes me think, then it makes me frown a bit.
Of course, once the long-lived mice are widely known they'll have to hijack a space ship and head for the stars to escape our envious wrath.
"The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth." -- Bene Gesserit Precept
Have you ever read any "distilled" summaries of the theory of relativity?
The classic example is the spaceman who is rocketed out somewhere far away (many lightyears) at barely < speed-o-light. When he gets to his destination and "calls home" he'll find all of his immediate family and friends to be dead and his children to be old folks.
(In the "happier" version, it's something like the spaceman is a twin, and his twin is an old man and he is not. Something like that. The Happy Guy wasn't going as far, I guess.)
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
My favorite quote from that movie is when Sean Connery is training the natives in the military art, and he tells them something to the effect of, "now you can slaughter your enemies like civilized men!"
While the copyright on "steam boat willy" will at some point lapse
It has already.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Have I told you about my condition?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Exactly. Mr spaceman isn't any older. He hasn't had a longer life. It's just time has passed in a different way for him.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
:P
CEO Nwabudike Morgan
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I, for one, welcome our elderly mice overlords!
You're close, sorry i think i'll have to kill you now.
reference to Pinky and the Brain
Only one ball??? Everyone knows that when you cut off the balls you extend the life...ask a Unic
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
where r u mr jingles.....
All your mice are belong to us.
If a packet gets routed too many times, it's probably a loop. The TTL field gets decremented on each hop and the packet dies when it reaches 0.
If a cell divides too many times, it's probably cancerous (if it's not a reproductive cell), the telemores get shortened on each division, and the cell goes senescent when they're gone.
This is the mechanism behind the "Hayflick Limit" (q.v.). Last I read, nobody including Dr. Hayflick was sure how much this phenomenon had to do with real-life aging.
Most people would call me an atheist, because I don't believe in a supreme entity whom has complete power over us and our world, but I just realized something.
:) are simply His latest attempts to curb the population problem that we've initiated.
We are God.
We've already stopped our own evolution. Before we developed the ability to heal ourselves, kill off or obsolete our only natural predators and shield ourselves from any natural threat, we were HAPPY to live to a ripe age of 30-40 years. It was plenty of time to raise a family and pass on our general knowledge of our simple little world.
200 years ago, we didn't know what cancer was. Not because we had no way to SEE it or diagnose it, but because it simply didn't happen (short of the very low rates of actual cancer manifestations.) When someone got sick from a terminal disease, it was just accepted as a fact of life, and those people became a statistic of Darwin's laws.
Now, people with congenital diseases (or diseases inherited from parents, or combinations of parents' genes which give the child a high predisposition for a disease) are surviving longer AND reproducing, causing such diseases and predispositions to prosper. On the other side of the same coin, we're weakening our species' immunities to congestive diseases by artificially suppressing and preventing them with medicine.
Biomedical engineering is also causing as much harm as good. Sure, we've eliminated many Really Bad Diseases. But now there are mutated versions of the same diseases (viral and bacterial) that survived our initial campaigns to eliminate them, which have proven to be much more resistant to our medicines and techniques. Virii and bacteria are still evolving, and there's nothing WE can do to stop that. It's only going to get worse.
Don't get me wrong here. I'm happy and extremely grateful to live a longer, healthier, and safer life than my predecessors. But we're taking this whole "Live Longer!" thing to an extreme that will only be detrimental in the long run. In fact, overpopulation is one of the immediately obvious effects of this. Why are we spending billions and billions of dollars and as many man hours every year, intentionally extending the lifespan of our individuals, instead of the collective species?
God (the one that most people in the world pray to) NEVER intended us to live this long. If God exists, I believe cancer, AIDS, SARS, and Osama bin Laden (sorry, couldn't resist
Creating 'super mice' might be a great novelty at first, and a boon to science, but what we learn from them certainly wont benefit our species. Just ourselves. Seems a bit selfish, ignoring the decline in quality of life many generations in the future will be faced with.
(Yes, I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but it's a point I REALLY wish more people would consider)
And that was 1986, so that's . . . 17? Right?
You are not the customer.
Soilant Green reference [here].
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
and you will have eternal life. Science is an eternal yoke of darkness.
I know of no mouse which has been engineered with "re-activated" telomerase, tripling it's life span, nor did a google search find mention of one. I challenge you to provide a link or reference to such a mouse if it exists.
Also, the limit of 50 cell replications you speak of is only for cells in culture, and it is still unknown whether there is such a limit exists for cells still in the body.
Here is a telomerase faq
If they can't even spell "Los Angeles" correctly, then how will they count the LA vote correctly?
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
This is what I thought abortion was about too, but it turns out I was wrong. Abortion is legal not because the line is drawn at birth -- apparently everyone concerned agrees that the fetus is a living human being, but because it was decided that a woman can't be forced to incubate against her will.
AFAIK, your description of the issues in stem cell research was spot-on though.
c-hack.com |
So, a citizen of the Roman Empire circa 0 A.D. wouldn't be a bit surprised at the world of 2003? In any sphere; not just science, but art, politics, culture, etc.?
There was no such year as AD 0. Jeez, you're as bad as the Itchy and Scratchy animators who had Itchy strike the same one of Scrathy's ribs twice in succession while producing two distinctly different tones.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
You spend a almost a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, and it fails in phase three clinical trials, so the FDA doesn't allow you to sell it.
participate with my elvish lab mouse ?
No, the way to totally win the contest is to cryogenically freeze the mouse. Technically the thing will still be alive for years and years...
There are too many of us now. If we lived a mear 30 years longer, the resource drain would cripple our children. We die when we do to avoid competition with our children.
Also semi-immortality would stagnate the power structure, new ideas come from new (i.e. young) people, but when we have a generation that refuses to die or leave power our children will never have power. The young will be second class citizens.
The stubornly old will also gather great amounts of wealth, forcing those who are young, or those who refuse to be immortal to be slaves/paupers/underclass.
If I had a choice, I'd live to 2070 as an aware being, then die. I don't get what immortality would do that is good for SOCIETY. I'm sick of advancments in technology that are good for the individual.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Hi folks, As one of the organizers, here's an answer to the question about transplanting mouse ears to game the system. We are looking at providing custom engineered mus musculus mice that contain a special secret recipe that guarantees authenticity. FYI, around 70% of mus musculus die of Cancer...you might think of this competition as a "two-fer". To make a mouse that's two years old already survive for 4 or 5 years, you MUST prevent the cancer in the already aged rat. Re:Immortality - We're seeking to provide lots more healthy tomorrows - I hate leaving movies in the middle :-) ...and...I LOVE Pinky and the Brain!
Dave Gobel
"(squeek) kill me (squeek) kill me...."
Everything's been downhill since the TRS-80
And more power to them. I raised mice when I was 11-15 and this was a long time before a veterinarian did anything other than perform euthanasia on animals and they were _mice_. I'm not sure what the growth/cancers were or the specific cause, I did know it was a common problem with severely inbred rodents. The inbreeding did result in some interesting mice though, I had a strain of gold furred, red eyed for a while.
-- Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.
Mickey Mouse wins all the fscking way... :P
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
I, for one, welcome our new rodent overlords, and would like to remind them that as a ....
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Right, but the people who are judging the age of the subject (spaceman or mouse) have aged, as compared to the subject, at an accelerated rate.
So, if the mouse subject was born in year 1 and the space flight took 2 years, but the judges aged 100 years, the judges would say "god DAMN that's one old mouse! I remember when he was born! He's 100 years old!"
Of course, to the mouse, he's just middle-aged.
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Immortality may give you a lot of time to get bored, but it would also give you a lot of time to develop patience in the search for cool things.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
Ahh, but you forfeit the winnings if you can't revive him.
Dyolf Knip
No, no, no! This will result in a very young mouse! What you need to do is speed the universe up to the speed of light while leaving the mouse stationary.
Voila! Old mouse!
--
Mac OS X--Unix without the assholes^Whassles.
http://www.carrottop.com/
Benifer? Bush (the whole family)? Clintons (both of them)?
It's the wealthy like them that could afford longevity treatments.
And they'll only get wealthier since their patents and copyrights could last forever. If you think creativity is stifled now, just wait till it's the same people creating stuff (what with the lower people turnover at longer longevities).
I thought of that too. They only want video for each day it's alive AFTER it beats the current record. So here's what you do:
Take mouse #1, submit it, have it tagged, freeze it.
One month later, do the same with mouse #2
And so on.
1 week before beating the current record, thaw mouse #1 and let it live the rest of it's life out, videotaping it each day.
Once mouse #1 dies, thaw out mouse #2. Since mouse #2 is a month younger then mouse #1, it hasn't beat the record yet.
rinse, lather, repeat.
Eventually, you'll have 10+ year old mice with just a touch of frostbit on it's toes.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
I know, you could spend your eternally lasting life travelling around the Universe insulting people! Just to make it more interesting, why not give it a go in alphabetic order! That's what I would do.
When I first read the title I expected to see an article about scientists finding signs that as early as 3000 years ago, people was holding "mouse contests", i.e. let two mouses into a little arena and let them to some crazy buddha kick-boxing.
That's nice and all, but the world would be a much better place if science concentrated on finding ways to reduce the world population rather than increasing it. Our planetary resources, natural, human, economic, and otherwise, are limited, and the more people that share this world, the harder it will be to reduce suffering and improve our lot.
What's more, it seems to me that if we're going to work on extending life expectancy, we should focus on populations which have significantly shorter life expectancies than our own: developing nations, inner city minorities, rural poor, people who do very dangerous jobs, etc. We already have all the science and technology we need to solve many of the problems these people face; what's needed now is better policy.
Beyond that, we should think about improving quality of life, rather than quantity of life, for everyone. Here again, we already have plenty of science to help, and we need to instead focus on reforms in the health care and pharmaceutical industries that will reduce suffering and increase happiness.
There may be some merit to building a Methusala Mouse. It may give us insight into the aging process which will help us help people to live better. Helping people to live longer just because we haven't yet come to terms with death seems like a waste of time.
Is that old enough? I think I've still got one sitting in a very used 286-12 or 386SX-16. -rick
If not already mentioned, calorie restriction aka CR is the best route for long-lived mice. Visit The CR Society where they are all about calorie restriction all the time.
Everyone knows they mice are just waiting until we get a permanent manned base on the moon. THAT'S when the enslavement / mining will really start.
I had a pet wild mouse that lasted seven.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Red herring? GM food is terribly expensive to develop. No one's going to release it out of the goodness of their hearts. Ergo, IP issues are inextricably tied to the use of GM food, as the multinational corps that created them have to make a profit on all their hard work.
My complaint, of course, is about IP laws and what looks to be a scummy gambit by Monsanto to make a large portion of the Third World entirely dependent on them, if not for the air they breathe, then at least for the staple foods they eat.
GM foods in general are another issue, one which I'm in no way qualified to discuss.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The puppet strings are showing. The mice are behind everything after all.
Your post reminds me of a drunken redneck game that friends of mine used to play. They'd buy various small caged pets (mice, rats, tarantulas, scorpions) and make them fight each other, taking bets on which one would win each bout.
It later became known as Animal Kingdom Kumite, after a series of strips from the late, great Space Moose comic.
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I've got a pretty old mouse to enter in this contest. It's a MS Mouse, serial number 0002224, circa 1983. Five years old ain't nothing! Any challengers?