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."

Comments

New world coming

[Matrix2110]

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.

Re:Test for side-effects

[mrjb]

Before pushing the longevity drug, please make sure that it does not make the user infertile.
Actually, after a certain age, that might be a desireable side effect.

Why?

[Max Romantschuk]

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!

Re:Why?

[LeoDV]

I think we tell ourselves that immortality would be a curse to make ourselves feel better about not having it. Think about it, it takes years, maybe even a lifetime, to know just a big city, or a country. If you were to go backpacking round the world, without paying heed to the time passing (and for good reason), by the time you'd make it back to where you started, everything will have changed so much you could as well go round again.

And if you get tired of that, it'd take at least a few centuries to read all the great literature, watch all the great movies, listen to all the great music... There is so much humanity produced and is producing, that not only is a lifetime not enough, but probably not even eternity. Entropy would take its toll on you before you'd be done with everything you had wanted to do.

Re:Why?

[pubjames]

I for one feel that imortality would be more of a curse than a blessing. Thoughts?

My take on this is that people who fear death are often those that don't make full use of the life they have. People that live full and rich lives don't fear death.

There is a memorable scene in a classic old movie, The Man Who Would Be King with Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Facing death due to an avalanche in the Himalayas, one turns to the other and says something like "we may have lived half the time of most men, but we've lived twice the life". Thus, they face death with humour and with their heads held high, without regret or worry.

Re:Why?

[Gyan]

Except that the novelty would wear out.

After I've completely known 100 cities, the 101st would be a drag, despite it being a new experience. You'll have learnt enough to see the 101st city as just another instance with different specifics. After reading 10001 books, you will start predicting plots and other elements of literature much better. There won't be much excitement of anticipation left. 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.

Re:Why?

[Monk[Deviant Form]]

yes WHY??
am i the only one thats wondering WHY we have to torture maim and inprison fellow beings?
immortality?
we do enough damage in the short lives we already have. I don't see much point in longer lives untill we have grown enough to do positive things with that time.

Re:Why?

[Zachary Kessin]

I personally would like to live a very long time, after all who would not want that. On the other hand I understand that at some point I will need to stand down and let the next generation step up to bat. If my generation were to be able to live forever (or just a lot longer than any before), what chance would my children have?

Someday I will have children, and I want them to be able to step out of the shadow of my generation at some point. After all every generation before ours has gotten out of the way when the time is right.

Re:Why?

[vvikram]

hi there. very interesting point. didn't occur to me. but i did think about it after your post.

don't you think that you should also extend exploration three-dimensionally if our age increases? in other words won't we have new planets and stars and asteroids to go around ; just not plain dull cities on the earth.

personally i think we will always have curiosity. the argument that things become dull is akin to the famous statements that everything that has to be invented has been [by some patent office officiando in the late 1800's]

human curiosity is infinite. if we don't get something tangible/physical to look we have enough brains to evolve virtual complex worlds [think math formulae, matrix etc] in our tiny little minds

thanks

Re:Why?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Silliness. Nobody's talking about immortality in terms of keeping old people as such alive longer; it's about slowing down, stopping, or even reversing the aging process itself. I'll take any of those, please, and despited the grumblings one always hears when this subject comes up, I suspect the vast majority of people would do the same.

I've noticed that those who object most vehemently to the idea are usually the very young, because death isn't really real to them yet anyway, and because they're easily bored; and the very old, because they've pretty much adjusted to the idea that they're going to die soon. But for those of us in the vast middle -- old enough to understand mortality, but young enough that life is in most ways still a pleasure to live -- the idea of an anti-aging pill is incredibly seductive.

Look, if such a pill came on the market tomorrow, you could always refuse to take it; and if you took it, and later decided that you didn't want to go on forever, you could always kill yourself (which would probably, given the nature of medical treatment, be as simple as "stop taking the pill.") But I've always kind of suspected that most of the neo-Luddites who bleat about how terrible immortality would be will be the first in line at the pharmacy once Ageastatin(tm) goes on sale.

Don't need genetically altered food

[Moderation abuser]

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.

Re:Don't need genetically altered food

[Walkiry]

>>The problem is political instability

And one way GM foods can help solve that is by allowing crops to grow in less favourable conditions. All that instability is, at the end of the day, just a hinderance to distribution. If we can make it easier to better grow crops locally, so much the better.

Also GM food can help in some other ways. You might have heard about the Golden Rice, a variety of rice that contains a high amount of A-vitamin and could be a great help to prevent its deficiency (which is quite a bit of a problem in many areas of Africa and South-East Asia).

We might not need it per se, but it sure is a nifty and useful tool to more easily solve certain problems.

Re:Don't need genetically altered food

[replicant108]

It is interesting that many slashdotters often warn against the encroachment of IP laws on software development, yet seem to be blind to the same issue with regard to agriculture.

Isn't the right to grow food as important as the rigth to develop software?

If a program can be contaminated with foreign IP, does the same problem not also apply to a field of crops?

How beneficial is it to the third world to have the IP rights to the food they grow owned by multi-nationals?

"We should commercially introduce GM crops, they say, because we need to feed the poor.

When this argument was first used aggressively by Monsanto in the late 1990s, the poor had other ideas. African delegates from Ethiopia to Burundi, Senegal and Mozambique, at special negotiations of the UN food and agriculture organisation "strongly" objected that "the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us""

Bwaahhaha

[simpleguy]

Fsck that! I have a brand new Logiteh MX .. oh wait, never mind.

Re:What about Mickey Mouse?

[richie2000]

Yes, he probably does. And if he doesn't, it's just a matter of time since congress just keep adding years to his economical life...

Microsoft rocked it

[jedrek]

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.

Re:This is the kind of research I like to see.

[evrybodygonsurfin]

It's like the absurdity of cancer therapies that can't be tried on terminally patients because they might have side effects.

Insightful point indeed. Presumably you make this from the perspective of someone who has watched a loved one suffering from terminal cancer be pumped full of toxic chemicals to the very limit of their mortal capabilities and then subjected to near-fatal doses of radiation in an attempt to lengthen their existance?

Given these circumstances, it is baffling that patients aren't queuing up to be guniea-pigs for the less `conservative' experimental therapies.

You pathetic wimpy pussy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Because

[varjag]

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.

Re:This is the kind of research I like to see.

[bundaegi]

Keywords are palliative treatment, quality of life.
Need to be balanced with patient's choice (or their relatives?) but if the prognosis is bleak then maybe it's more important to spend quality time with your loved ones rather than enduring agressive treatment that's not going to be effective anyway.

Oh yeah... trials on terminal patients. Maybe people like grandparent (and those who modded him up) don't see the ethical issues involved. Sad it came from somebody involved in bioinformatics. Don't you guys have any philosophy lectures anymore? even basic stuff?
Simply put, what next? you are given permission to start trials on patients who are going to die after all, then what? trials on prisoners? soldiers? random population sample? Thinking about it, it's not like this hasn't been tried before...

Re:This is the kind of research I like to see.

[Hittite Creosote]

So what's the worse things that's going to happen? A dead lab rat?

They might take your budget away for showing that you didn't really have a clue about biology? They aren't a magic wand. Take stem cell treatment for hearts for example - you have to have highly specific growth conditions in the laboratory culturure dishes to coax stem cells into developing as vascular cells. They're not just going to have a look round and think 'when in the heart, do as the heart cells do'.

Re:any technique ?

[Hittite Creosote]

Freezing the mouse is easy. Getting it to go for a walk after you've defrosted it is a little more problematical. I think they'd want to see it move before they'd give you the money.

Re:Out of the IBM support database

[rjch]

...I firmly believe that this (extremely) old joke probably contributed more than anything to the invention of the optical mouse...

This is the kind of

[jcsehak]

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.

Golden Rice.

[Grendel Drago]

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

Re:Golden Rice.

[Rich0]

So is your complaint about GM food, or intellectual property law?

In theory some foundation could come up with a GM food product which is free of IP baggage. Such a food could be freely grown by anyone. Since we aren't talking about experiments on humans the costs of research are much lower than in, say, drug design.

Usually the IP issues are a red herring - most GM protesters oppose GM food, and they're looking for any argument they can get. I don't think that the IP issues are at the heart of the matter for most people.

Oh, please.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Except that the novelty would wear out.

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...

Re:Works by maintaining/increasing telomere length

[Dr. Manhattan]

Telomeres are not the 'secret' of immortality. There are a lot of things that gradually wear down or accumulate in the human body (e.g. heavy metals) that cannot be dealth with by normal metabolic function, even in youthful bodies.

Real immortatlity is going to require active, artificial repair and maintenance systems.

Rich Immortals

[JuiceBySarah]

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.

It's analogous to a TTL field in a packet.

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Re:This is the kind of research I like to see.

[Rich0]

If the patient is of sound mind then they should be provided enough information to make an informed decision. Then leave it up to them. If they want to just die in peace that is fine. If they want to pump themselves full of every concoction imaginable by men, that should be fine as well as long as somebody is willing to foot the bill.

As far as testing prisoner or soldiers, etc, goes, I'm all for testing anyone provided they are given a choice.

What starts getting interesting is when a prisoner is given a choice like "if you volunteer for this clinical trial we'll knock 10 years off your time". Society is trading the risk of the prisoner killing somebody once they get out 10 years earlier for the reward of potential medical benefits. The prisoner is trading personal health risk for a lighter sentence.

Playing God with mice and men.

[fishnuts]

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.
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 :) are simply His latest attempts to curb the population problem that we've initiated.

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)

Re:Playing God with mice and men.

[register_ax]

We are God.

Sorry, but I don't think you can tell people this. People progress through states of mind that allow more "intense" realizations to occur. A primitive tribe is extremely hesitant to outsiders because of the overwhelming amount of change they introduce. It takes an extremely open mind to allow such a transition. That needs to be broken down first, so, how?

Questions. People need to be able to construct internal dialog or at least intelligent dialog between others. The important thing is being able to answer your own questions. This creates double the amount of work. Not only are you doubting "stuff", but you are trying to figure out that same "stuff" you're doubting.

Hence, introduce only things you believe your intended audience is ready to hear. Posting on /. more than likely fulfills that, but keep in mind when discussing such things in the real life(tm). ;)

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?

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.

These questions are extremely short-sighted. We extend lifespans indefinitely everyday; heart, liver, and kidney transplants, immunizations (preventive measure), vaccinations, CPR, blood transfusions, diabetic shots, or even those daily vitamins you take. All are either directly, or indirectly extending your life. It's easier to see the benefit of swapping organs when your's fails to operate properly, but all those other things are more of thinking in advance. You know of another life extension tip? Eat balanced diets and exercise. Holy shit! That may as well just save your life from tragic organ failures and cause you victim of brain disease. You see my point? If you are just going to die anyway why take the further preventive measure?

By spending money on life extension, we are really understanding just more about the body. What is cancer? An abnormal cell. Why does that cell become abnormal? Well, what happens is we get a broader understanding of what is really going on. That is what I wish more people understood, knowledge is interconnected in ways we can't even imagine. If it were any other way, it would be just one person coming up with all the solutions to life.

This is getting involved, but try and think of Leonardo da Vinci. This man is a pivotal subject in my theory. His quest was for knowledge. What may come of interest is he was just as wary of the whole "blood thing" as anyone else. He insisted that it is paramount to disregard this discomfort if you ever truly wanted to understand anatomy. For the obvious few who are aware of his works, one might want to pickup Leonardo: The Artist and the Man by Dover books. Note that Dover books are excellent books, but typically only to get you thinking about a subject, not so much a reference volume.

Back on topic, and why do we extend these lives everyday. To improve the collective well-being of all involved with that person. Just think of the web of relationships that individuals are usually enroped (is that a word) to. Continuing that one life is adding value to easily a hundred lives. That value may even be small keeping in mind I am thinking of second-order persons as well. You can't limit the effect of one person's death on just those directly affected by it. It should be easy to see that the creation of "good" is a worthwhile cause. Keep in mind the int

You're making this stuff up ...

[cookie_cutter]

... or at least remembering it incorrectly.

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

wrongheaded

[YouHaveSnail]

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.

Douglas Adams had it right

[MichaelDelving]

The puppet strings are showing. The mice are behind everything after all.