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

I Win!

[akadruid]

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

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?

[Eponymous Cowboy]

The need for immortality is obvious. Given an infinite lifespan--with all of its infinite possibilities--there will finally be a non-zero probability that the average Slashdot reader will be able to lose his virginity.

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?

[SlamMan]

Having a grandfather who spent 4 years in a home after a stroke and a heart attack, I know exactly what you mean. I do wonder if thats not a very good representative sample though. There are hoards of elderly people that are just fine out in the world. I wonder if being treated as an invalid as most people in a home are is more a cause of dementia than a symptom.

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?

[Jugalator]

... unless he is occupied with playing Duke Nukem Forever all the time.

Really an Award for Best Ear Transplant Technique

[Eponymous Cowboy]

From the Methuselah Mouse FAQ on how they will prove the mice are as old as is claimed:

Our approach is to use special identification tags. ... attached to the ear in such a way that they cannot be undetectably re-attached after breakage, so it is impossible to attach one to a younger mouse.

Obviously, therefore, the way to win this contest is to develop a way to successfully transplant mouse ears without leaving a noticeable scar.

Out of the IBM support database

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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...

Works by maintaining/increasing telomere length

[Gyan]

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.

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.

This is the kind of research I like to see.

[ahfoo]

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!

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.

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.

[kinnell]

So what's the worse things that's going to happen?

A giant, carniverous, mutant super mouse, bent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to work in it's underground cheese mines.

Narrrf!

[spumoni_fettuccini]

Errr... What are we gonna do tonight Brain? The same thing we do every night Pinky... keep up with the Jones rabbits.

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.

what about this genius?

[Unominous Coward]

Does it count?

How about this apple mouse?

any technique ?

[selderrr]

Researchers can use any technique to boost longevity

Flash freezing ?

Re:Methuselah Joke

[watzinaneihm]

No. Snopes says its true. But even IBM meant it as a joke.

Re:How about NOT experimenting on them for a while

[Maddog Batty]

That would seem to help with your average lab rat's life expectancy...

Unfortunately not. Half starving them does seem to improve life expectancy.

dogs monkeys

Human Immortality

[Famatra]

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 ;).

Re:Human Immortality

[tid242]

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 ;).

this is the kind of rhetoric i hear all of the time, as if people who live to be 1000 years old will still think it's necessary to start having kids when they're 20 and keep having them until they die (actually, in certain religious circles they might, which is pretty damn scary for us apostates).

the most obvious fallicy in all of this is that immortality will be available for everyone. Compare treatments for HIV with what you can probably (and rightly) assume about any hypothetical immortality-treatments - who has access to antiretroviral therapy? - allow me to name countries: USA, Japan, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada, etc, etc,. Notice anything odd about said selection of countries? Perhaps that they house about 10% of the world's population, have less than 5% of the world's HIV(+) population, and oh, by the way, they also control about 90% of the world's wealth. Now think of a hypothetical anti-aging pill (about the least-likely route of administration of anti-aging therapy, if you ask me), who do you suppose will have it first? - i'd guess the US and Western Europe (who pretty much all have negative population growths as it is (excluding immigration)), guess who'll own the rights to said therapy? - i'd guess US and/or Western European companies, Guess how much it'll cost? - i'd guess probably a whole lot more than most people in the US and Western Europe can afford, let alone people dying of diarrhea in 3rd world countries. Sure the price might eventually come down to levels affordable by "everyone" but that doesn't change the fact that most people world-wide die of nothing that has much at all to do with ageing.

Even in the US, it is questionable whether many of the biggest killers are really directly caused by ageing, cancer is really the only one that comes to mind that probably is. Heart disease, Diabetes, suicide, accidents, and almost all of the others on the top 10 (for any age group apart from cancer) can't be said to be caused by being old, they may be time-dependent processes, but it doesn't mean that the physiological changes associated with ageing causes them...

anyway, just a thought (or two).

-tid242

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: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.

This is a hard problem

[Jon Abbott]

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. :^)

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...

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.