Worm Lifespan Extended To Five to Six Times Normal

Trillian_1138 writes "Scientific America has a brief article, only two paragraphs, sumarizing research from a recently released longevity study done on worms. The worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, have been known to live 124 days, "the equivalent of a human reaching his 500th birthday." In addition, in worms which had their insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) altere, "lived six times longer than normal worms and remained active for most of their lives." "These life-span extensions, which are the longest mean life-span extensions every produced in any organism, are particularly intriguing," the team writes, "because the insulin/IGF-1 pathway controls longevity in many species, including mammals." Humans already live significantly longer than only a century ago, in large part simply from hygiene advances. What might the effects on society be if gene therapy or other medical treatement humans lived to be 500?"

Comments

I just read the headlines.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still getting plenty of Code Red hits on my webservers, hard as that is to believe...

Why, pray tell, do we WANT to extend the lifespan of a worm, again?

I don't like your chances

[bacon-kidney-pie]

Good luck surviving heart attack, cancer and road accidents for 500 years.

Re:I don't like your chances

[timbloid]

And at least a hundred years of smelling of wee, and queuing for your pension at the post office...

Re:I don't like your chances

[CarlDenny]

If we stayed as healthy as 25-44yos in 1995 (190 deaths/100,000), we'd have a median lifespan of about 360 odd years. Which is still a pretty good run. I suspect we'd be more careful, and knock that rate down a bit as well. But, yeah, even extending old-age longevity to millenia we'll still run into other limits right quick.

I'd take a measly extra 200 years, though.

Re:I don't like your chances

[bobsalt]

a life insurance company did a study. people will live to over 700 years before the odds are that they die form an accidnent

The next boom

[kinnell]

What might the effects on society be if gene therapy or other medical treatement humans lived to be 500?

Time to invest in zimmer frame and artificial hip manufacturers.

Hey, Hemos, Haven't Had Your Coffee Yet, Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Edited version of posting:

Scientific American has a brief article (only two paragraphs) sumarizing research from a recently released longevity study done on worms. The worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, have been known to live 124 days, "the equivalent of a human reaching his 500th birthday." Also, worms which had their insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) altered "lived six times longer than normal worms and remained active for most of their lives." "These life-span extensions, which are the longest mean life-span extensions ever produced in any organism, are particularly intriguing," the team writes, "because the insulin/IGF-1 pathway controls longevity in many species, including mammals." Humans already live significantly longer than only a century ago, in large part simply from hygiene advances. What might the effects on society be if gene therapy or other medical treatement extended human lifespans to 500 years?"

Re: Hey, Hemos, Haven't Had Your Coffee Yet, Eh?

[Black Parrot]

> Scientific American has a brief article (only two paragraphs) sumarizing research from a recently released longevity study done on worms. The worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, have been known to live 124 days, "the equivalent of a human reaching his 500th birthday."

So... what's the conversion factor between "worm days" and "dog years"?

Re: Hey, Hemos, Haven't Had Your Coffee Yet, Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, you're a dumb fuck!

DAMMIT

[Smidge204]

You know the only people who are going to be able to afford any kind of longevity tratment are going to be rich people and politicians... Imagine a whole senate full of Strom Thurmonds!

I, for one, welcome our new immortal legislative overlords.

=Smidge=

Worms? Ha, Worms!

[Sepper]

Read the headlines and tought:
"Hum? What happenned? They found a computer that STILL has code red?... Ho, REAL worms.... right..."

Anyway, I already read about this years ago: this is not the first... Although the last time was about 80 day, or 300 humans-years.

And like the article said it left the worms very lethargic...

Live 500 years but have a brain that works slower than molasse at -40... sure....

But can the brain handle it?

[G4from128k]

I've no doubt that we can cleverly shift the pace of the aging clock, but can we tweak the biochemical algorithms of the brain to handle life and learning over a 500 year span. If a person takes this drug when they are young, do they need to learn (or can they learn as easily as children learn) until they are 50 or 100? Will having too many 400 year-olds in the population hold back progess because they will veiw all the inventions of the last 380 years with suspicion? What about having 500 years of accumulated heartbreaks, lost friends, daily frustrations, etc?

Its one thing to physically live for 500 years, its another thing to mentally thrive for that long. Even if our bodies can be tweaked to last, its not clear that our minds can.

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[clambake]

Its one thing to physically live for 500 years, its another thing to mentally thrive for that long.

On this flip side, would violent crime and war be taken so lightly if people lived for half a millinia? A race of immortals would probably find that they get along much better than they ever did as dying creatures. ("So what if those guys are occupying my land for two centuries? There's plenty of time to reclaim it before middle age...", "That guy screwed me out a million bucks! It'll take fifty years to make it back.. oh well, no biggie.") On a similar note, getting "life" for a crime would suddenly mean something completely different than it does today.

Additionally, making plans that go beyond the next quarter would not seem like such a bad idea anymore. Humanity could do in a "generation" that which ten previous generations could not even begin to imagaine. The universe would suddenly open up for us in ways that were ever only dreamed about before.

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[Cujo]

I think it is true that the people we are now are not emotionally well equipped to live very long lives. However, the rhythms of life now are very diferent from what they were for our shorter-lived ancestors, and somehow we adapt.

Is there any evidence that healthy older people are in any way mentally impaired? Sure, some suffer from senile dementia or Alzheimer's, but many don't. Frank Lloyd Wright did much of his more famous work after turning 70, for example.

Presumably living longer would mean aging much more slowly, so a 100 yaeer old brain wold be more like a 20 year old brain is now - still damaged from undergraduate partying, but making headway.

I doubt anyone will embark on a 500 year life span in the next 100 years, but even if it were 200 years, then you would certainly alter life patterns. You'd want to retire, re-educate, and embark on new careers, but a lot of the accumulated knowledge would carry over. You'd get people entering medical school after long careers in say, finance, or becoming scuba instructors and moving to Florida after 90 year farming in Minnesota.

As for the increased skepticism, I'm all for it. And I don't think the pace of progress would be seriously impaired - remember it would take the better part of 500 years before you had anyone 500 years old.

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[LWATCDR]

Would anyone really want to live that long. There would be pluses. Part of me would like to see my great great grand kids. There are so many books that I would like to read. So much of the world I have not seen. Would we become batter long term planers. If it takes 100 years for a probe to reach another planet would we feel like it was more worth it since it is only 1/5 of our life? what about work? would we work until we where 400? What about children? Would we be still having kids at 200 or 300 or would that stop at 40 still? Some how a world full of old people and very few children seems sad to me. Maybe we would value them more or maybe not.
Since I am a little religious I do not think I want to live that long. The big question is would the good people of the world do as much good in 500 years to off set the evil that bad people could do in the same amount of time?
As the Vorlons told the humans, "You are not ready yet."

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[Liquidrage]

What makes you think the human brain cna handle living 20 years? Or 40 years? Does having too many 30 year old hold back progress? What I think you've done wrong is treat our reality as some objective "this is how it should be" reality. Plato's cave my friend. We will make of it what there is to make of it.

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[ralphclark]

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about this in the last book of his Mars Trilogy "Blue Mars" and in some of the additional short stories published elsewhere which served as postscripts to the trilogy.

One of the most disturbing aspects of his take on extreme old age was his assumption that by the time you were a couple of hundred years old you would have completely forgotten *all* of your childhood and even most of their first century of adulthood, consigning all memories of what we turn-of-the-millennium humans would think of as a normal human lifespan to the dustbin.

Also, although medical advances and a healthy lifestyle could enable one to retain one's health and a degree of fitness, it couldn't completely preserve the elasticity of skin or prevent all bone erosion so that you would end up spending most of your life *looking* kind of turtle-like. This was therefore the default appearance of humans in KSR's vision of utopia.

I want to add something to that. My own experience of ageing tells me that the brains of the young and the old are very different indeed. In general, the young are creative and adaptable. The mature brain is much less agile but benefits from a store house of experience not accessible to the young. So while young people are generally much more conscious than older people in the sense that they spend more of their time having genuinely original and creative thoughts, older people are more like extremely sophisticated robots.

It's not as devastating as it sounds. For most tasks, including many very sophisticated tasks such as in various fields of engineering, experience trumps creativity.

The rate at which the creative gives way to the robotic is obviously going to vary widely from person to person. But I'll bet most people can see the truth in what I'm saying when they consider either their own declining mental agility vs. their increasing experience and their tendency to sink into habit as they gets older, or the increasing tendency of their parents to repeat the same increasingly limited behaviour patterns, speeches and anecdotes, blissfully unaware that the needle is stuck in a groove.

Now what was I saying? Oh yeah...Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about this in the last book of his...what? What the hell are you laughing at?

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[G4from128k]

Exactly! The young and old are very different, from a cognitive standpoint. The switch-over from the learning-oriented, creative brain of youth to the execution-oriented, robotic brain of age is set by our current lifespan. If we live for 500 years we will either need to delay that switch or face a very very very long life as a less-than-adaptable adult.

I also, like Kim Stanley Robinson (good books, BTW), wonder about the total capacity of the brain and whether it would be forced to dump early memories to store each successive lifespan of experience. I'm probably more pessimistic than KSR -- I suspect that the capacity of the brain is probably much less than a century.

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[ralphclark]

Speaking from a neuroanatomical standpoint I don't know that such dumping would occur. Not in such stark black and white terms, anyway. Surely a few vivid memories from one's youth would survive at least.

I believe memory persists mainly through recall and rehearsal; as one tends to rehearse recent memories more, and remote memories less and less, the old memories simply fade while fresher ones are added. In which case it's not "capacity" (as so famously outlined by Conan Doyle) as such that underlies the memory problem, but merely the lack of persistence of memory engrams. If some biological or biochemical means could be found of preventing these from fading? Unlike Sherlock Holmes, I don't believe that the attic would ever be full; better memory retention wouldn't prevent the brain of a centenarian from continuing to accumulate new memories with the same ease as a thirty year old.

Even if, as we've both noted, memory deposition is lower in that thirty year old than in a twenty-five year old. The difference might not after all signify a progressive decline throughout one's lifetime: it might just be due to a fairly rapid switch from juvenile brain mode to adult brain mode, more or less complete by the time one is forty.

I hope!

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[G4from128k]

As I thought about this topic more, I came to suspect that it comes down to the brain remembering the top ranked memories in life (I'm not sure if N is 1,000 or 1,000,000 or more). The higher the rank of the memory, the more vivid and detailed that memory is. In childhood, everything is new and so every experience is a top-ranked memory. But at some point, new and intense memories start competing for the top-ranked spots (your wedding competes with your 6th birthday party). Formerly high-ranking memories get forced down the rankings by new memories. Unless you actively take the time to remember and refresh those old memories, they will fade (just like you suggested). Of course, the more time you spend on memory lane, the less time you spend out in the world creating new memories!

I agree with you about the switch between juvenile and adult modes -- its not that memory formation system breaks down as we age, its that it has been turned down by genetic switches. Regarding living til 500, I wonder if we can turn the learning mode back on every 50 or a 100 years so we can catch up on the latest technologies and cultural patterns? I also wonder what effects this would have-- would it obliterate many early memories or create new (and multiple) personalities?

I do believe that the brain has a finite capacity, but that people can take steps to improve memory efficiency. One tantalizing bit of brain research showed that the brains of smarter people actually consume less energy in thinking about a given problem than do the brains of others. Smart people don't think harder or have more brain power, they think more efficiently. I'm sure the same phenomenon applies to memory.

I don't know what one can do to improve memory efficiency. Is it like chosing a smaller block size for a filesystem (ala Apple's HFS+ vs. HFS for large hard disks) to reduce wasted space? Or is it more like using a better compression algorithm to remove redundancy in the memory? Or is it like a better directory structure or indexing system that improves retrieval with better organization? Or is it like defragmentation that reorganizes the storage media to open up larger blocks of contiguous free space for more memories? Or is like garbage collection that frees up resources that are being used by obsolete stuff? Or is it like none of these computer-oriented analogies because storing stuff in a neural net bears no resemblance to storing stuff on a hard disk?

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[G4from128k]

Interesting points.

Re: What makes you think the human brain cna handle living 20 years?

I would say that the current world state suggests that the answer is probably yes. As screwed up as some parts of the world are, much of the world does OK. Admittedly, the effective sample size of one -- we could have a nuclear exchange tomorrow, a nasty biological epidemic, or irretrievably trash the environment. Whether such an event could be ascribed to the brain not handling X years of life, or the brain not handling X billion people living together is another matter.

Re: Does having too many 30 year old hold back progress?

Some might argue that some of the Internet boom and bust rested on giving too much money to too many young people with too little experience. I would not go that far because I think society needs to have an emphasis on both dynamic exploration of new high-risk ideas and stable, standardized processes. Generally speaking, youth seems to advocate for trying new paths, while age tends to advocate for sticking to the tried-and-true paths. Both are needed (although a life-extended drug could shift the balance between the two groups for better or for worse).

As for objective/subjective reality -- most of science and engineering is fairly objective while most of human affairs is fairly subjective. The sticky part is the Nature vs. Nurture dividing line -- will a life extension drug be 100% likely to create undesirable biochemical changes in people's brains that create unavoidable, undesirable impacts on behavior. Or will our minds and society adapt to these changes and nuture new-found extended lifespan for the good of the many?

Re: Plato's cave my friend.

It is definitely is like Plato's cave. Science and extrapolation combine to project very fuzzy shadows in the minds of our future-facing eyes. Worse, different people hold the candle in different locations and thus see different shaped shadows. It then becomes up to the policy makers and scientists/engineers to navigate between "what should be" and "what can be."

Re:But can the brain handle it?

[ralphclark]

Your final suggestion is correct: the way biological neurons encode memory in the formation of synaptic networks results in a dynamic model which bears little in common with silicon hardware. The most important difference is that unlike DRAM memory, in the course of normal operation synapses do degrade over time, and entire brain cells die.

Incidentally, you suggested that the brain's memory capacity itself is finite. Well sure it must be, but taken in isolation the maximum information density of vertebrate cortex is much higher than you appear to think and I don't think any human has ever approached that limit.

What I mean is, the neural architecture of the cortex is in principle capable of encoding much more information than has ever been achieved in practice because of limits on the dynamic processes working for and against memory retention. These are:

1) the tendency of a memory to decay over time (individual synapses deteriorate, whole brain cells die).

2) the ability to refresh memory, counteracting the above deterioration, through the act of recall (Long Term Potentiation, or LTP).

As you correctly pointed out, the more time one spends on collecting new memories, the less time one has to reminisce and refresh the old.

And, even if we devote our lives purely to remembering and rehearsing the memories we already collected, given that the rate of memory recall must be as finite as the rate of memory decay there has to be some upper limit to the amount of memory that can be maintained through constant and deliberate maintenance.

This upper limit can be calculated roughly if we know the decay rate of synaptic connections and the amount of time necessary to spend in the act of recall to restore them. This would yield an answer in terms of the number of synaptic connections that can be maintained. Divide that by the average number of synapses per memory (though that's likely to be arbitrary: just what constitutes a "memory" anyway - its rather a vague term) and the answer is the maximum number of memories that can be maintained.

So, the practical limit on neural memory capacity isn't so much like a bucket of fixed size which gets full and overflows; it's more like a very large bucket constantly being filled with a dribble of water from a tap, but which has a significant hole in the bottom.

The water level never gets above a relatively low level for most people because doing so would require the tap to be kept on full blast for extended periods of time (which would require a lot of effort) and also the tap's maximum flow rate isn't terribly high.

On the basis of that analogy you might conclude that if it were possible to beam memories directly into your mind, like with the "Teacher" device Dr McCoy used in that Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain", you could then suddenly fill the bucket right up and maintain a truly prodigious amount of memory by expending the same amount of effort as anybody else, because the rate of loss from the bucket is still the same.

However, that's where the analogy breaks down. If you have a memory ten times as full then you have ten times the rate of synapse decay and you need to spend ten times the effort replacing decayed synapses. Individual synapses will decay just as frequently and the total rate of loss will be proportional to the total number of synapses. So it's more like the fuller the bucket gets, the bigger the hole in the bottom gets. The bucket has a thin rubber bottom with a *stretchy* hole.

Consequently the number of retrievable memories in that big full brain would decline until reaching whatever maximum level is sustainable on the owner's usual memory maintenance schedule.

If you want to expand human memory capacity then there are two ways.

The first is commonly practiced already: building synaptic networks that take less work to maintain through being more densely interconnected. This is what happens when you learn a subject well! Up to a certain point when you are lea

Long life means greater fear of death

[ZoneKagen]

If we can live to be 500, we would want to live more safely as not to throw life away on a technicality. If it would be affordable to only a select few, which it probably will, the rich would take all sorts of measures to protect themselves: secure houses, clean environment and armed bodyguards, not to mention favourable legislation and furtherance of the gab between rich and poor. All in all, it would suck to be poor and to live among those scared shirtless of death methusalems... pardon the spelling...

Re:Long life means greater fear of death

[kasparov]

The obvious solution: spend at least part of your 500 years amassing wealth. Yeah, it's cheesy. Yes, there are far more valuable things to do with your time. But, unfortunately, a lot of those things take some cash (i.e. research, etc.). Be smart, and it shouldn't really take that long. Use the rest of your life (which you would expect to be extended even more--surely, with 500 years they could come up with something) to achieve the things that you really care about.

Or, spend your time trying to design ways for money to be irrelevant. Cheap/limitless energy and some kind of replicator-type technology come to mind. Just think what you could accomplish with all of that time! Mankind really has trouble working on really long-term goals because, well, we don't have all that long to individually work on them.

Re:Long life means greater fear of death

[Thoth Ptolemy]

You could also just do the old Restraunt at the End of the Universe trick... ;)

Are you sure you want this?

[pythorlh]

From the article:

Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California at San Francisco and her colleagues perturbed genes in C. elegans that affect the activity of insulin and removed gonad tissue...

"Removed gonad tissue?" They cut off their balls! and this is considered living?!

Re:Are you sure you want this?

[Eccles]

"Removed gonad tissue?" They cut off their balls! and this is considered living?!

It's not that you would actually live 500 years... it's just that 50 years without 'nads would feel that long.

Re:Are you sure you want this?

[Nucleon500]

Remember - Eunichs are more stable.

A pretty pointless life when...

[danratherfan]

You have to watch Slashdot repeat itself a hundred trillion times. (lower estimate)

hard to adjust.

[bobba22]

It would take a long time for civilisation to adjust to longer life span. Especially if we aged more slowly. What age would you retire at? and who would pay your pension for *say* the next 200 years?The burden on society to look after the super-aged would be almost intolerable, workers would be taxed at incredible rates to provide. At the other end of the scale, you'd have kids running round at 25 years old, still not mature enough to be left alone, puberty would take a decade at least, would there be enough acne cream to go round ;-) On the plus side, women would look 16-30 for about 60 years! I'm all for it!

Re:hard to adjust.

[jon787]

What age would you retire at? and who would pay your pension for *say* the next 200 years?The burden on society to look after the super-aged would be almost intolerable, workers would be taxed at incredible rates to provide.

Social Security is already under strain, it wouldn't even takes this to make that fail.
Perhaps that is for the better though,

At the other end of the scale, you'd have kids running round at 25 years old, still not mature enough to be left alone, puberty would take a decade at least, would there be enough acne cream to go round

Well the article never says anything about the growth rates of these organisms being changed by the drugs.

They'd probably have to do this test on a different animal before they could determine that.

Re:hard to adjust.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet it's fun being you.

BLASTer

[Johnny Mnemonic]

How many people read the headline as a way to extend the self-expire date of SoBig and the Blaster worm?

Need...more...coffee.

at what price longevity?

[bluethundr]

C. elegans that affect the activity of insulin and removed gonad tissue, which affects endocrine hormone levels.

So the Doctor told me, "...okay so you can live for 500 years. All we have to do is remove your nads."

Clearly, this process is do for some refinement before it's ready for mass comsumption. Ananova also covers this.

Re:at what price longevity?

[Tumbleweed]

> So the Doctor told me, "...okay so you can live for 500 years. All we have to do is remove your nads."

Well, that would certainly cure the nasty overpopulation side-effect, wouldn't it? :)

What can I do in 500 years?

[Transcendent]

Well... just build up some technology and blast a crew off to mars, Alpha Centauri, or wherever we can go in 100 years and let them build, reproduce, and thrive there in the next 400.

Don't forget we can keep sending people there too.

Or wait... would infecting another planet be a bad thing?

Re:What can I do in 500 years?

[Jerf]

Or wait... would infecting another planet be a bad thing?

Humanity is Mother Nature's way of getting the biosphere off of its dependence on Planet Earth. No number of dogs will ever create a thriving ecosphere on the Moon.

Environmentalists too long used the idea of "Everything Man do to environment Bad!" should be pushing for space colonization with everything they have; there's an entire dead planet right on our doorstep waiting for us to give it life. The worst case scenario for the Moon's ecosphere is for us to leave it in its "pristine" state.

Re:What can I do in 500 years?

[iggymanz]

infecting? I have to laugh. The environicks (man-haters) think man is evil, but nature is pure. hahaha. The environment only has meaning & purpose insofar as man gives it one. Ditto for the other nonliving rocks in the universe besides the one we live on. If we colonize, utilize or monetize a heavenly body, we give it meaning.

Ugh

[gooru]

God, I don't think I could deal with my parents for hundreds more years.

Too early in the day for optimism?

[Futurepower(R)]

Article: Scientists may be able to extend lives.

Slashdot: Grumble, gloom, doom, complain, pessimism, joke, off topic.

At the time of this posting, no one had anything good to say.

Wait one minute!

[Coppit]

Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California at San Francisco and her colleagues perturbed genes in C. elegans that affect the activity of insulin and removed gonad tissue, which affects endocrine hormone levels.

What good is living longer if you don't have any gonads?! I think I'd rather just die earlier...

It's also well-known that low-cal diets will cause you to live longer, but who wants to live like that?

it is good, but let it be for all

[Madcapjack]

Although I have heard and once thought that if we develop medications to radically extend our life spans it would be primarily the rich who recieve such treatments. Naturally, since it would probably be expensive.

HOWEVER, I don't think it would work that way. I believe that after about 5-20 years of it being only for the rich, there would be such a movement to make the operation and freely available to all, that governments would do so for fear of revolution.

I don't think that the short-lived poor would tolerate the long-lived rich for very long. Mortals don't dig the immortals who deny mortals immortality.

Re:it is good, but let it be for all

[Gulthek]

Read the Red/Green/Blue Mars series of science fiction books for a great exposition just along those lines.

Re:it is good, but let it be for all

[iggymanz]

only for the rich

there's plenty of medical procedures that fall into that category alreaady. Come to think of it, do half the people on the planet now get any medical care?

Re:it is good, but let it be for all

[Madcapjack]

Read the Red/Green/Blue Mars series of science fiction books for a great exposition just along those lines.

Read 'em. good books. I also really like the author's book, "Orange County"

Re:it is good, but let it be for all

[Madcapjack]

only for the rich

there's plenty of medical procedures that fall into that category alreaady. Come to think of it, do half the people on the planet now get any medical care?

well i agree with you, but I think that this is different. When people start seeing 80 year old people looking like their 20, people won't be so passive. This is an offer of (near) immortality, a fountain of youth, not a heart operation.

Re:it is good, but let it be for all

[Nucleon500]

I don't think that the short-lived poor would tolerate the long-lived rich for very long. Mortals don't dig the immortals who deny mortals immortality.

Just look what happened to Numenor!

overpopulation

[bananaape]

The first thing I thought of was overpopulation. Its already a problem in some places, now make that happen everywhere.

Also unfair distribution could lead to an upper class who have exclusive rights to things like this.

Re:overpopulation

[asdfx]

If you play your cards right, you could have the government, or your health insurance provider pay for it. Obviously, the longer we all live, the more people there will be paying taxes and needing health care. It would be in their best interest to support this.

What is the capacity of the human brain?

[jat2]

Is it possible that an otherwise healthy brain runs out of space for memories after, say, 300 years worth? Then, since natural selection never had to deal with this problem, maybe we wouldn't be able to influence which memories get "over-written", or maybe we would be unable to commit any memories to our long-term memory.

Kim Stanley Robinson deals with this a little bit in the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy.

downside

[pizza_milkshake]

the downside, of course, is that assholes will live longer

Low-cal vs. low-CARB

[hlh_nospam]

As mentioned in the article, one of the researchers is personally following a low-carbohydrate diet after she saw that removing sugar from the worms' diet substantially increased lifespan. She also reported that it was MUCH more tolerable than low-calorie. I can personally vouch for that.

Of course, low-carb is still politically incorrect. Quacks like Ornish and McDougal still rule the so-called 'medical' establishment, although some actual research seems to be surfacing in support of low-carb despite the efforts of low-fat supporters trying to dismiss it (or shout it down -- after all "everybody knows" that fat is evil, right?). Interestingly, I have been unable to find any study in which reduction of sugar and starch in the diet did NOT lead to substantial health improvements -- and I have looked hard.

I personally have lost more than 110 lbs on a luxurious high-fat, low-carb diet (after years of torturing myself with low-fat!). Low-carb also reduced my blood pressure, cured my 'arthritis', controlled my blood sugar, and improved my blood lipids, among other pleasant side effects (like the absence of constant gnawing hunger). Now that I am substantially healthier, the possibility that it might significantly extend my lifespan is even more appealing.

Of course, low-carb won't prevent accidental death, nor will it cure or prevent every disease (which low-fat supporters use to attack the notion, ignoring that the same is true of low-fat).

As for losing the 'nads, I'm past the age when I do my thinking with them, so losing them might be a reasonable tradeoff for a longer and healthier life. There really are other things in life besides sex, and I don't want any more offspring. Plus, losing the gonads does NOT necessarily mean the end of a satisfying sex life.

Re:Low-cal vs. low-CARB

[Anonymous Coward]

As mentioned in the article, one of the researchers is personally following a low-carbohydrate diet after she saw that removing sugar from the worms' diet substantially increased lifespan. She also reported that it was MUCH more tolerable than low-calorie. I can personally vouch for that.

...

I personally have lost more than 110 lbs on a luxurious high-fat, low-carb diet (after years of torturing myself with low-fat!). Low-carb also...

Ok, first of all the researcher who decided to change her diet based on research conducted on nematodes is a moron. Human metobolic function is much different than in other species. Even mice and non-human primates do not offer satisfactory models for research involving human diet. Of course the statement was probable made with the intent of giving more credibility to the research they are conducting and hence producing greater funding for their lab. Similar research was done on yeast at Harvard involving the introduction of resveratrol(a compound found in, among other things, red wine). The researchers found that the yeast lived longer when fed resveratrol, and at least one of them decided that this was adequate evidence for him to increase his red wine intake. This is actually a very common trick among researchers, and there are plenty of other examples of it. Ketogenic, or low-carbohydrate, diets do have drawbacks. Some of these are documented in research. If you are really interested in them, then go search pubmed. It should be noted that simply reducing the percentage of carbohydrates in your diet will not cause you to lose weight, or body fat. These changes take place through overall reduction in caloric intake. If you reduce the percentage of calories in your diet, but maintain the same caloric load, your body fat percentage will not change(Ketogenic diets will cause overall weight loss through water weight reduction in the initial phases though).

Re:Low-cal vs. low-CARB

[kalidasa]

Plus, losing the gonads does NOT necessarily mean the end of a satisfying sex life.

Guess you haven't read Voltaire's Candide, eh?

Prevents Aging??

[runninggel]

It says it extends the life span. But does it slow down aging? Does this particular technique prevent the worms from dying of 'old age' or does it slow down the ageing process? Would you like to live 200 yrs without any teeth & having to take a piss thru a tube?

Not a good idea to extend human life yet

[Confessed Geek]

Hey, great for me to be Lazerous Long, but I don't want that jerk down the street to live forever.

Seriously though, while the article is facinating and may eventually lead to some great breakthroughs in life extention, I don't think humanity as civilization is socially ready for such huge extentions in the lifespan. As was pointed out we are already living about twice as long as we did 500 years ago, and what has happened? We have overpopulated. The great majority of our current world problems come from too many people.

Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population. Our technology has been able to barely keep our heads above water, but look around and you will see that while we are fighting the good fight we are aren't winning just doing a losing holding action. Multiply lifespans by 5 and the total population would quickly overcome all efforts, or worse.

How worse? Say the process is very expensive. If you think class wars and the struggle between the haves and have-nots is bad now, just wait till the Bill Gates or Kim Jong-Ils of the future not only have more money than you ever will, but will have more years of life than you can aspire to. Say hello to your new imortal overlord...

While we will probably eventually discover how to extend the human life span indefinatly we will have to change our world society in regards to reproduction before it will spell anything but our doom if we succeed.

The "proof" of this can be examined in the following lines of thought.

People are a resource. The more of a resource that is available the less value of that resource. Thus the more people the less they are worth. So the value of human life, and the value of human labor goes down with each increase in the human population. In the past geography and cultural barriers have ment that seperated cultures could develop "independently" leaving "under" populated areas like the United States or Europe to thrive and produce high qualities of living and an abundance of natural resources - letting them dominate other regions that did not have the same advantages. As the world "shrinks" due to easy access to fast transportation and communication these benefits are dilluted and the world becomes more of one community, creating a greater equality. Unfortunatly for some, equality will mean moving down if you were on the top. This means that population issues are not the problem of "Those people" , "That ethnic group" or "That Country," but of all citizens of the planet who will share the responsibility.

Do you like democracy? The existance of the middle class? Technology? Then you should thank heaven for the Black Plauge. The black plauge made the rise of the middle class possilbe and increased the value of human life throughout Europe. The plauge wiped out huge swaths of the population in europe. While horribly tragic for those who lost their lives or the lives of loved ones this huge reduction in population of europe made people and human labor worth significantly more than it was before. This meant that those who wanted to use that labor (nobles/kings/economicly powerful) had to "pay" more for the resouce. The coin of exchange was not only material resources but the end of serfdom and an increase of human rights and a greater restriction on the power of the Kings/Nobles/Landowners/CEOs. This led eventually to rise of the middle class, representitive government (of one form or another), and the idea that non elite were more than cattle. Also with this increase in the cost of human labor it became more advantageous to develop technology to make better use of the labor and increase the abilities /longlevity of the resouces. The Aztecs developed the wheel, and used it in toys for children, but never implemented it as a tool because human labor was so cheap that there was no reason to.

Perhaps it makes more sense now why unemployment is so high, wa

Re:Not a good idea to extend human life yet

[clambake]

As was pointed out we are already living about twice as long as we did 500 years ago, and what has happened? We have overpopulated. The great majority of our current world problems come from too many people.

Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population.

Yeah, 500 years ago there was NEVER any famine, war, plauge, class inequality or poverty... NONE WHATSOEVER! Or at least, seeing as it was mostly the dark ages, we don't have any written record of those things... I wonder why? Maybe everyone was just too happy with thier lack of disease and poverty to get on writing anything.

If anything, the world is suffering a severe UNDER-population...

Re:Not a good idea to extend human life yet

[kalidasa]

As was pointed out we are already living about twice as long as we did 500 years ago

The average life expectancy might be double, but the extremes haven't changed all that much. Socrates died in his early 70s, and Sophocles (probably) in his 90s. That was 2400+ years ago (Socrates died in 399 bc, Sophocles in 405 bc). And those are reasonably reliable dates, they're not like Old Testament dates - we can track Sophocles, with huge gaping holes, from 468 to 405 bc, and Socrates from 423 bc (when he was already middle-aged at least) to 399 bc. I could list others, but the fact is, that while quite rare, people did live to their 80s, 90s, and 100s long before modern medicine. It's just that the average person didn't. That's what medicine has given us.

Re:Not a good idea to extend human life yet

[Confessed Geek]

From Webster's
Famine: an extreme scarcity of food.
Scarcity: the state of being scare.
Scarce: deficient in quantity or number compared with the demand.

War - you have to have people to fight, what do you fight over? Resources. Why do you refight over resources? Because you want more than you have. See Scarce above.

Plague - A plauge is an infectious disease affecting large portions of the populous. Why does it tend to spread so fast and far? Because to many people are crammed together in too small of a space with poor sanitation? Why? Scarcity. see above

Class Inequality - did you read original message.

Poverty - See scacity above and class inequality in original message.

Re:Not a good idea to extend human life yet

[Confessed Geek]

No argument.

While intersting and informative (I didn't know the lifespan of either man) as you point out the Average person did not live that long, thus decreasing the over all population and its rate of increase.

If we developed a method to increase active lifespan by a factor of 5 FOR THE AVERAGE PERSON- especialy if the period of viable fertility is also extended, then this would dramaticly increase population growth thus accelerating the problems of overpopulation

Re:Not a good idea to extend human life yet

[ItaloSuave]

You make the fundamental misunderstanding of our modern era, that the only value a person has is his or her economic value. Even by this measure, your resulting valuation is only approximate, imperfect, flawed. For one thing, people who create our advances, whether in technology or otherwise, generally do not operate in a singular, solitary "vacuum". The Wright Brothers invented their airplane in the midst of a community of others working assiduously, and quite publicly, to enable manned flight. Word of both failures and successes travelled across the country and around the globe. Haven't you seen old videotapes of the various, abortive "flying machine" contraptions? Also, Bill Gates did not make DOS 1.0; he talked with IBM about their new, "personal" computer, they told him what they needed (an operating system) and he turned around and contracted the job out to some programmer in California (Stanford connected?) to do the job in a week or two for $3,000 or $5,000. Bill's daddy was a successful businessman, Bill blew off his admission to Harvard after one term, so he had both opportunity and capital, plus he recognized his opportunity when he found himself in the right place at the right time. By contrast, I met Ray Kroc in front of his first McDonald's Restaurant on Mount Prospect Road in Des Plaines, Illinois (near O'Hare Airport; now rebuilt as a secular, historic "shrine" by the McDonald's Corporation.) We talked business, hamburgers specifically, what a great product he had, how to expand the concept (franchise) into other markets quickly, but I was just a kid approaching seven years old, and my family was moving away. Ray Kroc repeatedly asked me to send my father over to meet him, he had a job waiting (ground floor opportunity in one of the greatest business ventures ever) but my Dad was entirely resistant, saying to me, "Son, I have a good job [utility engineer - Company provided Mom with zero pension after Dad's 23 years of service]" and utterly refused to meet the nice Mr. Kroc, despite my imploring, repeated entreaties. Thirteen years later, my family moved again, this time across the street from a first generation, business saavy Greek-American immigrant, who had bought the rights to franchise McDonald's Restaurants in the State of Maine. Without building a single store, the guy was worth millions. And I might add that the McDonald's franchise business model has transformed the business landscape both at home and abroad. Old Mr. Ray Kroc and I had the right idea, and it worked ("billions served") but I missed one of the biggest "ground floor" opportunities ever. Yet, I still have "value".

Re:Not a good idea to extend human life yet

[merlin_jim]

Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population.

I would like to point out that all of these symptoms have been with humanity regardless of population size for nearly the entire span of recorded history.

And with the exception of pollution and environmental damage, one can make a case that most of these items are better now, at the height of our population so far, than ever before. The industrial revolution vastly increased our capacity for both pollution and environmental damage, as humans no longer need to be personally involved in either process.

Longevicity Vaccine

[Joe the Lesser]

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.

CEO Nwabudike Morgan
MorganLink 3DVision Interview

unmentioned negative side-effect

[Tumbleweed]

With all those extra people crawling around, reading Slashdot, it's going to make getting 'First Post' that much harder. :)

And I don't even wanna _think_ how much worse the Slashdot Effect would get!

Then again, BitTorrent would be that much better!

The only real difference

[pmz]

is that the jokes about 80-year-old female genitalia in junior high school will no longer be funny (funny in the context of 14-year-olds, that is).

What good is longevity?

[BurningTyger]

What good is longevity if you are not rejuvenated?

Living up to 500yr old, does that mean you live as an adolescent for the first 100 years?

Or does that mean you become old by age 60, and live the rest of the 440 years as grumpy grandpa Simpson in an old folks home ??

Moreover, how many more years do you have to work to make enough money for the retirement saving now that you can live up to 500 years ??

Re:What good is longevity?

[Anonymous Coward]

"What good is longevity if you are not rejuvenated?

Living up to 500yr old, does that mean you live as an adolescent for the first 100 years?

Or does that mean you become old by age 60, and live the rest of the 440 years as grumpy grandpa Simpson in an old folks home ??"

You don't even have to RTFA for this one. Just RTFHeadline and abstract. Sheesh.

Welchia and Blaster live longer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll -still- be getting probed by them several years from now.

Just run fdisk

[xgamer04]

and all your problems will be gone

Ahh yes Alpha Centauri...

[FirstNoel]

I was wondering if I'd see any quotes from that game.

Why wouldn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Avoid alcohol. Meditate. Eat healthy. Think.

Why wouldn't the brain handle it?

Changing timescales = changing priorities

[G4from128k]

Additionally, making plans that go beyond the next quarter would not seem like such a bad idea anymore.

Yes, people's priorities would change and some of the impacts might be rather strange. For example, would retirement ages be pushed to 400. Since no company or government pension plan could afford to give someone 440 years of retirement in exchange for 40 years work, these polices would need to shift. Yet, anyone who abuses their body would probably not be able to work til 400 and be force to retire before the new "normal" retirement age.

Funding for health would also shift. Inexorable demands to help people get their full 500 years would mean less funding for diseases of the young and more funding for diseases of the middle age. I also wonder if society would either regulate or further ostrasize unhealthy habits like over eating, smoking, drinking, etc. Damages in "wrongful-detah" lawsuits would skyrocket -- compensating for 450 years of lost earnings.

Drink to forget

[Doc Ruby]

Once our bodies can live 500 years, barring accident, the obstacle to longevity will be our minds. With 500 years of memories, role models, lovers, enemies, how can we keep it together, running our current model of individual personality? Reinventing yourself will be a survival requirement. I liked Greg Egan's treatment of immortals in Diaspora and John Varley's Steel Beach. What's your strategy for the long term?

Social Security

[Goyuix]

Well, I guess I can give up that last fleeting hope of seeing some of that come back one day....

AVERAGES, kids

[BeaverCleaver]

The statistic that the average lifespan of humans has doubled in the last 300 years is thrown around all the time. People tend to imply that 300 years ago everybody must have died at 40. This is obviously nonsense. The statistic used to calculate life expectancy is actually "life expectancy at birth". So the real influence is not healthy adults living a few years longer. Remember your 3rd-grade arithmetic? If a baby breathes for a coupla minutes, then dies,(ie age = 0) it will affect the average more than someone who lives to say, 80 instead of 75. The reason life expectancy has doubled in the last 300 years is because fewer people die young of poor neonatal care, childhood diseases, malnutrition etc, not because science has done anything major for old people. This is still a Good Thing, but kind of different to the geriatric revolution it is so often painted as.

"Worm Lifespan Extended To Five to Six Times Norma

[Tukla]

Christ, you mean Steve Ballmer could live for another 400 years?!

Worms ain't people

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAMB but IANAAR. However, aging research has been a pet interest for me for many years. The problem with these model aging studies is that they may have very little to tell us about human aging. Take cancer for example. If you're a mouse and you have cancer, you are in good shape, medical science has cured cancer in mice several times over. The rub is that humans have better natural checkpoints and anti-cancer defenses than mice. Therefore most of the anti-cancer treatments we've developed simply ape many of the natural defenses our bodies already have - which human tumors have already circumvented. Therefore, most of those treaments are of little value to humans with cancer.

Aging is a similar story. Although the broad categories of cause like telomere shortening and oxidative damage probably play at least some role in the aging of most complex animals, the specific causes for aging vary from creature to creature and species to species. A good analogy is a car. Most modern cars run for about 100K miles (160K km) before serious problems begin to appear. In some cars, the gaskets go out, in some it electrical problems, etc. In fact the rate of car death vs age can be nicely plotted on the same graphs as for living creatures. Why is this?

Not unlike car manufacturers, evolution is cheap. We have one heart since it's enough rather than the two that we should have for redundancy. In most cases, our body is engineered to only about a 2-fold safety margin. It's enough to give an engineer nightmares. Bone strength, kidney function capacity, lung O2 transfer caapacity, etc. These are all cut pretty close to the bone. Evolution has picked these values so that we function relatively well but not so well that we function flawlessly. The reason is that the prehistoric ubermensch that had a huge skeleton, two hearts, etc would have starved to death trying to keep all those systems fed. Likewise, most cars do not have all encompasing airbags, titanium bodies, turbine engines, diamond windshields and terrain following radar. It's too expensive.
There is a story (possibly apocryphal) about Henry Ford. After the model T had been out for a year or so, he sent out a survey out to the car owners. It asked them what parts failed in their cars. After acouple of years, Ford had a very good accounting of what parts failed first in the model T. He then made all of the rest of the parts of the car cheaper so that they would fail at the same time - no point in wasting good parts on a car that's going to fail anyway.
Evolution has done a similar accounting, all our barely sufficient systems degrade over time and tend to fail at about the same time. Just like cars, we tend to kick off for different reasons. Though you might die of a heart attack, this is irrelevant, you were rapidly heading towards kidney failure, cancer and brain degeneration anyways.

The mutations in C. elegans tend to be dauer mutations or similar. (dauer is, IIRC, a sort of hibernatory forn of the C. elegans larvae which is triggered by low food conditions) These are mutations that affect the amount of energy the work spends on reproduction. (metabolic energy, not movement or other things) The energy the worm normally spends on making eggs or sperm (which IIRC, the gonads of C. elegans are a significant portion of the entire body mass) is instead spent on body repairs which extends the lifespan. It's sort of like someone that normally spends their money on detailing and neon rider boards on their car instead of changing the oil, there's a trade off.
Humans on the other hand, don't spend much metabolic energy on reproduction, our gonads are a pretty miniscule part of our body mass. I'm not counting money, mental anguish or time as being spent on reproduction since these do not have a direct effect (an indirect one probably) on the energy the body has to effect internal repairs and upkeep. Therefore, the sort of mutations mentioned in the article should have a much smaller effect upon human longetivity

One important line

[HangingChad]

There's one caveat to the procedure...

...removed gonad tissue...

If you want to live longer in exchange for your 'nads, you all go for it!

Like... the SPICE!

[acidrain69]

The spice... extends life, extends conciousness.

He who controls the spice control the universe!

It's only fitting that they do this on worms first. Maybe they will grow to tremendous proportions and we can start mining their growth factor stuff, ala Frank Herbert.
That would rule.