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Engineering An End to Aging
Reason writes "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a biological engineering plan to end human aging and co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize in recent years. Now he is finally getting some of the public recognition he deserves in an excellent David Stipp article at Fortune Magazine. If you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year - and how to bring about a sea change in the scientific establishment - then this is the place to start. As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"
We already have an answer, it's called rotational gravity. Of course, nobody's going to put up the trillions of dollars needed to build a spaceship large enough to use it effectively.
More than a few of those centennarians in Russia.. are not centennarians. Quite a few lied about their ages to avoid military conscription during Stalin's day.
As for the Chinese, well, there may be a similar argument there, not sure.
The Guinness Book is loathe to accept records for longevity for the larger reason. Lack of reliable evidence makes claims to longevity ripe for fraud. Think of how unreliable record-keeping must have been in various parts of the world over 100 years ago. Or how many records have been destroyed by disaster or conflict over the years..
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
cells that have probably lost a significant amount of their protective end-sections (IANAG--I forget what the ends of the DNA molecules are called, but they basically act as a buffer to prevent harmful mutation. Over time, though, they get shorter and disappear.)
IANAG, but I am a MD.
Those things are called telomeres, they shorten in most cells with each copying of the DNA. Except that in germ (reproductive) cells there are telomerases, which re-lenghten the telomeres.
Problem solved right, just turn on your telomerases? wrong, cancer does that....
Read more at Wikipedia
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
Telomers. Here is a good article on the application of removing telomerase to extend the life of humans. Mice studies have shown that by capping the Telomers to keep them from unwinding that mice can be made which seemingly cease to age and which are almost immune to carcinogens. There have been mice that live several years whereas their untreated brethern die in weeks or months.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Very recently, this was shown to be false, at least for mice. But everyone now confidently expects to find similar results in humans.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Actually, "turning on the telomerases" is closer to a possible solution than you claim. I wish I could find the article again (if anyone else can, please post), but I can't, so here's the summary: A group of scientists took a worm and messed with its genes so that it constantly made telomerase. The worm was supposed to have a life span of 2 weeks (this was not a garden worm, but some kind of funny roundworm or something). After 1 year, it still appeared normal and healthy. It is quite possible that telomerase will do this sort of thing to other organisms too, but there are ethical questions that need to be resolved before we do testing on humans.
In response to your quip about cancer, yes, cancer cells constantly produce telomerase. This is why cancer can continue to grow and not die off (indeed, you can even get certain decades-old cancer strains in biological catalogues). However, this only keeps cancer cells from growing frail and losing important genes. The part that makes them grow and divide at a malicious rate is unrelated. This has to do with a protein called p53. p53 usually just sits around, but when a cell exhibits certain cancerous behaviors, p53 lyses (kills) it. In cancer cells, the gene that makes p53 no longer works (either it has been disabled, or it has a mutation in it that causes it to no longer make p53). This is why cancer cells are harmful - they do not stop replicating. This has almost nothing to do with telomerase. The telomerase just keeps the genes in the cancer cells (and in regular cells too) healthy. Indeed, all cells have a little telomerase in them, but not enough to completely repair the telomeres after the DNA has been copied.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
Ok, so it's the fat metabolism that does it... (like I said, I'm not a nutritional scientist), but the point is, your body is thrown into a state of ketosis (http://atkins.com/helpatkins/newfaq/answers/Since StartingTheAtkinsProgramIHaveBadBreath.html) Ketosis is GREAT for weight-loss. You con your body into feeding off its own fat. But like I said, you don't want to be on this for the *long term*. A "low carb lifestyle" is NOT healthy.
Would you mind providing a reference for the "Ketoines cause organ damage"-claim, or would that spoil the fun?
http://www.capeargus.co.za/index.php?fSectionId= 342&fArticleId=255925
"Ketosis happens when the body needs glucose to fuel its processes, and can't get it from its usual source - carbohydrates. The body has a back-up mechanism that turns to stored fat or protein to produce the glucose, by going into a state called ketosis.
The problem with ketosis is that its by-products are toxic to the body in excess.
Ketogenic diets have been implicated in causing not only halitosis (bad breath), but also cancer, heart disease, kidney ailments and brittle bones.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Assuming that people's bodies could be kept at the 20-year-old state indefinitely. All diseases, accidents, violence, etc would happen to you with the probability of a 20-year-old. Consulting medical and acturial databases, how many years would this add to the mean lifespan?
I don't believe that "15 year" answer, so I looked at a mortality table and did the math myself. I came up with an estimate of 800 years.
The acturial tables that you want are called mortality tables. Here is a collection of them from the American National Center for Health Statistics.
NCHS Data Warehouse
Going to the first table, death rates by age, the death rate for 15-24 year olds is 80.7 per 100,000 (all states, 2001).
This means that in the year 2001, in this population group, for each 100,000 people, 99,919.3 of people of these ages lived, and 80.7 of them died.
Or, to scale it down: start with 1000 people. In a year, 1 person dies, and 999 live. What's the average life span of that population? It's a hell of a lot longer than "15 more than normal 60 or so"!
A quick calculation, log(0.5)/log(0.999193)), shows that the median life expectancy of a "perpetual 20 year old", would be 858 more years. That is, if you had 100,000 of these perpetual 20 year olds, after 858 years, 50,000 of them would still be alive.
Calculating average is a bit trickier and I'll leave it alone.
The primary observation was that, while older people are on the average more susceptible to such things than younger people, the difference isn't all that great.
Oh yes it is.
ALL AGES: 848.5
0-1 year: 683.4
1-4 years: 33.3
5-14 years: 17.3
15-24 years: 80.7
25-34 years: 105.2
35-44 years: 203.6
45-54 years: 428.9
55-64 years: 964.6
65-74 years: 2,353.3
75-84 years: 5,582.4
85+ years: 15,112.8
A 50 year old has 5 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old. A 60 year old has 12 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old.
NCHS has lots of interesting tables like these; or you can google for "mortality table" and get tables from other sources, too.