Scientists Discover Possible Anti-Aging Gene

werelnon writes "The BBC is running an article about researchers who seem to have discovered a gene which controls aging. By stimulating this gene, which when malfunctioning causes premature aging, scientists have managed to prolong the average life span of lab mice from 2 to 3 years. Because a very similar gene is present in humans it is quite possible it will do the same thing for people." From the article: "But there may be downsides with Klotho. The long-lived mice in the new experiments tend to be less fertile. And the gene may also predispose people to diabetes. The trick for researchers will be to find ways of getting the life-enhancing results of Klotho while avoiding the drawbacks."

Comments

Re:Cheating death

[silverkniveshotmail.]

which geocities site did you get this from?

the key...

[ErichTheWebGuy]

The trick for researchers will be to find ways of getting the life-enhancing results of Klotho while avoiding the drawbacks

Isn't that always the goal of a research scientist? To find the benefits, while mitigating or eliminating the drawbacks?

Side effects?

[Jason1729]

If you're increasing life expectancy 50%, it seems like decreased fertility would be a benefit, not a drawback. You don't want to cause a population boom.

Re:Side effects?

[Xyrus]

Increasing life expentancy by 50% will also discover even more errors in our genetic code. That's the main reason why we are discovering so many age related ailments. Our code was designed to help us survive to a certain point because that's how long most of us lived. Our lifespans have increased faster than our code could evolve, so after a certain point, we're running in untested conditions. Sometimes we can apply a patch to a problem, other times we can't. Be that as it may, I think "curing" aging will be a problem for some time. All organisms on earth contain the genetic death code. It's what allowed life to continue on like it has. Reversing this could be difficult. ~X~

diabetes and infertility?

[bprime]

I'd say that's a very, very fair trade for a 50% increase in lifespan.

And how do you distribute this miracle?

[Quadraginta]

You know, it's very likely the only way a beneficial artificial genetic variation like this would reach the masses is by a technology that modifies your genes very soon after conception. Because once you're born, or (worse) reach adulthood, it becomes very tricky and expensive to evade the body's built-in defenses against alien genetic material (e.g. viruses). So even if a life-extending genetic treatment became available, you'd very likely only be able to take advantage of it (1) before you're born or (2) after you become fabulously rich.

And doesn't that open an interesting can of worms? If, for example, it turns out that some people with decently well-off and very foresightful parents can live 50% longer than the rest of us? If you think we have nasty debates now about, say, equal opportunity in college education, just wait a few decades, when it's a question of equal opportunity for that extra 30 years of life...

Re:And how do you distribute this miracle?

[An Onerous Coward]

That's not the way this sort of research usually works. Rather than "fixing the gene", their likely goal is to figure out what protein it codes for, then figure out the metabolic pathways that the protein is involved in, and then see what sort of drugs can be formulated to make those processes work the way they'd like.

The older we get the worse shape we are...

[scruff323]

From a person who doesn't know much about this topic, it seems like the longer people live, the worse shape they become. As people start reaching their late 70s and 80s, they getting many health problems that, quite frankly, I would rather not live with. These problems can be mental and/or physical so that you could have a body that is fragile and brittle, but a working mind. This makes it so that you know that you are brittle and fragile, but you can't do anything about it. The reverse of that would be pretty bad too.

I know that I would not want live in that state. Just imagine yourself in the early stages of alzheimer's where you know that you are forgetting all that you used to know. I'm sure to incite a couple of fierce replies with this next comment but it is my opinion: I would want to be euthanized if I was in that state.

The article does state that in the mice, the typical effects of old age were delayed. But I would bet anything that in humans, infertility and diabetes would be only the start of the problems caused by this.

P.S. People who oppose my opinion, don't take offense to what I say for it is simply my opinion and it often changes as more information is taken into account.

Re:The older we get the worse shape we are...

[jIyajbe]

My father (who passed away a few months ago) had a major stroke which put him in a wheelchair. He needed help with the most basic life functions. Later, Parkinson's disease starting taking away his mind--very, very slowly, over a period of 10 years. He *knew* he was losing his memories, his ability to read, and even to form a coherent sentence. He could still understand me, and until almost the very end of his life, I could understand him.

For all 15 years of this degenerative process, up until the last two months of his life, he maintained that life was still worth living, and that in spite of everything, he was still enjoying being alive. (Children, marriages, grandchildren...) Only in the last two months did he say he was ready to die. (He went peacefully.)

One anecdotal data point. My point? Us young folks really can't say what old folks want, or will want. Including ourselves.

Re:The older we get the worse shape we are...

[Anonymous Coward]

From a person who doesn't know much about this topic, it seems like the longer people live, the worse shape they become.

People get sick and have all sort of problems when they are old, because the cells in their body are starting to die.

If we could find a way to make cells to regenerate, we could be as healthy as youngsters are today, even if we would be thousands of years old.

Re:The older we get the worse shape we are...

[jadel]

I think a distinction has to be made here between life extension and anti-aging.
from the article:

Klotho seems to delay many of the effects of old age, like the weakening of bones, clogging of the arteries and loss of muscle fitness.
This is important for those researching the causes of ageing, whose intention is not so much to prolong life as to improve the quality of our final years.

I have to agree I wouldn't want to live in a decrepit state, but staying young for longer has a definite appeal.

Quality of life is decreasing

[elucido]

While we may be having increased life expectancy, life quality and our level of health is decreasing.

Most food people consume is no longer organic, most people know nothing at all about supplements and how to stay healthy.

We should be focused on life extention and not waiting for government or corporations to come in with the cure for diseases like cancer and diabetes.

If you want a cure, start a business to fund the search for it. The life extension foundation does this. Life extension foundation

Life expectancy is not important. Only quality is important. We are not as healthy as we once were, and every 10 years more of us are dying from heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other illnesses due to the foods we are consuming. It is time for us to take control of our own destiny, become our own doctors, create our own supplements and treatments, and finally start supporting the organic food industry.

We can complain about the results (obesity, diabetes, cancer) of consumption of low quality products, but the only way to improve our health is to stop consuming products designed to ruin our health. This means we need to both fund research for cures while also focus on prevention by offering alternatives to Coke, Pepsi, and high fructose corn syrup which are actually safe. We need to be consuming products like green tea, with natural organic sugar, not high fructose corn syrup and dextrose mixed with acid.

Re:Quality of life is decreasing

[silverkniveshotmail.]

I think whether or not we're eating organic food is trivial when we're talking about the issues of obesity and diabetes; in fact, I don't know how much of organic food's popularity is about how cool it is and how much of it actually improves health. I think our first steps as a country should be working on portion sizes and nutritional value.
I also do not see how natural organic sugar is going to affect us in any way. Sugar is sugar, our bodies process the sugar from apples the same as the sugar from coke and pepsi, however apples contain many benneficial antioxidants and far less sugar than soda pop. It's just like natural sea salt, it's still just salt.
What we really need is to eat less fast food, and to get off our asses. There are plenty of other things that we can do to help us be more healthy, but until we can start doing those two simple things we're hopeless.

whiners

[Jippy T Flounder]

the current average human life span is PLENTY for achieving dreams, enjoyment, and personal betterment. instead of trying to extend life, these guys should be out there LIVING.

and besides, as asimov said, our relatively short life-spans are a cause for collaboration, and you can't say that's not a good thing. a big part of human nature is the concept of legacy, evolving ourselves and passing down to the next generation. if we increase our life-spans, we just slow down the process.

not to mention overpopulation, poverty, blah blah blah etc. etc. ad nauseum.

if we're going to evolve, let's evolve along the lines of cybernetics, improving the quality of life for the here and now, instead of hanging around longer. those who dream of extended life are dreaming of more time to regret wasting the first bits.

and we're STILL not immune to large trucks. BUGGRIT.

Re:whiners

[Jugurtha]

All of those issues are rediculous. They are not an issue when you take into account birth control, decrease in poverty due to future technologies, etc... Why have 10 kids if you are going to live for 1000+ years? The current human life span is way too short. A person would need 1000 lifetimes to really start to experience everything that life has to offer. The entire idea that people should accept death is nothing more than a rationalization in the face of the lack of ability to halt the aging process and death. If we have the technology to end aging, which we seem to be working towards even if it isn't supported outwardly by most people, then I say we must do it. Life is good death is bad, it doesn't get any simpler than that. All it is going to take is one research group making a mouse live double its normal lifespan for people to take a serious look at the possibility of extending the human lifespan indefinitely. The sooner we do this the better off humanity will be. Imagine if people actually lived for 1000 years. Instead of dying off they would have to live with the effects of their lifestyle choices on the world. I like to think that people would become far less likely to allow pollution to occure, far less likely to go to war, far less likely to be ignoran given the centuries of experience they would have. I can only see positives in terms of extending peoples lives. Any negatives are problems that we will solve in the future. Overpopulation? Move off the planet, engineer better crops. Grow meat rather than raise it on farms, the list goes on. Anyone who is against this technology is not thinking of the future, they are stuck in the past in a dogma of death and ignorance.

Re:Dying early can be a drawback.

[Jim_Callahan]

Well, diabetes kills people too stupid to regulate it correctly. So you'll end up with a decrease in lifespan rather than an increase it in a majority of the human population...

The trick

[yppiz]

The article summary says "The trick ... will be to find ways of getting the life-enhancing results of Klotho while avoiding the drawbacks"

No, the trick will be finding whether what they did with the mice applied to humans. Suppressing the side effects they found in mice is nothing by comparison.

While mice are similar in some ways to people, they are also rather different. What extends the life of lab mice might, in humans: a) have no effect, b) cause humans to sprout extra limbs, c) live longe and prosper, or d) none of the above.

And it's going to take a long time before they can try these experiments on humans.

--Pat

Re:The trick

[Anonymous Coward]

There are more similarities between humans and mice than dissimilarities, although not as apparent as one might expect. You recognize the dissimilarities because they are more obvious than the similarities. I'm talking genetics here. Do you have special knowledge in this field? Are you familiar that mice are used very frequently in discovering how drugs will effect humans? Why do you think mice are used as frequently as they are, because they are small and cute? It's because more often than not, mice reactions can rather accurately predict human response. So, perhaps it actually is the trick.

Re:Behold!

[Jugurtha]

Better safe than sorry. Don't try to prevent other people just because of your personal beliefs in an afterlife. If you are right then good for you, if you are wrong you are condeming everyone else along with you. Me thinks that most religious people would be all too willing to accept an anti aging cure if one came along. It's easy to say no when it doesn't exist.

Re:Geriatrics

[fgl]

& Whats wrong with reduced fertility anyway? Do we need more people? especially if they will all be living longer.

Eat processed food and live longer

[mangu]

What people need to do is just go back to the cave man diet, if its packaged don't eat it.

Yeah, great, that's a perfect plan if you intend to life the 20~25 years lifespan of a cave man. But what people who lament the wide availability of processed food forget is that the use of packaged food is closely correlated with increased life span.

No, I'm not saying that processed food prolongs life, not at all. A correlation does not imply in cause and effect, there could be a common cause for both phenomena. For instance, the problems of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease that you mention could have an alternative explanation: old age. Even if we assume that processed food brings some health problems, those are certainly offset by other advantages in using processed food, because people who live in industrial countries and eat processed food live much longer than people who live in poor countries and eat food directly from nature.

Remember, the industrial system that gives us processed food is the same system that gives us sanitation and advanced health treatment. It's no use eating vegetables fresh from the garden if you don't have treated water to wash them before eating. Even the most "natural" fruit and vegetables are unable to protect us from typhus and cholera.

Perhaps one could eat natural food in an industrial society and get the best of both worlds, maybe that's what you are trying to say. But the system isn't prepared to supply organically grown food for all the 6+ billion people living on Earth today. If it weren't for the hundreds of millions of tons of grain grown with pesticides and fertilizers and now also with genetically modified plants, people would starve.

All in all, the combination of processed food + advanced health treatment has almost doubled the expected lifespan of people living in the industrial countries, compared to a hundred years ago. Given the choice, most people prefer to face the possible risks of diabetes and heart disease in old age rather than dying from other causes before those diseases appear.

Re:Eat processed food and live longer

[cowscows]

You're making improper connections. People who live in industrialized countries aren't living longer primarily because of processed foods. You listed most of the other causes, yet always seem to think that processed foods are what made them possible. Sanitation, refrigeration, and medicine have all been a big help, and all three could easily still exist even if we stopped making processed foods tomorrow.

Washing your fruit off with clean tap water does not make them
"processed". We're talking about foods made from lots of artificial ingredients, stuck in plastic packaging, and placed in long store shelves. They're convenient, and they taste good cause they're full of lots of concentrated sugars. But they aren't natural, they're chemically way different than anything nature would provide, and so our bodies have not evolved to process them in healthy ways. Fertilized crops aren't the problem, it's the fact that so much of our food cannot be efficiently dealt with by our bodies. And so we become fatasses and get diabetes and stuff.

The solution, the easy one, is to stop eating those manufactured foods. We don't need to go back to everyone growing their own vegetables in their own gardens, but we need to be more intelligent about how the food that is grown ends up in front of the average person. The earth can grow plenty of food. Go talk to some farmers, especially in countries where they aren't subsidized. They're having a rough time because prices are so low. The world is growing more food than it needs. People are only starving for political and economical reasons, not because all the farmland is already being used to capacity.

Re:Eat processed food and live longer

[canadian_right]

Organic food doesn't have any advantage over non-organic food. If I buy "normal" fresh fruit, vegatables and meats, and cook them using healthy methods the resulting meal will be just as healthy as if I started with "organic" food. The only difference is that organic food wasn't sprayed with pesticides and only natural fertalizers were used to grow it.

Processed food is the problem. If I process organic food (chop it up, press it, fry it, add salt and sugar, etc...) it will now be unhealthy food.

If you want to eat healthy buy and eat FRESH fruit and vegatables. Buy fresh meat, poultry, and fish. Eat most fruit and vegatables raw. Steam your other vegatbles instead of boiling them. Do NOT deep fry anything. Keep sugary and fatty treats to a minimum. Cut back on the amount of meat you eat (unless you are training vigorously every day you most likely eat more meat than you need). Never drink more than a single glass of pop (soda to the Americans) per day. EXERCISE every day for at least 20 minutes.

Pop/soda is liquid sugar. All deep fried foods have too much fat. Virtually all processed foods have too much sugar, salt, and fat. Processing often reduces the vitamins, fibre, and other good parts of food. Cooking your own food is fun and healthy.

Diet & Lifestyle

[xeno-cat]

I'll bet that the differences your mentioning have more to do with what people eat and how active they remain througout their lives and less to do with genetics. Asian's tend to have very clean diets compared to Eurpean and American fare.

Rural people and particulary the rural poor tend to lead more active lives and eat food that is fresher, home made and healthier than the moderatly wealthy to obsenely rich.

Kind regards

Re:Maybe

[manthrax3]

Something to note is that US citizens live longer than people in any other country... if we make it to 30. The reason it looks like we live shorter lives is because of drug use, car accidents (55,000 deaths / year) and violent crime.

How to Extend Your Life 50% (No Joke)

[Lord Byron II]

Take a look at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005110.html.

Diseases of heart - Heart Attack
Malignant neoplasms - Cancer
Cerebrovascular diseases - Stroke
Chronic lower respiratory diseases - Lung Disease
Diabetes mellitus - Diabetes

Now, heart attacks are caused almost exclusively bad poor diet (too much fat) and not enough exercise. Cancer has strong links with diet (too much fat) and exposure to chemicals. Strokes are "heart attacks of the brain" in that diet and exercise are major contributing factors here too. A good portion, but not all, cases of lung disease are induced or exacerbated by smoking. And (adult onset) diabetes has been linked to diets high in fats and sugars.

So considering that 66% of male deaths and 63% of female deaths were caused by the above diseases, if you can eliminate the causes of those diseases, you're obviously going to increase your chances for a long and healthy life.

Re:Geriatrics

[mdwh2]

Well, it's the difference between living longer whilst remaining healthy during that time, or just extending the time we spend in old age. Obviously the latter has all the problems you describe, but the former is the complete opposite.

From TFA:

Klotho seems to delay many of the effects of old age, like the weakening of bones, clogging of the arteries and loss of muscle fitness.

This is important for those researching the causes of ageing, whose intention is not so much to prolong life as to improve the quality of our final years.

So this certainly seems to be the former category. I'd gladly work for longer if I'm living a healthy life for longer (obviously it would be absurd and selfish to suggest I should work for 65 years, then live for 100 years off the state). The ratio of workers to pensioners would increase.

Even if the downsides such as lack of fertility and diabetes were not solved, this would still not prevent people from working.

Re:Diabetes is already becoming popular

[loucura!]

How do you cure a ketosis coma?

Re:Maybe

[bnenning]

Food companies like to blame the problem instead of the cause. They will blame obesity for poor health instead of the quality of their products. If we want better health we need a more advanced food industry which actually designs foods to be as health as possible instead of food that is plain addictive.

The fast food joints actually tried to offer a bunch of healthy (well, healthier) selections a few years ago; the only problem was people really do like burgers and fries better than salads. They're giving us exactly what we want, which is food that tastes good even if it eventually kills us.