Slashdot Mirror
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."
Human life expectancy has been increasing overall for a long time now, and we have come to expect certain diseases and conditions including lack of fertility and diabetes along with many others (see Geriatrics).
Could the issues that these mice are having be similar to what we as humans are experiencing by exceeding the lifetimes that generations previous had?
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?
bash: rtfm: command not found
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.
"The head of the research team developing the drug had this to say about the breakthrough: 'MWUHAHAHAHA! Soon I will be... IMMORTAL! HAHAHAHA!' The team expects the drug to be available to the general public 'At the whim of your new overlords.'"
You mean Kolto, from Knights Of The Old Republic. Klotho is from Greek mythology: CLOTHO: Youngest of the three FATES. Known as The Spinner, she spins the Thread of Life that controls your destiny.
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...
The Hayflick Barrier, that suggests cells will replicate only a certain number of times.
Hela cells having to do with cancerous "immortal cells" and the length of telomeres and aging.
lysosomes which as the "recycling bins" of cells may overtime become "clogged" with material the cells are unable to recycle and cause cell death.
No matter that there may be a genetic tweak for aging there are other things at play that may impact on the genetic tweak.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
There are a few limitations to our lifespan. The Hayflick limit may be a driving factor. Body cells, with very few exceptions, have a limit on the number of divisions they can make. This may be related to the way that every time a cell divides, one of the daughter cells has a slightly shorter copy. The ends of the chromosome are telomeres, the aglets on our gene shoelaces.
Of course, many of our tissues divide more than others, and we're vulnerable to a weak point of failure, whether it be skin tissue (definitely a point of infection), blood supply, blood vessels or what have you.
There have been two major schools of thought about aging, and many points in-between. On one side, some think that aging is caused by an incredible number of small failures from separate causes, and to try to beat aging is doomed to fail on this alone. On the other side of the issue, there are those who believe one or perhaps two major items are at fault for aging, and that we can close to an Elixir of Youth. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
I still highly recommend Michael D. West's book The Immortal Cell for an inside account of one search for a cure for aging. (He's also one of the co-authors of the hefty tome Principles of Cloning). Fascinating stuff, and definitely not the stuff of 'fringe' science.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
Frankly I think that just about anything out there to decrease my fertility vastly increases the quality of my life. Then again, I also hate children. So long as it doesn't affect my ability to have sex I thoroughly welcome it.
As well diabetes can generally be controlled, aging, however is a much more problematic disorder.
Scientists discover that Klotho's evil twin brother, Cthulhu, can be used without the drawbacks of life-enhancing results.
I think the reason humans live longer is because they have enough money to buy medicine. The only way to actually live healthier is to change your consumption, and Americans are one of the least healthy countries in the developed world. Our quality of life is among the lowest, and we don't even live the longest. Basically we have enough money to buy life extensions.
Diabetes is common now, so is heart disease and cancer. The reason these diseases are so common is because many of the food companies and industries deliberately create products which in tests on mice are known to cause diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. If mice die from high fructose corn syrup, why are humans being given high fructose corn syrup in every product?
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. Otherwise our healthcare costs will continue to rise forever while food companies continue to put junk in foods to give us new diseases of the future.
Grow your own food, or buy organic. Buy supplements. Look out for your own health, be your own doctor, and help fund research for new supplements, help fund organic farmers and shop at the stores which sell quality.
Long sick lives are not as good as long health lives.
between humans? Esp. humans of different races? It seems to me that Asians(esp. East Asians) actually tend to age much less than caucasians. Japan especially tends to have a lot of very old people, I remember in 2003 the oldest person in the world was Japanese, they died, and then again the oldest person in the world was Japanese. In China, esp. rural China, you buy your own casket at age 60 or 70, but it's not uncommon for one to use it as a piece of furniture for 20 or 30 years!
Even in very poor parts of Asia, such as Pakistan, centarians(sp?) are not nearly as rare as they are in the US and Europe. Is this due to the same gene? Is it due to diet/exercise? Or is it a combination of factors?
Monstar L
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.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
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.
I think what the parent meant is that processed foods are known to cause diabetes. Organic foods are know to reduce the risk of cancer, so theres reasons why eating organic is good or even vital for life long health.
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.
I have a degree in nutrition, and from what you are saying you seem to know know anything at all about how the human body works. High fructose corn syrup is not digested in the same way as cane sugar. The glycemic index is different, the body simply was never designed for liquid sugar. If you create liquid salt, the body is not designed for liquid salt. The body is designed to slowly digest sugars in the form of packaged foods like fruit, veggies, and from natural sources. High fructose cornsyrup was made in a lab somewhere.
Eating less fast food is healthy, but its not that simple. Not all fast food is unhealthy, and not all slowly cooked food is healthy. Most products you have in your house have high fructose cornsyrup and cancer causing agents inside them, and depending on how you cook the food decides your cancer risk.
What people need to do is just go back to the cave man diet, if its packaged don't eat it. If you can see what it is and you know what each ingredient on the back of the package is, then go ahead and eat it. Never eat processed foods and you wont have to worry so much about diabetes or heart disease. The problem is its almost impossible to find foods which arent processed in a normal supermarket.
I suggest you take a class on nutrition, and learn more about high fructose corn syrup and the dangers of certain kinds of salts, mercury, and other chemicals which are neurotoxic. Everything you eat influences your body in some way. Your health is based on what you eat, not how much, not where, not how long it takes to cook. Excercise won't cure diabetes or heart disease, it will delay it. Bill Clinton has heart disease, he jogged every day.
It would be logical, then, if evolution had produced a direct link between aging and fertility. This does not mean it has, only that such a link would be entirely reasonable. We also know, from other work in genetics, that direct links exist in countless places between all sorts of characteristics - even ones you wouldn't necessarily expect.
Sexual reproduction evolved quite late on and different species have very different numbers of X and Y chromosomes. The Duck-Billed Platypus has 5 X chromosomes, 5 Y chromosomes and a determination system that simply isn't understood at all. It would seem likely, then, that this is a product or extension of aging. Again, this would make a lot of sense, as there is really nothing else that would make sense.
I would imagine there to be multiple links, too. Genetic material is damaged over time, so a later adaptation would presumably have been to put the energy and effort into a timeframe where damage is within acceptable limits. It is also possible that, in species with simple-enough genetic material, this might even be leveraged - a small amount of damage would maximize diversity through subtle mis-copies of the genetic code. The genes would need to be fantastically fault-tolerent for this to work, but it is certainly within the realms of the imaginable.
The upshot of all this is simple enough - tweak one parameter and it WILL impact people in other ways. Rather than regarding this as a problem, it may prove very helpful, as not all parameters are going to be directly or easily controllable. There may be other ways to tweak them, if you exploit these kinds of side-effects.
Of course, they still have to find a way to alter genetic material safely. Existing mechanisms use modified retroviruses that embed desired sequences into the infected person. This method has a moderate-to-high risk of a rare form of leukemia. It is also unclear what impact (if any) the old code remaining present will have.
The problems are not well-understood and the complexity of human genetic code is still too great to be subject to detailed analysis. However, the fact that results are being obtained at all shows that these are very bright people with a good understanding of their subject. It'll be interesting to see how far this goes, over time.
One final note - this might be a way to help revive long-lived species on the edge of extinction. If increasing longevity decreases fertility for the reasons I've suggested, then decreasing longevity should increase fertility. It may be possible to use this (in conjunction with other fertility treatments, if any are usable) to help rebuild populations where the genetics would normally work against them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
Sorry, but that is just wrong. Many factors from hygeine to nutrition are actually making people live longer (not just he bump to the average cause by the decrease in infant mortality you mention). That is before we even consider late adult health care that makes heart attacks and strokes survivable.
Our health is massively improved due largely to hygiene and nutrition because despite the damage that diet can do, the benefits of the improved nutrition of the last 50 - 100 years has lead to larger fitter bodies with almost no incidences of malnutrition in the developed world. The proof is in the life expectancy of the under developed world where both these factors do not exist.
I cannot get the stats to hand but if you take out mortality in the first five years (which would eliminate the skew you mention from neo/post natal care) then the expected age of a developed world human is vastly greater than it was.
Further evidence of this is the graph of resting pulse rate vs life expectancy of mammals. It is a remarkable fact that "apart from humans" all mammals exhibit a direct correlation between heart rate and life expetancy to the extent that mammals all seem to have the same number of heartbeats in their life (statistically speaking) apart from humans who are way off the graph with many many more heart beats than normal mammals. Such a contrary position is hard to explain from simple physiological differences.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
What people need to do is just go back to the cave man diet
You explain that to my next-door neighbor who won't stop bitching at me about killing and eating her cat.