Slashdot Mirror
Geneticists Claim Aging Breakthrough
Quirk writes "The Science section of The Guardian is reporting on recent experiments by geneticists 'to unlock the secrets of the aging process has created organisms that live six times their usual lifespan, raising hopes that it might be possible to slow ageing in humans.' 'In the experiment, Dr Longo's team took yeast cells and knocked out two key genes, named Sir2 and SCH9. The latter governs the cells' ability to convert nutrients into energy. They found that instead of dying after a week, the cells lived for up to six weeks.''Research has now begun to test whether the effect works in mice.' So it looks like we might soon have near immortal, fearless mice."
..real crowded in the world if we're all immortal.
Longevity will provide the next inflection point of human capacity and progress. Imagine if the great people of science could continue to contribute and innovate for the equivalent of several lifetimes. Gauss was the last mathematician who was said to be able to be conversant with the entire spectrum of mathematics. Currently it takes a human a decade to two just to be abreast of a specific field of science to be able to make any significant contributions. The period of time available to advance our understanding is getting shorter and shorter due to increase in the body of knowledge and our limited life times.
I know there will be the crowd that says - but we were designed to die. That is bunk! Self aware intelligence is bound and destined to perpetuated and proliferate.
Here's a simple way to increase your lifespan. Eat less. In fact, halve the amount of food you eat.
There are papers that you can search for with sciencedirect.com or scholar.google.com that show rats that are given half the calories of the control group living almost 50% longer. It's just not exactly something that you can sell to people. You can live longer, if you live LESS. There's a reason animals that live very long lives have very slow metabolisms (such as Turtles) and animals that have very high metabolisms live less (such as humming birds and mice). To put it simply, you can 'burn the midnight oil' and live a short life, or eat less and do less and live longer.
Putting it more complicatedly, the reason you age is generally regarded to be because of damage your body and cells accumulate over a lifetime of living. The damage often comes from 'Oxidative stress'. This is just a very broad umbrella term for anything that causes the generation of 'Reactive oxygen species' that are highly reactive molecules that zip about your cell damaging proteins and DNA. ROS are made by things such as too much Vitamin K, smoking, UV light or certain other radiation bands, too much iron in the diet, and so on.
And the biggest contributor to ROS in your body over it's life? The Mitochondria. The 'power plant' of each cell. It makes ROS as a part of the process used to make ATP (the 'batteries' of your cells) and inevitably some escapes and causes damage. Over a life-time the damage builds up.
The biggest contributor to ageing is just plain old living (kind of obvious really), and the best way to therefore cut down on that damage is to eat less, slowing down the metabolism and decreasing the amount of ROS the mitochondria produces.
IMHO, not really worth it! you could get hit by a bus tomorrow! Dig into your fresh Chiabatta and Fetta cheese!
I asked a friend of mine in the insurance industry once how long people would live if we eliminated all natural causes. He said given current accident rates, people would live on average about 800 years. I do wonder if a lifespan was 800 years on average, we might be more careful, but I doubt it. If you think about it, this number means that roughly 1 in 10 people die in accidents over the course of a lifetime. That sounds about right to me. As for people dying of diseases, I believe that most of the diseases associated with end of life are heavily related to aging itself, so many of the diseases you mention may be lessened or eliminated through extending lifespan.