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Longevity Gene Found
quixote9 writes "Calorie restriction while maintaining nutrient levels has long been known to dramatically increase life spans. Very different lab animals, from worms to mice, live up to 50% longer (or even more) on the restricted diets. However, so far, nobody has been able to figure out how this works. Scientists at the Salk Institute have found a specific gene in worms (there's a very similar one in people) that is directly involved in the longevity effect. That opens up the interesting possibility that doctors may someday be able to activate that gene directly and we can live long and prosper . . . without giving up chocolate."
Give me immortality, or give me death!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I am of two minds on this. I'd like to enjoy a longer lifespan than I would otherwise expect and I would want my loved ones (and everyone in the world for that matter) to have it too. But if according to the wikipedia we are well over SIX THOUSAND MILLION people alive at the moment, the world would find itself in a much worse position if we stopped dieing and clearing the way for younger generations.
+Raider of the lost BBS
If we do live longer to say 150 and you retire at say 70 would you really want to spend 80 years doing nothing..
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(That is going to hurt my karma but I am still no bored of that joke...)
(OK, maybe a little over it)
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Our current life expectancy is already putting such a burden on our social security system. When will people realize that quality of life != quantity of life? How is our great-grandkids' generation supposed to support millions of supercentenarians?
actually that is not the case, calorie restriction (CR) makes you live longer with a positive impact on your health - including heart diseases. the only issue is the social and psychological impact such a restrictive diet has on your life. the alternative is going on an alternate day diet, or using these longlivety genes turn-on's, like resveratol. these have non of the problems - instant extra 30 years!
How long do we really want these worms to live? Till they become sentient long-lived invertebrate overlords?
u-bend
See e.g. Scientific American, March 2006: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colI D=1&articleID=000B73EB-3380-13F6-B38083414B7F0000
If I could get a few more years earlier in life while I still have gobs of energy and relatively no responsibilities... Suddenly four years for a degree wouldn't seem like a huge investment. A year of study abroad in Japan wouldn't be an issue. I might have two hobbies. Long term investments would make more sense. I would take more time to learn more things, aquire more skills, and experience a broader life.
In short, I think living longer would make it a lot easier to live sensibly. As it is, if I have to weight the risks of investing time or taking something I can do now, I end up taking the most courageous and risky courses possible.
I don't think it's a relative thing either. Not in the sense that, regardless of whatever time-span I had, I would always wish, "Wow, if only I had twice as much." In an absolute sense, I just don't think I'll ever have the years to do all the things I want to. It makes it seem really pointless to invest eight years into something (for instance, undergrad + med-school) when it's such a large investment that, by the time I get done, I will have lost many opportunities of youth, but I couldn't put such a thing off because, who wants to invest eight years in something that will only pay off for twenty?
Humanity is robbed. People live crazy lives because we are going to die too soon to live fully, so life is futile. Damn whatever you recognize as the determining factor of our longevity. The light is green to research like this.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
It's not the drugs that are the problem, it's our never-ending population growth! The more land we turn into farmland, the more kids we have, that again will need to turn new land into farmland, or squeeze even more out of what is allready there to stay alive, and have more kids that needs more farmland... and so on, so forth...
Seriously, we know that we will crack the secrets to long life at one point or another. We know that we want to maintain a high standards of living, and achieve self-realiszation. We want there to be wild nature left. We want there to be more species that rats, cockroaches, dogs and cats living alongside us.
It doesn't take a genious to see that a major pieces in the puzzle that is our long-term survival is population control, and we need to enact it now. Global warming is a small piece in comparison.
To those who wish to endulge, I'd stornly reccomend Daniel Quinn's excellend books 'Ishmael', and 'The Story of B'.
Healthy food does not prolonge life, it just make it seem so long and boring you want to die.
Why do I have the feeling that this study was funded by the Ira Howard foundation?
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
We have a breakfast (Suhur) before dawn and do not eat or drink until sunset. After sunset we have a usual meal (Iftar). The only difference to the diet described in this BBC article is that we do not drink while Mr. Cavanaugh does.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
that when confronted with the possibility of a greatly increased lifespan, say a hundred years extra, so few actually want it. Ask some people and watch their initial reaction. The ones I've queried have almost invariably argued that it would become boring.
IMHO this stems from a belief that zest for life is NOT a biological effect, but rather a result of inexperience.
People grow jaded with age, many even grown comfortable with their own mortality.
I am inclined to believe that the biological decay of our bodies is a main cause of declining appetite for life.
It does not mean that FOXA family does not do something for our longer lives, it just mean that article does not prove that via sequence similarity. Since I enjoy "trolling" I would add that (once again) Nature capitalizes on the subject importance and publishes articles with overstretching conclusions.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"You can have my extended life gene when you pry it from my cold dead hands."
Seriously, if you want to extend life, ban fructose as a sweetener. Unlike regular sugar, fructose blocks the hormones that make you "feel full" so you continue eating and drinking (esp. soda pop). 2/3 of the population is overweight, and a LOT of those are obese. Of course, a fructose ban would result in lower sales of all junk foods (because you'll "feel full" sooner), so expect it to be fought by the manufacturers, who're just fattening you up fo the slaughter.
they are also healthy and vibrant
so your calorie restricted 90 year old is like your uncalorie restricted 60 year old
in other words, you don't just extend lifespan, you extend the period of robust physical ability to continue working and earning a living
in a hypothetical society where these longevity genes were activated somehow in a large segment of the population, it wouldn't be crazy to imagine retirement ages of 90 or 100
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So, can we expect long lifes like vulcans have?
...
Does this gene transforms our ears in pointy ones?
Now we can have worms that live FOREVER!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The article is light on any real scientific information, so for the few people that are interested in what Pha-4 is about, checkout the following link:
pha-4 Gene Information
3 men in an old-age home were comparing notes.
The 70-year-old said that he needs to go to the toilet first thing in the morning, and it takes him 10 minutes just to get out of bed, and another half-hour in the can, so he has to get up at 6:30 if he's going to make it for breakfast at 7:00
The 80-year-old said "You think that's bad? It takes me half an hour to get out of bed, and an HOUR in the toilet, so I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning if I'm going to eat breakfast at 7:00. Heck, I have to take half a viagra so I don't end up pissing on my slippers!
The 90-year-old says "You young'uns ... I wake up at 6:55, have a piss, take a shit, and I'm all done by 7:00 ... then I have breakfast, while they change my sheets."
Oh great, now George W. Bush will live forever! The survivors will envy the dead.
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
All sugars promote tooth decay.
Also http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=65470, http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/89/6 /2963, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/05050 3152956.htm
Fructose depresses leptin and insulin levels. Leptin is normally produced when you eat, and this triggers the "ok, I'm no longer hungry" signal in your brain so you stop eating. Lowering the leptin level causes you to still feel hungry, even after you've eaten. Switching from fructose to sucrose will allow your body to regulate itself better.
Its probably going to take some major lawsuits (and bankruptcies) to fix this problem ...
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"The life expectancy these days is longer than it has ever been,"
Wanna bet? Nothing has changed in the 3 years since this, except that people have continued to get fatter ...
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/news/testimony/child obesity03022004.htm
Interesting study, but I'm always a bit leery of aging studies done in these worms (C. elegans), especially those which involve caloric restriction. Worms have the ability to follow an entirely different developmental path under certain conditions. Thus, normally, worms progress to adulthood and live a couple weeks. But if they are STARVED, at a young stage they shift into what is called a "dauer" state--they stop growing and can live for months and months. This is totally different than just living longer or stopping aging at a normal state--they are entering an entirely different developmental stage, which they normally would never see. Humans, of course, have no such developmental path. So with aging studies dealing with caloric restriction in worms, you have to wonder if they're studying something relevant to mammals, or if they are manipulating this worm-specific dauer pathway. It almost seems more likely to me that they would be affecting something to do with this dauer state. It will be interesting to see what happens when they follow up in mice.
Seriously, if you want to extend life, ban fructose as a sweetener. Unlike regular sugar, fructose blocks the hormones that make you "feel full"
So people still fall for this one, eh?
Newsflash - Plain ol' table sugar (aka "sucrose") contains nearly the same amount of fructose as that big-bad-boogeyman, High Fructose Corn syrup!
Sucrose has a 50/50 mix of fructose and dextrose, while HFC contains from 43 to 55% fructose.
But by all means, keep blaming American's fat asses on HFC rather than admitting that we simply eat way too much and exercise way too little...
- I assume that I will continue to get at least 8% annual return on my investments (on average).
- I assume that COLAs will be no more than 2% per annum - or, more specifically, that the difference between my ROI and COLAs will be at least 6%.
- I assume that my insurance will cover any drastic expenses that arise.
In reality, any one of these assumptions could be violated, of course.Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Read this.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
You don't even need a mandate to use real sugar; just remove all sugar tariffs and corn subsidies.
As I understand it, those studies were done on rats. If you let a rat eat all it wants, the rat eat itelf to death in a very short time. That's where they got this calorie restriction idea.
Thing is, rats that have a normal diet live as long as rats that have calorie restricted diet.
Or, that's how I understand it.
Only until Americans realize getting rid of things that kill you also means getting rid of guns, then they'll go all Second Amendment on you.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
You know what? Eating healthy takes a little more effort and attention, but it actually tastes a hell of a lot better.
Just walking into a fast-food place now actually makes me a little nauseous. I know tastes vary -- hell, I used to love that stuff myself. But now it's, "Ye gods, how did I ever choke that crap down?"
It's like using real maple syrup after being raised using Maple-Flavored Pancake Topping. "Oh, this is what that other stuff is pretending to be."
Sucrose is 50/50 fructose and glucose. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose
y rup
HFCS in foods is largely 90/10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_s
Only in sports drinks is the glucose content of HFCS higher than that of in sucrose.
The wikipedia article also mentions that the most common sweetener for processed foods and soft drinks is HFCS 55 (55/45), which isn't much greater in fructose content than the 50/50 of sucrose. However, they don't mention whether HFCS 90 or HFCS 55 is cheaper to process, which would make that the more prevalent variety. Regardless, it's safe to assume that HFCS foods have more fructose than if they were to have used sugar instead.
I'm not disagreeing that obesity is a result of eating too much and exercising too little. But what we eat also contributes to our health. And consuming large amounts of HFCS through processed foods doesn't help.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
While guns increase average deaths, in specific cases, ownership of a gun increases life span.
If two sane people had had guns at VT or Kileen, Tx Luby's, a lot less people would have died.
However, the average citizen tends to get angry, or has a clever child that gets a hold of the gun, or is just joking around, etc. etc. and so we get more total deaths from having a lot of guns out there.
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All that being said. The reason for the second amendment is to protect us from the government when it *inevitably* goes evil on us. They always do. They always will. When they do- hundreds of thousands or evil millions of people die really fast.
So it is just a question of how long before you need guns to protect yourself.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
True, but imagine the population going from slowly rising in this country to rapidly rising, due to a fall-off in death rates... here in the country where each individual makes a maximum impact on the enviornment, towards energy usage, and towards waste production.
Of course it'll level off after everyone gets the treatment, but the new established 'level' will be higher than it otherwise would be.
I still think the emphasis should be on living better, not living longer. Do we really want the retirement age to go up to 85 or beyond? Oy. I think there would be a lot of social changes and accomodations that would be required as well. Let's not even talk about social security or anything like that, as that gets REALLY messy.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
That doesn't change the basic reasons why the provision is there. We have lots of provisions and laws that become dated. Unfortunately, I agree with you that, despite their original intentions, at this point the combination of surveillance cameras, weaponry, and a fine sense of just how much they can take from us before we object means it is unlikely we could do anything.
On other hand- if you have a gun, you can probably get a machine gun. And indirect attacks so successful in Iraq would be equally effective here. And, the army is no where near big enough to take on an entire population armed even with hunting rifles and being sneaky.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.