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Scientists Identify a Potentially Universal Mechanism of Aging
cybergenesis2008 points us to a summary of research out of Harvard Medical School in which a set of genes known to affect aging in yeast was found to affect aging in mice as well. The genes, called sirtuins, perform two particular tasks; regulating which genes are "on" and "off," and also helping to repair damaged DNA. As an organism ages, the frequency of damage to DNA increases, leaving less time for the sirtuins' regulatory tasks. The increasingly unregulated genes then become a significant factor in aging. Realizing this, the researchers "administered extra copies of the sirtuin gene [to the mice], or fed them the sirtuin activator resveratrol, which in turn extended their mean lifespan by 24 to 46 percent." We discussed the plans for this research a few years ago.
But don't worry guys, they're going to come out with a new class of bailout drugs for you guys, like Paulsonex, and Philgramma, and Greenspanitol.
My pet snake thanks you.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, at least people are waiting until more research comes in on the effects of this before trying to mass market this as some sort of magical age extender for humans.
Oh... wait...
Though it will be interesting to see if this has any noticeable effects on the many people that I'm sure are taking this stuff regularly.
I'm honestly scared of the day that they do figure out how to cure aging, because it will lead to an even greater stratification of social status and class. Most of the wealth in this country (and indeed most of the world) is concentrated with men who are over the age of 50-60 years. When they die, that wealth is then redistributed. Those people will be amongst the first to benefit from any such medical process; And if history has been any judge, that medical process will be expensive and there'll be little incentive to make it cheaper. The end result will be people who are born and work their entire lives, then die, never having had the opportunity to aquire wealth, because those who still have it aren't dying anymore.
This won't be something for humanity to celebrate. If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease? And the answer will be in what kind of life is possible in that world. It won't be as good as the one you have now, I assure you.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
24%-46% longer human life would be an economic disaster.
i have identified a potentially universal mechanism of aging: time
what scientists have discovered is the opposite: a dna repair mechanism which is overwhelmed over time, and perhaps a way to bolster the repair mechanism so it is overwhelmed a little later
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fun. No really, the older I get, the more fun life gets. My thirties rocked hard, and life in my forties is thus far great.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Funny that the wikipedia entry for Resveratrol states exactly the opposite, i.e. no extension of lifespan of mice in recent experiments. Maybe it needs updating?
"This is proof that all life on earth is part of a drag and drop object oriented genome project and therefore must be ID."
Have fun with the fallacies. :P
If it pans out, they could always start administering it in a closed water system like bottled water. Floride for the 21st century...
Reservatol is a chemical extracted from grape skins when exposed to fungus (yeast), and present in red wine.
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There are two problems I see with the usual theory that aging is related to "accumulation of damage", as the article seems to imply:
1) Humans live, barring accidents and disease, about 80-90 years, 120 at the outside. My dog lives 15-16 years, 22 on the outside. My dog gets all the normal signs of aging -- arthritis, gray hair, join and muscle pain, etc. But at an age that humans are not even entering their physical prime.
2) From a certain point of view, there is only one organism on earth, and it's billions of years old. Pieces of the organism fall off now and then, but it constantly renews itself. Slightly different each, but going through a consistent cycle of "physical prime". How can it renew itself when, presumably, all cells are "accumulating damage"?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
While your comment includes _some_ correct thoughts, what is correct is overwhelmed by your foolish notions. But you have been indoctrinated well. Your teachers should be pleased.
First, wealth isn't a finite resource. It is more like bytes and wood (we make more), than gold or oil (short of transmutation, finite).
We make wealth all the time. You add value to things by moving them from place to place, transforming them from one state to another (raw to finished, recycled, etc.), by performing services, inventing things, and so on.
It is nice (from a greedy point of view) when people die and their heirs get money the heirs didn't have to work for. But that isn't a redistribution of a finite resource. It is a "windfall profit". And as anyone with dying relatives will tell you, often dying relatives means a boatload of money out of _your_ pocket. Funerals, hospice care, etc. cost a God awful lot of money. That "wealth" is distributed from the immediate (living) family to the healthcare & death industries. Why do you think 50-60s hold the money but 60-70s don't. Because once you hit your 60s, your costs exceed your income. You spend your nest-egg you saved for 30 years.
The only real "resource" issues I see with immortality is land and leadership roles. But that is mitigated by the social aspects of immortality (see below) (e.g., 30 year mortgages turning into 60 year mortgages).
Second, why would their be "little incentive to make it cheaper"? Every medical advance has become cheaper over time. That is the whole point of generic drugs. Healthcare ain't cheap, but its like computers. A $1,000 PC in 2008 gets you a Hell of a lot better PC than $3,000 in 1998.
What kills healthcare is (a) lawsuits, a necessary evil, and (b) nationalized medicine (e.g., where Canada's Supreme Court has ruled that "a right to healthcare" means only a right to be on a waiting list. After all, this "right to healthcare" mantra is really a demand for immortality; "I should be immortal and my God, government, should give that to me").
What makes you think (to you your Marxist phraseology) the proletariat will not turnout with pitchforks & torches to see immortality pushed down the social ladder? Maybe in the EU (where an anti-democratic bureaucracy replaced an aristocracy), or China (mature fascist) would this even be conceivable (but not likely).
Third, you ignore the social effects of immortality.
A long lived population is likely to:
a) have less children or have them later (think and extreme version of Europe's demographics). It'll probably take longer to get a house, degree, etc. As life expectancy increased in the West so did our period of adolescence. You used to get married at 20, have kids, and be an adult. Now you can sit in college until your 30 (Ph.d), marry in your late-20s/30s, and never have kids. Adulthood has been pushed back substantially.
b) become very risk adverse. When you risk your life (or life savings) you aren't risking 30 years but 300 years.
c) you'll have to create a mechanism for moving people out of leadership roles or the Boss is likely to be The Boss for 100 years (like Motorola used to only promote based on seniority). This may be solved by increased career changing. Of course, with less children, there are less people trying to move up.
So a few decades from now I'll be immortal, controlling my computer with my mind, and having sex in the holodeck? Future, here I come!
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
I, for one, welcome our immortal rodent overlords!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I wish I could mod down individual paragraphs of articles.
Like our current financial crisis, the aging process might also be a product excessive deregulation.
-1, Off-topic
It's the awful truth isn't it? The Baby Boomers really aren't ever going to go away are they?
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
To increase lifespan would result in wiser people. They wouldn't have to dunder into wars that they knew to be stupid, Bush-style. Provided a drug, like NMDA (the acuity drug, not a narcotic) were used also, we'd have a smarter, greatly more literate, insightful crowd. The mellowing and depth, the even-ness of mind that comes with age would be excellent. And we would treasure the children more. Older people melt when they see the innocence of little ones.
I'm honestly scared of the day that they do figure out how to cure aging (basic diseases like mumps, rubella, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, etc etc), because it will lead to an even greater stratification of social status and class. Most of the wealth in this country (and indeed most of the world) is concentrated with men who are over the age of 50-60 years. When they die, that wealth is then redistributed. Those people will be amongst the first to benefit from any such medical process; And if history has been any judge, that medical process will be expensive and there'll be little incentive to make it cheaper (medical processes are initially expensive, but rapidly become cheaper to the point of ubiqity, and there is great incentive to make it cheaper (mass production = more purchasers = greater profit). The end result will be people who are born and work their entire lives, then die, never having had the opportunity to aquire wealth, (due to greater health and longer lives, having many more opportunities to aquire wealth) because those who still have it aren't dying anymore (and therefore live longer, spend more, and via spending more, enriching others).
This won't be something for humanity to celebrate (because you prefer people to die young and poor?). If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease? (Very simple - because people don't rely on subsistence farming, they don't need huge families of which most die before age five; therefore, smaller families, lower population. lower enviromental impact, and greater percentage of resources and wealth available for the population as a whole). And the answer will be in what kind of life is possible in that world. It won't be as good as the one you have now, I assure you. (You think the discovery and invention of vaccines, bandages, surgery, hospitals, CPR, and every other medical advance of the past several thousand years has made life *worse*?) ...
Honestly, the above poster knows very little of medicine, history, or human nature.
Considering the fact that at the time of this posting a Brad Pitt film is coming out on the premise of reverse aging (implying an entirely new paradigm for the consideration of time), and indeed, that this is not exactly a new subject - consider Vanilla Sky, Forever Young; let alone the Space Oddyssey, which really as an expose kind of says it all - artifacts? What artifacts? Utah? What?
As for population - I get a little irked every time this comes up in debate; I am fully confident that the carrying capacity of Earth alone is well over at least several times the current population, provable by the hoarding of water into a rather large volume of pipes littered about the major population centers, let alone such an architectural-planning atrocity as Vegas or LA - it's simple, just let the water out, irrigate, develop an organic-watershed model for watercycling (oh wait, it's called a wetland), and who knows, maybe even develop a distributed-egality algorithm to upload to the soon-to-be-vacant servers of Wall St.
(and no it's not a fallacy to cite film as a source of scientific elucidation, considering the, er, studio system)
When they die, that wealth is then redistributed.
Actually these days most of the wealth has been drained before death, by nursing home care and the like.
This research just shows the size of the black hole known as The Great Society in the CBO projections 30 years out is a fraction of its actual size. When the Baby Boomers hit 120 the system completely unravels. It's already projected to raise tax rates beyond the point where it's more cost effective to be on welfare than to work, so I'm not sure this actually makes a difference, except perhaps it'll only be available to the most wealthy in secret while the rest of society is functionally in turmoil.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Those aliens sure are going to be happy that we've discovered how to stop them from getting old as well.
If they say raise retirement age from 60s to 80's and at 80 you feel like you are 60
Why has the retirement age not already risen with the vast improvements in healthcare and life expectancy?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Nirvana is where it's at!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
if you magically removed all preprogrammed senescence, our brains, arteries, kidneys... it would al still fall apart over time
we will extend lives, certainly, but there is an upper limit of the processes you are talking about, across which normal entropy rots us out
thereis no magical biological process which protects us forever from entropy. because that process itself is subject to entropy
we will extend human life to 200, 300, 500 years. but in the end, it all falls apart, and you die
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The parent has it 180 degrees backwards. We are in this crisis because people invested too aggressively, not because they spent too much.
All the agents involved in this crisis, the Homebuyers, Lenders, Bankers, and Hedge Funds, all displayed a textbook propensity for extreme accumulation of wealth. As every fool who has every taken econ 101 knows, investment is the exact opposite of consumption.
Greed was certainly a large motivator, but it there were others, namely envy and fear. Otherwise rational people got invested simply because they couldn't stand that other people were out performing them and getting larger returns.
At the very bottom of the pyramid fear was a significant factor. Many of them jumped on the bandwagon because they felt they were slowly slipping behind America's cruel economic barriers. The saw the price of homes ascending beyond their reach, taking with them their shot at the American Dream.
People didn't in general buy because they are prodigal retards, they bought because they were very conscious of the acutely widening gap between the haves and the have-nots that the OP alluded to, and they desperately wanted to be and the side of the haves.
inside Dick Clark's medicine cabinet!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
WTF does it mean for there to be a range of means? It's not like they're sampling the population of all mice to which they gave this treatment, and have to estimate the mean.
you understand my point
thanks for the nitpicking, its added a lot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In most red wines. I've been drinking an awful lot of reds lately. So if my lifespan were 72 years that means I'm pushing for 90 now. Yippee!
This works out perfectly!! I was hoping to work my crappy job and have my kids mooch of me for centuries!!
"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~Me
Is that they really just made the first zombies. Sure the mice were animated for 24-47% longer, but they died at the same time as normal mice.
As an organism ages, the frequency of damage to DNA increases,
Don't you just love scientific religion? 'Tis a mathematical certainty! /bow
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
It will become necessary to kill them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm honestly scared of the day that they do figure out how to cure aging, because it will lead to an even greater stratification of social status and class.
Forget money for a second -- think of civil rights. Do you think that we would have equal racial rights nowadays if 100 years ago we had developed this technology, and no one of middle class or better means alive in 1900 had died of natural causes since then?
Right now the gay rights movement is in a situation that might be telling. In age groups under the 35, support for & opposition to gay marriage is 50-50. Opposition slowly climbs until it reaches a peak of 90% opposed around age 70. (Above that age support climbs a bit, but so does "don't know.")
If everyone alive today was alive 100 years from now (and not senile), then chances are that the gay rights movement would never gain any traction. New births might tilt the demographic, but we have a lot more to worry about than civil rights & economic strati if we find immortality without controlling population growth strictly.
Putting aside any feelings you might have for / against gay marriage, can you see how immortality may close of future rights battles? Who knows what we may have to encounter in the future of civil rights -- artificial organisms, hybrid life forms, AI, or even simple human issues like transgender rights or immigrant rights. The broad historical march of American society towards greater freedom and greater recognition of those different from us as still people may grind to a crawl or even a halt.
And the same goes for scientific progress as well. As Max Planck once said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Think of what immortality means for that as well.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The truth hurts, don't it?
SHOOT ME NOW
The comment was on who has the money now.
Who invests? Who runs industry? The people with money. And eventually that is women. What do you think women do when they inherit their husband's money? Bury it in the back yard? Hold quilting bees? No, they spend it, they donate to causes they believe in, they make political contributions, they run companies... and they'll be doing that for a good 10 years or more after their husbands kick off from work related stress...
If you think "men" are in charge you are suffering from a rather astonishing degree of ignorance. And by the way do you think saying "Bah" actually impresses anyone? I mean if you want to do sheep impressions by all means go ahead... lol.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
"Scientists Identify a Potentially Universal Mechanism of Aging "
Yeah! Having kids.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
The problems is that this is not really a universal mechanism of aging. While Sinclair and associates are clearly doing good work they are not answering a fundamental question -- "Why do all complex organisms age and die?" The fact that their work shows an extension of mean lifespans but not maximal lifespan is critical. Similar results were demonstrated a year or more ago with completely different work involving telomere extension in mice with increased tumor suppressor gene capability. One can extend mean lifespan in a group of individuals but one does not extend maximal lifespan -- thus one is not dealing with the "universal" mechanisms of aging. If one *is* dealing with universal mechanisms then one would have a mouse that lives anywhere from 120 years (= ~maximal human lifespan) to 220 years (= ~maximal Bowhead whale lifespan) and *longer*. If you are not addressing why a Bowhead whale (a mammal) can live ~220+ years vs. a mouse (another mammal) living ~3 years then one is *not* dealing with a universal mechanism of aging.
The problem may be that they are dealing with how double strand DNA breaks are dealt with (involving the quantity and relocation of sirtuins) rather than why the occur in the first place (i.e. what are the causes of genomic decay?) and how they are dealt with (the non-homologous DNA double-strand break repair processes). If the DNA double strand break repair processes inherently corrupt the genome (my current opinion) then *that* is a universal mechanism of aging -- not whether one has enough sirtuins (which are involved in decloaking the DNA for such repairs). The only organism I am currently aware of which uses a different process for double strand break repair is members of the Deinococcus bacterial group. All other species utilize enzymes which inherently corrupt the genome during the repair process. The sirtuins are "side actors" in this process and they play only a minor role in the grand scheme.
Quite simple isn't it?
Whatever they do, just don't let them give this thing to the Chinese!! there's enough of them already...if we make their lives longer there really won't e ANY space left.. we're already short of living space...we've colonised africa too.. TAKE TO THE OCEANS! (since NASA seems to be having problems recently sending men towards the moon..)
this is a virtual insanity that always seems to be governed by our love for this useless twisting of our new technology.
Listening to Futures in Biotech this past week, I came across similar work about aging that's quite interesting.
http://kenyonlab.ucsf.edu/html/publications.html
So far most of the work is on lower life-forms but it comes down to the IGF-1 signaling pathway and mutations of the genes responsible for the IGF-1 receptor sites affecting aging. That's pretty glossed over but you can read more about it if you like.
people still procreate (unless they stop it as well), and resources are limited. as people increase, and the availability of resources decrease, we'll have less resources to share. Eventually the net energy input from the sun (or the earth's decaying core, or fusion or fission or what have you) cannot sustain the entire population's energy consumption; thermodynamic laws take over, and we, even if our aging has stopped, would naturally return to soil. Also, think of the social, economic, and political implications. E.g., at a small social scale...hm, you don't wanna date a super hot babe whose actual age is 85, do you? Politics-wise, politicians wouldn't die of old age...anyone who wants to take over would have to resort to other measures like assassination? Economic-wise, what do people who wouldn't die of old age need? Do they still consume things of their own era? Does this mean industries have to sustain production of various eras, or do these old people change with time? Family-structure-wise, how does it feel for you to be able to interact with your great^20 grandpa and grandma, essentially your very old ancestors? Wouldn't all families in the world have essentially *living* blood-related ties as people of each generation marry and procreate. If we plot this converging big family structure as a network graph vs time, how does it look like? Is it going to give us any idea on how to improve the present Internet, or the way virus spreads? When the era of prosthetic body comes, how will the transition from non-aging biological shell to prosthetic body be? What are the implications? Not to mention cryogenics and suspended animation. Experience-wise, barring any accidents, how would a 1000 year living do to your thinking and personality? I do not believe we'll get bored because socially we keep changing. When all that you will have seen and done exceed your brain's capacity to remember (after 1000 years) do you lose your original identity as you forget things for real (i.e. not tucked away somewhere in the brain)?
all this, of course, happens before we are able to terraform other planets, or discover a way to move to a parallel universe with the same physic laws, or transform ourselves to mere non-tangible data form*, or find a way to modify physic laws as we see fit (modifying laws doesn't seem scientific, but I do not discount this; we essentially become gods), or kill ourselves in some massive scale destruction, or change our total energy usage patterns (think of the entire mankind as a computer on standby mode, conserving energy until something interesting happens), or energy consumption mechanisms (humans use photosynthesis/fusion instead of eating bacon and ramen)...
* sorry I have to say this as well even if it's unrelated at all: if we're converted into data, and our consciousness's complexity increase (we become more sophisticated and advanced), wouldn't regularity decrease, and soon our data pattern approximates random signals? What's the implication? Or am I missing something? Would regularity just increase? But wouldn't that violate thermodynamic laws? What would Shannon say to this?
** I think I'm way off topic, but I think /.ers would love to hear all that seeing we all are geeks...
Man, I bet a 200-year-old woman would know some fancy tricks in the sack, if she had put in enough years of practice.
And if she looked alive enough to bone, that you would want to try...
A 25% increase in human lifespan would be pretty amazing. If this actually does turn out to be practical, we get that much closer to the tipping point where lifespan increases more than one year of life per year of research.
I don't expect them to fix the tissue regeneration vs. cancer dilemma any time soon, though. You can't just keep on dividing cells without some mutation, and cells don't live forever.
When wealth of the magnitude of a few million dollars and up is passed on, the heirs don't just receive fruits of their parent's labour as a comfortable life - they receive real power.
If people did live for hundreds of years, yes there would be a real risk of overpopulation even compared to what we have now. But if the people with power, the ultra wealthy, knew they'd be living for long enough that their actions would eventually have consequences on themselves - would not they be more inclined to think long term? There's a limit to what wealth can protect you from.
Even beyond over population, the wealthy would have to consider who they treated the environment more, and what sort of innovations they enabled or stifled. The way things work now, you can make a few billion making the world a worse place and afford to be insulated against that damage for the rest of your life. The longer people live though, the less feasible that becomes.
Take a look at what the ultra rich are doing already with the longer life spans today's medical technology are giving them. They're funding cure-centric (as opposed to profit-centric) approaches to the diseases they're coming down with, or fear coming down with. Of course, it's a bit of a hail Mary pass to start supporting better schools and better medical research when you're sixty, eh?
Longer life spans may well shift the most powerful among us to start treating the whole planet as something they're going to have to life with for a long, long time.
A lot of money is spent training each generation. At the age of 21 we finally get out into the workforce, and work for 30-40 years. Then our minds start to go and we retire.
FTFA, not only did the mice live longer, but they did not show signs of aging (physical and mental degradation)
Keeping the workforce going would be beneficial to society because the cost of education would be offset by a longer output.
There are old people out in the world now that could be contibuting member of society if they were more able bodied.
Not only is it missing a word, it's a weird interjection of politics in a science article. Some might argue the current financial crisis didn't have to do with deregulation at all but pressure from a certain political party taking power next year on banks to make high-risk loans to poor people.
Entropy is relevant in a closed system (e.g. cut off your air supply), then it kills you in seconds. With access to energy, the organism self-repairs and can overcome entropy for as long as it has the evolutionary programming to do so. Wild-state humans get eaten by a sabertooth at 30, or die of some plague before that, so we (the soma) have not evolved to self-repair the problems we encounter at age 80. Look up antagonistic pleiotropy. In contrast, consider the germ line. Every cell in your body can trace its lineage back several billion-with-a-b years, giving entropy a good kicking along the way. It's an engineering problem, nothing more - complex but solvable.
What cause do the millions that have no access to current drugs have to care about the invention of future drugs they'll have no access to? None. The issue is as irrelevant to them as the price of rocket fare to the ISS. There are enough people in that strait who care not a whit about your precious intellectual property to induce some social change if they were aware of their lack. Their lack is a direct result of the system we've put in place to protect the inventors of drugs and being denied life saving medicine they are entitled to resent that system. You say invention will stop. That seems unlikely, but what of it to them? They don't stand to benefit from its continuance. Why should they care?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A lot of things need to be fixed in the current US healthcare system. However, a lot of "stick it to them" solutions that are suggested just won't work in the long term.
I have one suggestion which isn't a "stick it to them" cure, but doesn't improve the situation for the poor. Most providers of care will not schedule or treat people who have no insurance, even if they're able to pay. This is just plain wrong and should be legally prohibited. Punitive "discounts" negotiated by insurer "groups" that do absolutely nothing except cement the physician-insurer codependence and drive up the cost for "cash" customers should be prohibited by law. Worse than improving the costs for covered insured, the required paperwork actually multiplies the costs to provide the care, the costs to the covered insured and through negative discounting deprives cash customers of care they would be able to afford otherwise. This is much of the nonsense that is making perfectly good doctors decide to quit practice. Doctors, dentists and other care providers should be required to publish a fee schedule and while they might be permitted to refuse care to those unable to pay, they should not be permitted to refuse service based on how their services are paid for, whether through insurance or for cash.
The money does say "for all debts" right on it after all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.