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.

Comments

My genes are regulated as hell

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Re:My genes are regulated as hell

[davester666]

Hell, reading the article's title, I thought they had discovered that time passing as a universal cause for people to age.

Longer "Use by" dates on mice

[PPH]

My pet snake thanks you.

Re:Longer "Use by" dates on mice

[netfool]

That's what she said

Immortality is scary

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Immortality is scary

[jellomizer]

If you can say younger for 50% longer that means there is 50% more time you can work. If they say raise retirement age from 60s to 80's and at 80 you feel like you are 60 then what can happen is there is more time you can contribute to social security thus more money in the system. Also longer time where the person is benefiting to the economy and less of taking what you deserve. You are under the impression that as people gain wealth most of them will horde it. While the truth is that they will try to spend it. So if the average joe can make more when they do retire with an exptected 20-30 years of their lives they will spend it more liberally, then if they had little.

Re:Immortality is scary

[thermian]

Before they cure aging, they have to cure arthritis. What use is living to be a thousand if for 940 of those years you are immobile.

Arthritis is an interesting case, since it strikes humans after breeding age mostly, so evolution hasn't killed it off.

Re:Immortality is scary

[owlnation]

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?

What will happen? I can answer that in one word -- "rebellion"

The rich may not age, but they will still bleed.

Re:Immortality is scary

[Rayban]

The answer is simple: anti-arthritis death sqauds. If you end up with arthritis, we kill you and your whole family.

It's obvious- why hasn't anyone implemented it yet?

Re:Immortality is scary

[girlintraining]

You are under the impression that as people gain wealth most of them will horde it. While the truth is that they will try to spend it.

There are many economists, researchers, and liberal arts majors, along with about 200 million working poor, that very much disagree with you. But you can ignore the liberal arts majors.

Re:Immortality is scary

[miracle69]

Wealth is not finite. There is more wealth in the world right now than there was 500 years ago. Wealth is a concept.

Re:Immortality is scary

[FleaPlus]

If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease?

Or maybe people will finally start realizing that (especially with ever-increasing technology) economics isn't a zero-sum game.

Re:Immortality is scary

[Reality Master 101]

There is so much wrong in your post that it actually makes me weep that you're really serious.

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.

If history is any judge, medical processes get consistently cheaper and more widely available.

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.

Do you seriously believe the only way to acquire wealth is to sit and wait for someone to die and have it given to you? Sheesh.

Let me tell you the easiest way to become wealthy: SAVE. That simple. Don't be a typical consumer idiot. Save 25% of your income. By the time you retire, you will be one of those rich people you think hoard all the wealth.

If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease?

What makes you think immortality leads to population increases? Actually, I think it's far more likely that it will lead to a decreasing population. I doubt that immortal people will continue to crank out kids decade after decade. It's more likely that an older population of people who have "been there, done that" will be done making kids, and we'll actually have an human extinction crisis in 1,000 years.

What that means is that immorality leads to a decreasing population leading to more resources for fewer people.

Re:Immortality is scary

[c6gunner]

There are many economists, researchers, and liberal arts majors, along with about 200 million working poor, that very much disagree with you. But you can ignore the liberal arts majors.

You can ignore all of them. There are also 100 million Americans who believe that the Earth is being visited by little green men who have nothing better to do than shove metal objects in the anal cavities of dirt-poor yokels in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Idaho. Just because an idea is popular, that doesn't mean it's true.

As for the original claim - he's absolutely right. Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it. That's part of the reason why the US is in such a hole right now - because people like living beyond their means.

What you and the other numbnut are referring to is the infinitesimal percentage of people who actually know how to make large amounts of money, and use it wisely. Personally, I don't give a damn if those people manage to "hoard" ten times what they can accumulate today - they generally generate so much wealth and advancement in the process of acquiring their wealth that their personal fortunes pale in comparison. You and your buddy can bitch about Bill Gates and Richard Branson all you like, but each of them does more good for the human race in one day than you will in a lifetime.

Re:Immortality is scary

[n dot l]

What will happen? I can answer that in one word -- "rebellion"

Oh, please. We'd be too busy stabbing each other in the back, fighting for what little scraps they do leave us, to ever do them much harm. Much as it has always been.

What kills them in the end (because nothing can last forever) will not be a rebellion of the poor. It will be their own stupidity as they will, inevitably, become bored, complacent, decadent and distracted - random misfortune will do the rest. It won't be till the very end, when their power is already good as gone, that angry mobs storm the palace and take credit for the people's great victory.

Re:Immortality is scary

[girlintraining]

If history is any judge, medical processes get consistently cheaper and more widely available.

I'm sorry but the facts do not support this conclusion. The percentage of uninsured persons in the United States has been on the rise for some time and as of 2006 was at just over 20%. The percentage of people (workers and dependents) with employment-based health insurance has dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 59 percent in 2006. Clearly, availability is going down. As to costs... You must not read the papers. Medicaid is about to go bankrupt due to skyrocketing health care costs.

Do you seriously believe the only way to acquire wealth is to sit and wait for someone to die and have it given to you? Sheesh.

I didn't say it was the only way. They could spend it. The majority of wealth (~70%) is owned by under 5% of the population, and given their spending habits, I just think it's far more practical to wait for them to die.

Let me tell you the easiest way to become wealthy: SAVE. That simple. Don't be a typical consumer idiot. Save 25% of your income. By the time you retire, you will be one of those rich people you think hoard all the wealth.

I thought the easiest way was being born into a rich family or winning the lottery. And as to "saving"... Honey, don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining; Most of us are living paycheck to paycheck, and we spend everything we get on basic necessities. We're not "consumer idiots" -- the technical term for people like us is fucking broke.

What makes you think immortality leads to population increases?

People live longer and they're still going to want to fuck. Heeeere's your sign.

I doubt that immortal people will continue to crank out kids decade after decade.

Funny, since most people look at having kids as their best shot at immortality.

Re:Immortality is scary

[Free the Cowards]

If you take the total amount of assets (converted to a monentary value) and divide by the estimated world population, you're in for a shock: That number hasn't really changed in the last 500 years.

Really? Do you have the figures to back this up? Because simply looking at the average wealth in the "West", plus the average wealth in the two most populous countries which, while not super high, is way higher than it used to be, it seems to me that the per capita wealth in the world is a lot more than it was 500 years ago. Yes, some groups are being left behind, but on the whole people are much richer than they were.

Consider, for example, that 500 years ago famine was a fairly regular occurrence. Now people only die of hunger in politically-diseased countries, and there really aren't that many of them. The vast majority of the world has enough to eat. That alone puts the modern day far ahead.

Re:Immortality is scary

[Free the Cowards]

Medicare is going bankrupt because aggregate costs are increasing. But that says nothing about individual procedures. If we wanted to provide 1950-level care today, it would cost less than it cost in 1950. But we expect better, and so we pay more, even though the cost of the individual pieces has gone down.

Re:Immortality is scary

[Martin Blank]

Bill Gates has not just sat on his horde. One of the reasons that he's no longer at the top is because he's donated vast sums to various causes, totaling nearly $30 billion, and has said that he intends to do the same with almost all of the rest.

Re:Immortality is scary

[nugneant]

Because the "anti-arthritis" gene may be a recessive trait. Alternatively, if you kill their entire families, eventually you'll either have to draw a line somewhere, or wipe out the entire planet. No, it'd be much more logical to have a harem of healthy thirty year old women ready to procreate with any 90 year old man not suffering from arthritis. Hopefully it's not an X-linked gene.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a scientist, or even particularly intelligent

Re:Immortality is scary

[Albertosaurus]

I thought the easiest way was being born into a rich family or winning the lottery. And as to "saving"... Honey, don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining; Most of us are living paycheck to paycheck, and we spend everything we get on basic necessities. We're not "consumer idiots" -- the technical term for people like us is fucking broke.

The technical term for people like you is "delusional". If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you're living the American Dream, a.k.a., you're living beyond your means. And guess what, you don't have the fucking right to live a lifestyle you can't support. Deal with it. You can start by spending the time you normally use to read Slashdot on doing something productive. It's not a basic necessity. Neither is your TV, DVD player, or going out to the pub. I'm sick to death of whiny bastards with an disproportionate sense of entitlement. Then again, asses who can't manage their money are my primary source of revenue. So I shouldn't complain.

Re:Immortality is scary

[h4rm0ny]

The one flaw I see in your plan is that I'm not a 90-year old man without arthritis. Other than that, your logic is excellent.

Re:Immortality is scary

[smoker2]

Photography - Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre - French
Radio - Hertz - German
TV - Paul Nipkow (mechanical) German, Karl Braun (electronic CRT) German
Phone - Antonio Meucci Italian
Car - Nicholas Joseph Cugnot (Steam) French, Alphonse Bear de Rochas (ICE otto cycle) French

The last three are derivatives of everything else, the internet is electronic communication, space flight is an extension of Von Braun (German) and the Russians were there first, and a modern understanding of physics is so vague as to be useless. But Einstein was not an American citizen until the war came and he was already 53 years old.

You're welcome - The Rest of The World.

Re:Immortality is scary

[gregorio]

The investment class doesn't "provide jobs and growth" so much as it skims wealth off of the top. The U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion, the workforce of about 150,000,000: the average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value per year. But the average annual wage is only about $39,000.

Except that economics doesn't work that way. The GDP is not about "creating value", but mostly about moving money around. You're also wrong when you talk about "the average American worker" when mentioning TOTAL/COUNT.

General Electric has a Net Income of 22 billion dollars, and 370 000 workers. That's nearly 60 thousand dollars worth of profit for every single employee. So an extremely profitable company will yield something like 2/3 of your estimate. Even worse when you consider that GE is a good employer.

If you compare GE's 60k USD and your mentioned average 40k USD, it's a pretty fair game: their profits are not based just on their workforce but also based on more than half a trillion dollars in debt and more than 130 billion worth of assets. Taking only 60k of profit per employee while having to finance such a massive infrastructure is pretty fair.

You also fail to account the fact that most companies are owned by the average american. While powerful banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are the first-tier owners of billions of dollars worth of stocks, they're actually buying them in the name of pension funds and also using money borrowed from your bank account.

Re:24%-46% longer human life

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading over your 30-page argument and its wealth of calculations, charts, and academic sources cited across multiple peer-reviewed journals stating much the same, I have to say that I completely agree with you.

Re:uh

[qw0ntum]

Time is not a mechanism for aging. Our bodies do not undergo "time" and age as a result. Assuming these researchers are correct, our bodies undergo some process like the one discussed here, which causes our bodies to break down in one way or the other. Time does not do the breaking down. The breaking down happens in time.

Put another way, it's not the passage of time itself that causes us to age, it's something that occurs during that passage of time, such as the process we're talking about here.

Hmmm

[Reality Master 101]

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"?

Re:it's called entropy

[qw0ntum]

I'm not arguing that life is infinitely extendable, I'm just saying time is not a mechanism by which aging occurs. To say so misrepresents time: it is not a biological process. Whatever process occurs in time would be the mechanism by which aging occurs; in your terms, the way entropy manifests itself within our bodies.