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Increasing Stem Cell Production For Faster Healing
Wandering Wombat tips a BBC story about researchers from Imperial College London who were able to stimulate stem cell production by a factor of 100 in the bone marrow of mice. Such stem cells are released by the marrow to help with the regeneration of damaged bone and tissue. "Techniques already exist to increase the numbers of blood cell producing stem cells from the bone marrow, but the study focuses on two other types — endothelial, which produce the cells which make up our blood vessels, and mesenchymal, which can become bone or cartilage cells." The scientists hope that the increased production rate could be used to greatly speed tissue repair and to allow recovery from wounds that would otherwise be too severe. "There are also hopes that the technique could help damp down autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, where the body's immune system attacks its own tissues. Mesenchymal stem cells are known to have the ability to damp down the immune system." The full research paper is available at Cell Stem Cell.
Or simply 'dampen'? 'Suppress' is a little more severe than 'dampen'.
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I can recall this Star Trek episode where people on a planet never aged, but the horror of it was that because nobody died, the planet filled up with people so that no beauty could flourish.
Medical discoveries like this one, by increasing the level of reproduction rates in stem cells by a factor of 100, remind me that eventually humanity will cure death. However, unlike that fateful society on that distant memory of a Star Trek episode, we have INFINITE stars and potential to flourish outside of our known universe, and therefore we should not fear immortality.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Just not having children is a much simpler solution---the absurd premise of "The Mark of Gideon" was that these people couldn't be sterilised, they healed so well. That's unlikely, with human beings---anyway, how is it that one has med tech good enough to create this sort of super-healing (which seems unlikely ab initio) but can't make it be contraceptive at the same time.
Anyway, there is no evidence that enough of us can get into space fast enough to make a difference on Earth. See here for an elaboration.
Technically, there is no indication that there are an "infinite" number of stars, and even if you mean "planet" by "universe", no proof yet that we ca flourish off-world (I like my bone mass, especially around my spinal cord.)
"same time." --> "same time?"
"ca " --> "can"
"off-world " --> "off-world."
Duh; too much caffeine, or not enough.
This is awesome. Biology is doing amazing things.
I do have one worry, though: Stem cells, some research is starting to indicate, are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow new tissue to grow, but on the other, that new growth may end up being cancerous. One wonders whether the fact that we don't naturally produce stem cells at this rate reflects the optimal balance that evolution has found.
If we could control and cure (or prevent?) cancer reliably, however, this sort of technology would be great.
It's like Xi Sui Jing, without the decades of practice required.
I'm not a biologist, but wouldn't this shorten your life span?
I remember reading about Telomeres and how they shorten as you age (and this is why you age).
Would this accelerated growth/generation cause these to shorten at a more rapid pace?
This is the perfect scenario for a remake of 'The Blob'
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Yeah, soon, soon we'll be able to become splicers!
Possibly. I've wondered the same thing, but wouldn't that actually be in conflict with Einstein's Relativity, particularly Special Relativity? I mean, the speed of light is constant in a vacuum for all observers, so that's it, right? Doesn't that more or less prove that distance in space means something and is thus always relevant?
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. . . city halls across the U.S. are flooded with request from men wanting to change their name to Wolverine.
Can I bum a sig?
Menopause is actually a more complex thing, and actually had _zero_ impact on human evolution back when it mattered.
The problem is that all mammal females are born with a finite number of "eggs". Usually more than enough for an average life span. Again, it's actually controlled by evolution, or rather natural selection. If you have too few it's a handicap, so nature tends to select those with more. But here's the important part: enough for your expected life span. If a cat lives for, say, 3 years outside, there's no evolutionary pressure to have enough ovules for 30 years. If an ape lives for an average 20 years, there is no evolutionary pressure to pre-produce enough ovules for 300 years.
So basically all you really see there is that the life span of our ancestors was _much_ shorter, back when we evolved into humans.
As late as the Old Kingdom period in Egypt -- and that's already talking about 5000 years ago, out of 200,000 that Homo Sapiens existed for, or the _millions_ leading to Homo Sapiens -- if you got past the high infant mortality, the median age for death was in the mid-20's for women. (And mid-30's for men.)
And just to stress it, I'm not talking about "life expectancy at birth" (which would include the dead babies), but the actual second peak of the age-at-death curve. We have a ton of records (plaques, scrolls, etc) detailing when someone died, and if you plot X = age, Y = number of such records dead at that age, you get a scary spike in the first 3 years of age, then a second peak in the mid 20's for women, and mid-30's for men.
So that was the number of years that you needed ovules for. The average women got married at 12 and died at, say, 24. That's 12 years of being fertile. That's all the ovules it needed. Having enough of them until the age of 60 is already a _massive_ margin for the case she lived longer. It's having 4 times more than the average will ever need.
(Actually, even more. Ovulation is inhibited while you're pregnant or have someone sucking milk out of your breast, as a safety. So someone making an average of, say, a child every 2 years and nursing each for a year, would use up only a fraction of what a modern woman uses.)
At any rate, an ultra-tiny minority lived long enough to reach menopause. There was _no_ evolutionary pressure to push it until later.
What you see is a relatively modern age phenomenon. The life expectancy has risen so dramatically, that the women actually get to reach the end of that counter. What was once a 300% margin, now is actually less than enough.
In computer terms: it's a buffer overflow error. Literally.
But the same modern age all but stopped evolution. And nobody makes a child every 2 years any more. People stop at a much lower number, menopause or not. There is no natural selection to change that any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Man, someone trying to get flamed by implying we couldn't cure death. What a jerk. Good one, mods.
Well, I think "important" is a personal call, I'd be much more interested in news about a cure for arthritis than MS if I had arthritis but not MS
Moreover it's not always about which disease is a higher priority. From the blurby article, it does seem odd that they'd mention that instead of MS, but there could be a technical explanation that could have been judged not worth putting into the article. I have no specific knowledge of either, but it wouldn't suprise me if it looked like this happened to be a good cure fure rheumatoid arthritis but not MS. If the scientists involved had a reason to think RA was going to be going down soon because of this, but for whatever reason this wouldn't work for MS, it would make sense to give RA as an example with no mention of MS.
I would, but I hear getting over life causes you to break out in a bad case of dead.
Maybe. You need massive amounts of energy to do any of the above, and, yes, I've noticed your statement about mastering fusion. There's a lot more to mastering fusion than simply generating it. For one, you've got to find some way to get a self-sustaining fusion reaction going without putting in more energy than you're getting out of it. Secondly, you need to find someway to contain and channel all that energy. Easier said than done. Just you try building a container to hold the sun.
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I wonder if this offers faster or better recovery from burns? Currently severe burns require grafts because dermal tissue regenerates poorly or not at all. Even if this could only help speed growth of auto-graft tissue production it would be a benefit.