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Aging Discovery Yields Nobel Prize
An anonymous reader writes This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes, called the telomeres, and in an enzyme that forms them."
It's great news however how are we going to solve the population crisis when the Earth gets too small?
I always knew I was going to be 512 years old before I die. :]
Better than being dead.
You really think so? I tend to think that there are certain fates that are worse than death.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
So Speak for yourself if you want to jump off a bridge at 85. I work with several incredibly bright people who are in their mid 70's who still travel the world. With the advent of information technology we can even do our work without being physically active, just a computer and internet access.
By the time I turn 85 in the 2050's, it will be the new 55! I'll race you to the top of the mountain.
I agree that the article makes it sound recent and I got misled too before reading TFA. But can you explain why you differentiate between cell aging and human aging? Isn't human aging a consequence of cell aging?
Life is about being a Phoenix!
New slashdot poll?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm not sure where you are seeing that the summary sounds like it's a recent discovery. The only thing would be that the scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize this year, which is true. And yes, you're right, this discovery is not recent. Of course, it sometimes takes decades for people to be awarded a Nobel Prize for work they did decades ago.
From what I recall of genetics, the cellular aging is (partially) what leads to shorter life spans and increased age related problems in clones. If you are cloning an animal it is kind of like making a copy of a copy since the telomeres are actually a part of the chromosomes they are transferred into the new host.
This leads to the telomeres being extended far beyond their 'normal' lifespan and you end up with all kinds of abnormalities that usually wouldn't be present until the subject is much older even though they still look young.
If nothing else, this discovery should help in the research of cloned animals and livestock, etc. But take all this with a grain of salt...I've not been involved with genetics for the better part of 12 years.
Yes, you can be immortal if you want. But part of the problem is that, in order to achieve immortality, you have to keep adding guanines to your telomeres. The problem with that, is that it gives you cancer,... ;-)
I think I would gladly take cancer if I was assured it was not going to kill me due to being immortal ;}
no, engineered viruses are nowhere near that advanced. Most viruses are limited by payload; there is a limit to how much DNA (or RNA) you can engineer into a viral particle. (not unlike a BIOS virus I suppose). Also, the viruses that are able to modify the host genome do so at random locations, so it is hard to precisely control where you want a particular modification to occur. And, the virus only modifies a very small portion of the host genome. Finally, most viruses are highly picky as to what kinds of cells they will infect. For instance, HIV will only target helper T cells in the immune system. Engineering HIV to, for instance, infect cytotoxic T cells (another type of white blood cell that is similar but distinct) will never work, because as far as HIV is concerned a cytotoxic T cell is no different than a kidney cell (that is, it's not a helper T cell).
NO CARRIER
Wow ... are we really that afraid of dying? Let's slide down this slippery slope and say that we actually solve the aging issue. Throughout recorded history we estimated our numbers at under a billion. That's a long relatively steady line. Then, at the 11th hour (11:59 actually), we see the historic "J-curve" of world population growth (putting to shame the J-curve of an inconvenient truth). Hmmm ... could that curve coincide with other issues on this planet?
We better think in advance and make the "immortal option" come with a price - no reproductive capabilities. That's right - trade your testis and ovaries for immortality.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Viruses have very small genomes in comparison with the human genome; many viruses get by with fewer than ten genes, while we have around twenty thousand. In addition, viruses don't arrange their genes in structures anything like the chromatin we use. Packaging a replacement human genome to infect human cells would require a vector so completely re-engineered from what we would currently recognize as a virus that we'd probably want to call it something else. Getting that infection procedure to work without killing the patient is far, far beyond current technology, and I'm not sure that it would confer biological immortality anyway. Your mitochondria have their own little genome, separate from that of the nucleus, which would be difficult to replace with a virus- and mitochondrial aging may play a significant role in producing the outward effects of human aging. If you turned your mitochondria off, you would die very quickly- the effect would be as if you had been poisoned with cyanide.
It is possible to add very small numbers of genes using viral vectors- human gene therapy is something that may indeed take off in years to come. There are presently many difficulties with using viruses to insert genes- you can use a retrovirus to insert the gene permanently into the genome, but it's hard to control insertion, so it's possible to get many copies- or none- in a given cell. Genes may also insert themselves in the middle of other genes, causing all sorts of deleterious effects.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
> There would have to be a few modifications made, for example, making it invisible to your immune system,
That's just what we need... a human-engineered virus that is completely invisible to your immune system. There is no way THAT could ever cause any problems as it mixed with other viruses in the wild.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Anyone who pays attention to how science Nobels are awarded knows that they're generally given for older work which has shown to be important over time. So anyone who thinks the story is calling it a new discovery, and criticizes it on that basis, is pretty much making an ass of himself.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.