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Aging Reversed In Mice
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that scientists claim to be a step closer to reversing the aging process after experimental treatment developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School turned weak and feeble old mice into healthy animals by regenerating their aged bodies. 'What we saw in these animals was not a slowing down or stabilization of the aging process. We saw a dramatic reversal – and that was unexpected,' says Ronald DePinho, who led the study. The Harvard group focused on a process called telomere shortening where each time a cell divides, the telomeres are snipped shorter, until eventually they stop working and the cell dies or goes into a suspended state called 'senescence.' Researchers bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter causing the mice to age prematurely and suffer ailments, including a poor sense of smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. When the mice were given injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of aging raising hope among scientists that it may be possible to achieve a similar feat in humans – or at least to slow down the aging process."
This isn't worth posting.
For the most part, most of us live long enough. What is necessary is a substantial increase in the quality of our lives, not an increase in the length of it. If this treatment can return youthful vigor to our cells, that is something amazing. So far we've been relegated to using HGH or steroids or exercise and diet to control our aging process. However, the actual cellular aging progresses unhindered.
A treatment that does not require diet and exercise modifications is sorely needed.
Are you saying /. regenerated an old story into a fresh new one?
If we can do it with mice and stories then chances are we will have half the worlds population claiming pensions in no time!!
- Sig
Honestly, i hope they do not succeed in making people live forever, there are already 6 billion of us here, and that number will only increase, and there are only so many mouths we can feed & bodies we can clothe, not to mentioning the possibility of this treatment being reserved for the super rich... Let the people die, it's why we were born in the first place.
Mice bread without an enzyme age prematurely. Injecting them with the enzyme reversed this process. This does not necessarily mean that injecting normal mice with more of the enzyme will have any affect on their ageing.
It was probably the unexpected attention that the elderly mice got, that made them feel happy and youthful. That, and a placebo effect.
Cells do not normally produce telomerase on their own because not producing it protects against cancer. Turning on the gene that makes telomerase is one of the hurdles pre-cancerous cells have to cross on their way to becoming cancerous.
Also, as someone else pointed out, telomeres are just one aspect of aging. You can induce mice to age prematurely by restricting embryonic expression of telomerase, but that doesn't necessarily mean that mice that age normally will be similarly completely restored by adding it.
There are a number of degenerative diseases (macular degeneration and probably alzheimers) that happen because of inadequate waste removal. No amount of telomerase is going to cause all the little protein fragments lying around to be magically cleaned up and excreted.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
the Dick Cheneys of the world living to 140...
Seriously not a good idea. I, personally, would not like a body-wide cancer.
Call me back when nanites are developed far enough to repair tissue damage!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Only give this to people who do not have sex and therefor no offspring. Slashdot will LIVE FOREVER!!!
And the living will envy the death (because they got some).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Isn't this more like: "Scientists reverse artificially induced ageing in mice by re-introducing the enzyme that they deactivated to induce the ageing in the first place"?
Will introducing more telomerase to into naturally ageing patients cause reversal in cell damage or cancer?
MMmmmmm. Mice bread.
Goes well with cheese.
Sounds like they simply corrected a disease that was purposefully inflicted upon the mice. I don't see this as "Aging reversed" more like "Abnormally quick aging can be corrected."
I believe the end of the Nature article link agrees. It also points out that shortening telomeres isn't the only thing that causes aging and it's defects.
That said, this is a good baby step forward.
Actually Aging was not reversed. It was made faster in the first place. And then telomerase was added, and aging was normal again.
It's nice. But sometimes it is deactivated for a reason. To stop aging we would have to stop mutating cells. Our cells still would have to divide. Our braincells would still be more or less limited. So we would have to control our tumours while getting more stupid. The biblical 120 max won't be broken any time soon.
Still, such a news is incredible in a scientific perspective. But for potions of life, please consider your local alchemist or any grail you might find.
I just want to tell you good luck. We're all counting on you.
While I see some folks saying "no one should live forever" let me ask you this... What about space travelers? Don't you think on 100+ year trips, living forever might be a good thing?
So we are the last generations that will die. That's just great...
They've already done this with dolphins. It involves feeding them seagulls. Unfortunately, the lead scientist was arrested when he stepped across a lion sleeping in the doorway to the lab, after catching a few seagulls.
The charge: transporting gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises.
Mark Edwards
Mice bread
It stops squeaking and struggling after a minute or two in the toaster. The fur might get stuck in your teeth, though.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The stock price of the Umbrella Corporation was up 36 points amid heavy trading as the markets opened this morning...
So is this the first steps towards the gene therapies in Red Mars books? Finally!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
My other Sig is very funny.
If scientists can breed humans with mice, creating mice-men, this idea has potential. I think Monty Python even did a skit on this, where perverts dressed up as mice, and went to parties, where they "squeaked" and passed cheese around.
Definitely an idea that is worthy of a Hollywood B film.
If the mice bread experiments go wrong, we can always pop them into the toaster.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They were impatient
T-Virus
I think Star Trek had a warning about his one. http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Miri_(episode)
Reminds me a book dealing with the subject of regeneration : "Rollback" Robert J. Sawyer
Hey, if this keeps my younger.. longer and adds 100 years to my life.. kick ass. You spend half your life figuring what the hell you are doing... then you spend the other half slowly withering away. I want Leslie Nielson back, dammit!
Maybe it is dangerous, but if you get to (say) 80+ and can only look forward to a few more years with increasing incontinence and decreasing memory (which may even make up for the incontinence) then it's got to be worth a shot. After all, it's not as if you have much to lose. Though your relatives might not appreciate the loss of any expected inheritance, and the nursing homes have a vested interest in it failing, and the whole pension / insurance industry will go broke overnight. However, if it means I could live to be 200, all that's a small price to pay.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Just in time to rescue the Most Valuable Generation, the Baby Boomers!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
But, in order to get anywhere in space you have to go real fast, and then relativity comes into play.
Now we just need a decent cancer treatment and hello overpopulation!
They created mice that lacked an enzyme and later on they added the enzyme. All this proves is that the enzyme is relevant to support healthy growth, and it's absence mimics the symptoms of aging. That would be like stripping someone of his clothes, put him in the cold, give him a blanket and say: "We solved the problem of freezing to death!".
Do not trust this signature.
We just need to increase a few anti-cancer genes quantity and/or effects. It's already been done on mice: https://www.cnio.es/es/grupos/plantillas/presentacion.asp?pag=35
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
Now do both to the mice, then welcome our new super-mice overlords.
I don't want to age. I don't care if my life ends at 80 or 90 or 150, I want those years, every last one of them, to be spent without sitting in a hospice as a drooling vegetable. I'd rather get tired of living than spend most of my life on the sliding slope away from the heights of my youth.
When they come to take me away when I'm 150, I'll say good bye to the cruel world, the cruel bedsheets and even the cruel curtains with some sort of tassels.
And as for the population problem, if I was sure I'd live till eternity, I might not even care too much about the propagation of the species (see, I don't really see why Wowbagger had to date Trillian).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It is not very likely that there will ever be found a cure for the bullet through the head condition.
You will always have your way out.
Rest of us on the other hand would like to continue with this endless party called life for as long as possible.
Heck... Just all that culture out there is worth the ticket.
Not to mention all those humans, all that planet, all that space etc.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There are a lot off people with the wealth, means and connections to make it happen when it's possible. So wether it should or not is not really the question it's more how the world is going to be when people will be able to live maybe 500 years or more. Sure the future is very hard to predict but just imagine people could live longer. Maybe they would actually start to learn to think not only of the short term pleasures and goals but as they have more years to live will actually take more care of the environment. Living much longer means a way better view on environmental impacts of short term actions and you have to. You have to live in your own mess a lot longer. Also the wish to have childeren now decreases with live expectancy just imagine people living 500+ years having kids only after 100 years? Perfect! Enough time to plan living space, housing, environmental issue's etc. Sure there are negative impacts aswell but when this anti aging pill comes on the market I'll take it.
Reversing changes to the body is all well and good, but will the newly-unaged mice still yell at the youngsters to get off their lawn?
I think 100+ years spent in a tin can with other people is something that has such an incredibly high chance of causing extreme psychological issues that I would not agree to send them, volunteers or not. And it raises a whole host of ethical issues as well, such as whether the travelers would have some right to kill one another if they perceived a threat or what to do with some immortal space traveling hero should he try to return to society and be utterly unable to reintegrate, similar to how a lot of ex-felons are when they are released.
Unless we're talking Starship Enterprise-style accommodations here, I would do everything in my power to stop trips like that from ever happening.
You mean that Monty Python started the furries? Who knew?
Don't tell Emperor Palpatine. That crazy old bugger does want to live forever! ...
Hang on a sec, I have a 800 year-old little green guy with a cane at my door, asking if I think I'm a Jedi or not....
One of the 187.
If extremely long lives are becoming more and more realistic, maybe it is time to start thinking about how humans will cope with it. Most of us never heal of the scars of our experiences, and let them accumulate. By the end of our lives, we are pretty much wrecked, full of guilt, pain, set in our ways and done with learning. Our entire society is built around this concept that you start learning about the world, then you go about being productive, then you get a few years of relaxing and living off the results of your work.
Psychologically, but also socially, we are nowhere near ready to dealing with any significant number of people living a very long life.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Possibly not overlords in the "ruling over you" sense, but what would happen if a few mice got out, which never aged or died from cancer? Sure, mice get preyed upon, but if even a few of these mice made it to the wild, you'd see billions and billions of them in a few years. Mouse Armageddon, I think so!
What are the side affects?
Do you need keep taking more and more or you die real quick?
The army may want to test stuff like this.
OK, let me see if I got this straight. They bred some mice that age prematurely, then they developed a therapy that reverses the premature aging and this is supposed to be a treatment for natural aging? Come back to me when they use this treatment on mice (or some other animal) that has naturally aged and it has the same effect, as it is, this is an interesting study about possible avenues to be explored but nothing to get particularly excited about at this time.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
In highly developed countries people are already having too few children. We aren't replacing the workforce and are having to borrow from developing countries. In addition to having fewer children people are waiting until later in life to have them. If people knew there wasn't a time limit, a point past which they could not have children, they would wait even longer. I suspect that in the first world this problem would solve itself. Providing such treatment in developing countries would probably cause Malthusian collapse in short order. Got to get them 2^10 TV channels, and only then provide the cure for aging.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I cant wait till they get it in a protein shake form, and i can live till 300 years old, we will be the new age elves, living for 3 or 4 hundred years....!
Now we just need to figure out how to turn people into mice and we have elixir of youth. Unless the young mice rebel first, and take over the world.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
That comes with age.
Unless we're talking Starship Enterprise-style accommodations here, I would do everything in my power to stop trips like that from ever happening.
Really? Do you, by any chance, consider such a voyage worse than, say, living in squalor and famine and violence and disease, and then dying from something silly like diarrhea or horrible like gang rape?
If you don’t, how come you’re posting on Slashdot instead of doing everything in your power to stop that from happening? (News Flash: Everything I’ve described, and worse, is happening *right now* to hundreds of thousands of people.)
If you do, then... hmm. Not sure what to say. Can you perhaps explain why?
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
2. They then waited for the YOUNG mice to develop symptoms of their genetic disease that simulated aging.
3. They then cured the DISEASE they had created.
Calling this curing aging is like announcing that you can raise the dead by administering adrenaline after artificially stopping someone's heart.
Call us when you can reverse aging in any creature that has not first been artifically aged. Till then, you are just blowing smoke up your own butt.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There goes the pension system down the swanny!
This reminds me of one of my favorite books, by Poul Anderson, "Boat of a Million Years". It follows the lives of 11 individuals whose DNS allows them to be immortal with respect to aging. They can still be injured just like anyone else. It starts around 300BC and goes into the future. Much of human history is portrayed through the eyed of those who don't age. It also goes into what happens to the world when this gift is finally shared with everyone.
Cells are programmed to die after a certain number of divisions as one way of combating the development of cancer cells. You might live longer with this treatment, but you'll have more cells that are susceptible to becoming cancer cells.
Of someone who could not die of old age?
When would all the chances of accidental death finally add up and kill you ?
(not to mention all the relatives whom you are boring with 500 years worth of stories)
What accident prone activities would you give up ?
Immortal would imply that you cannot die. In this instance, even if people were able to sustain life forever, it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is going to live forever. People take stupid risks and if they were "immortal" they'd probably take dumber risks. So ultimately, only the smartest would survive.
last thing we need is some age stopping or reversing drug. it wont be used for any good if one ever worked. only the ritch dickheads would get some extra years. and they cant die fast enough. but they only stopped part of the aging. so many other factors come in like altimers etc. no human could live like 300 years. even if you stopped your body from ageing the brain brakes down at around 100 years if your Lucky earlier for many others. heck are hartes are doomed to fail at around 65+. so stopping the ageing look is only a small part of the problem. even if it prevents those can you imagine the resource issues if people sudnly all live to be 150+. yes life is short heck i lived half mine. and wee would like extra years but it would throw off so much if billions suddnly lived 2 or 3 times longer.
In other news, retirement age has been raised to 250, though term limits are still an open question.
Minor footnote: author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote presciently about this technology in his Mars trilogy (specifically, "Green Mars", I believe.)
--joe.
I'm so amused at some comments pointing at overpopulation as the main argument against life extension. It's exactly like saying you aren't buying into Information Technology because you won't be doing the maths by yourself so you could fall of exercise! It's a stupid argument. Making people life forever is an hard task, making them sterile is way easier. Don't you think that, once biotechnologies become sophisticated enough to enable a sort of "genetic immortality" we'll all be asked to choose between that and breeding? Do you remember what's the point of having childs? Because we die. And we die so that our biology can improves through succeeding generations. We don't need that anymore. We can improve ourselves in other ways. We don't need to die. We don't need to bother about overpopulation. That's just an excuse to avoid real in-topic debating.
There has never been a better time to be a mouse!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Or heck, even just "living in an isolated small town with maybe, at best, 1000 neighbors, for your entire life" - which is basically what most human beings have done for the entirety of human history.
But this is beside the point. By the time we could create a craft capable of keeping even a single human being alive with even spartan living conditions, for over a century of space-travel, we would have had to develop so many other technologies that this kind of thing simply wouldn't be that challenging to handle. Hell, by the time we could even create a probe capable of lasting for 100 years with basic *computer* systems on board and the propulsion necessary to get it to go to wherever it is we'd be sending humans on 100+ year trips, we'd have beaten so many problems that this would simply be an extra check-mark on our to-do list.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1765#comic
Mice bread without an enzyme age prematurely. Injecting them with the enzyme reversed this process. This does not necessarily mean that injecting normal mice with more of the enzyme will have any affect on their ageing.
That was the feeling I got from the article. The summary should be something closer "Premature aging effects found to be reversible in mice".
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
http://xkcd.com/793/
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I need some of these. :P Wait, will this work for ants?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yep, you can get it at Tesco. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-11419498
I find the number of "why would you want to live forever?" comments surprisingly high for a slashdot thread. I see a large proportion of anti-religious posts on here so I would imagine the majority of posters here don't believe in some sort of afterlife - which would give you even more incentive to want to live forever (or at least until you choose when to go). I'm sure the idea of death is a lot more comforting to those that believe that life actually isn't over for them when their physical body dies.
I don't believe in any sort of after life and death terrifies the shit out of me. Reading this article provides a happy glimpse into the future, and may eventually provide a way to significantly extend life. I can maybe understand why though - people in chronic physical pain or paralyzed or physically or mentally crippled to a point where life isn't the least bit enjoyable wouldn't want to extend their life any further, and perhaps the only reason they're still living is because they can't quite end it themselves. Maybe if you're in your 50's or 60's you start to get more medical problems and pain and begin to think "I wouldn't want to live like this for another 100 years". But for me, there's way too much to do - cultures, languages, instruments, travel etc... to fill in for a few hundred years.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Some damage is bound to occur to the genetic copying mechanism even with the cells continually fixing themselves.
So, have backups of the DNA with error correction on different media (magnetic, optical, flash so that it would be less likely to get corrupt all at once) and have nanobots periodically refresh the DNA in the cells. The DNA is just a gigabyte or so.
Somewhere along the way, it would be cheaper to simply transfer the the thing that matters most (the mind or a person's memories) into another body or an android.
But wouldn't that be like creating a copy of me? That is, for some time, there would be two Pentiums, then only the copy would remain - so I would still die, but some other guy who has all my memories would live. OTOH, becoming a cyborg with my original brain intact would be OK.
I really wish I had mod points for you, because apparently whoever the mods are don't understand that you're referencing gods that according to scripture, were once human, obtained immortality for their good deeds and ascended. I don't see how that's offtopic to this discussion.
If we have the technology to selectively erase memories (it was posted on slash a few weeks back) then everyday could be a new day for our intrepid explorers. There's other ways to make the trip less psychologically damaging. If we're at the point where we're erasing memories, then maybe we're also at the point where we can slow down our internal perception of time. With our perception of time slowed down, a year could move by in seconds. For that matter, do people even have to be awake the entire time? (suspended animation)