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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."
I'd like to thank you on behalf of those of us who want to live forever...making room for the immortals if awfully kind of you.
You're an engineer, aren't you?
You go: Well, a lot of our problems come from lack of excercise and bad diet. So... we need to tweak our bodies to no longer be troubled by that.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a social and economic reevaluation, that just plain leaves you more time and resources to live a more healthy life in the first place.
Being able to take the time to do these things the usual way would mean a proportional decrease in stress on top of the healthier living.
So in short: Instead of fixing what is broken, make it so it doesn't break in the first place.
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?
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
I don't consider this to make people to last forever, but 'unnecessarily long'.
What do you consider a necessary duration? And necessary for what? There is no objective purpose to life - people have to ascribe their own subjective meaning - whatever you think is necessary during your own life is you own subjective value judgement and doesn't apply to anyone else.
we are 'out-breeding' our ability to be able produce enough food ... putting more people on this rock with drastically increased lifespans don't seem to be sch a bright idea to me.
This is a potential problem, but it presumes that technology won't be able to keep up with demand. There is mounting economic pressure (which makes all the difference) to create a renewable infrastructure now. It's only a matter of time. The more people there are, the greater the pressure. People would be able to work for longer, and would be under less pressure to have kids early. There is a large degree of self-correction to the situation, but it's one of those difficult to predict scenarios, becuase it's such a collosal global game-changing event.
Besides, think a bit what it would be like to live forever, it's a nightmare.
I honestly have never understood this attitude. People say it, but never give a reason. Why? You say you love life, so when would that change for you? At what point do you become effectively suicidal? Are you anticipating an afterlife?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Speak for yourself. I want to live forever.
You're a 20-something, aren't you? Come back and say that in another half a century. Life isn't all that "must-have" after a bunch of decades, even if you're in perfect health. The main problem is that after numerous years of life-experience, you start realizing what unbelievable sacks of shit most people truly are. If YOU get to live forever, you're going to have to deal with THEM forever too.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
"we are 'out-breeding' our ability to be able produce enough food"
Says you. I actually work in the field, and we have well more than enough technology, raw seed stock, and modified seed stock, to feed this planet fifty times over for the next twenty generations.
"our main energy source is finite (oil), and our climate seems to be going through changes (i don't care if they're man-made or not),"
These actually pose real problems that we must work upon.
"putting more people on this rock with drastically increased lifespans don't seem to be sch a bright idea to me."
Well, odds are this would only be available to those that could afford it, while the general masses die off. While this leaves a lower population to sustain the planetary population overall, there's also a lower planetary population to handle. Thinking of a worst-case scenario, this would be like giving those hard working and intelligent enough a pass at a super-long life, while eliminating the unwashed masses. That poses another problem, but everything is a problem, and in truth nothing is a total solution.
"Besides, think a bit what it would be like to live forever, it's a nightmare."
I've been dead twice. I think I prefer life, TYVM.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Speak for yourself. I want to live forever.
You're a 20-something, aren't you? Come back and say that in another half a century. Life isn't all that "must-have" after a bunch of decades, even if you're in perfect health. The main problem is that after numerous years of life-experience, you start realizing what unbelievable sacks of shit most people truly are. If YOU get to live forever, you're going to have to deal with THEM forever too.
You die when you stop enjoying life.
The more I love life, the more beautiful people I meet.
I'm sorry that you lost the love for living.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Uh, sorry, but no, you don't. The memory lives on, not the person. If that is important to those who live on is another matter. But please do not confuse the two.
Toutankhamon is not alive. insert dead parrot sketch
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You are missing a point by the way, an important point.
People, who are short-lived, do not care about the long term consequences. It's like politicians, who are elected only for a few years and all they try to do is to get reelected, they don't care about actually working that much. Same with non-owners of corporations, who are nevertheless on top of them, like seagull CEOs for example, they come in, make a lot of noise, crap all over the place, collect the severance and leave.
People who live longer than our very limited life-spans, and people who have more active life-styles by being healthier, would probably end up thinking a bit more long-term, which may end up being good for the population in the long run.
I do not buy the argument that the natural order of things is GOOD. I think the natural order is actually pretty bad, considering that evolution basically cares about procreation first of all, doesn't care about your quality of life past certain age-point, so it elects the traits in populations that are better suited for the young people, not for those who are maybe 20 years older than 'the young'. But in today's society being 20 years older than 'the young' also has a positive effect (well, with some). They are experienced, they are very knowledgeable and specialized, they are trained, a lot of resources went to their training, they are still useful, but their health is deteriorating and they do become an increasing burden.
If this particular treatment prolongs the life of people by say 40 years, yet makes them younger in the process, it would end up as a net positive for society, because those resources would be available longer and without the downside of being sicker.
Basically sign me up (I am almost sure I will never see this treatment, but I would like to.)
You can't handle the truth.
I'm hitting 30. My ambition to live forever is stronger now than it was when I was 15. All the shit given to me over the years hasn't had an impact. You sound like you want to die because it might become depressing. The simplest answer would be to move away and live in a different part of the world for 50 years. Imagine the opportunity to do that and really start life anew?
Jonathanjk.com
Telomerase activation shouldn't give you cancer. First of all, your telomeres won't be a problem untill you are in the 700-800 year range (if I remember my undergrad genetics courses correctly). At least, outside of the white blood cell lineages, those will probably go for most people in the first 100 years - they could probably use some telomerase. OK, so lets say you would normally get cancer by the time you were 150, thankfully, your white blood cells stop functioning so well around age 90 and you die of pneumonia instead. Now, lets assume the other causes of aging are fixed, so, that's pretty much the standard.
Insert telomerase. You now live to 150, and die of cancer. Did the telomerase give you cancer? No, it just allowed you to live long enough for the factors that did give you cancer to take hold.
You do have cells in your body producing telomerase - the gamete producing lineage. You can trace telomerase back to the development of successful linear DNA from that lineage - without break. No cancer. Telomerase is a DNA stabilizing agent, not a mutagen.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Assuming you know you are to live forever, what's the rush in breading children?
Well, if you want to live forever, that makes a lot of sense. Grilled is healthier than fried.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In the future: We can carry on with our fixed population size, imposed via whatever methods are "acceptable" and we will have options:
hate that I have to keep pointing this out, but clinical immortality will not lead to overpopulation, as counter-intuitive as that statement sounds, regardless of whether we limit our reproduction as a matter of public policy.
I'll break it down into three scenarios, in order of most to least likely. All three are based around methods for extending the human lifespan. In the first scenario, let's imagine a world where telomerase treatments reverse or mitigate cellular ageing.
Now, to begin with, this isn't "immortality", even in the ageless sense, as there would still be terminal illnesses and cumulative damage. Lifespans would increase, but would not be infinite. Cancer would probably beat out all other natural causes put together. So, let's say the average lifespan is a century or two.
The window of opportunity for having kids would remain mostly where it is now. This is because gametes age and run out regardless of the ageing going on in your other bodily tissues. A woman is born with a finite number of eggs, and they have an best-before date that has nothing to do with telomeres. Men would stay fertile longer, though not indefinitely, but the population growth rate is capped by the number of fertile females, not males.
Thus, the most likely scenario for anti-ageing drugs would not affect the rate of population growth rate, and would only increase the average lifespan by a limited margin. Given that the developed world is already at or below replacement level fertility, this would not pose a problem for the global population. And the developing world would need to modernize before they could implement this kind of medical care regardless, so they would probably also see a decline in growth to match our own, if history is any precedent.
Now, a second scenario would be perfect clinical immortality. No disease is terminal, no age related damage irreversible, no injury permanent. People only die traumatic deaths, whether by accident, violence or suicide.
The population still wouldn't skyrocket. People in the western world put off having kids already, generally waiting as long as natural fertility allows. How long would we put off having kids if we had no biological clock counting down? Decades? Centuries? A long time, regardless.
People still wouldn't live forever either. I've seen estimate that state that if death by old age vanished tomorrow, the average life expectancy would work out to about 300-500 years. Might be less if suicide became a common cause of death. And while the population might level out, the growth rate would slow to a crawl.
Now, the final option would be complete immortality. To accomplish this, we'd need to be able to make backups, against the risk of traumatic death. The mechanism for backing up a human being would almost certainly entail whole brain uploading.
With the capacity to upload brains comes the capacity to live without bodies. Overpopulation becomes supremely irrelevant if many or most of us live inside virtual worlds. And as far as that goes, given how technologically unlikely this scenario is, who's to say we'd even need Earth at this stage?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Since most people nowadays spend their days that way out of necessity... yes. Quality of life is increased by having your body tolerate its normal usage. It lowers your quality of life that you have to spend several hours a week running in circles and lifting weights just to keep your muscle mass from disappearing and being replaced by useless fat tissue.
I suppose that this might violate some people's ideal of having to earn everything with sweat and blood, but hey: they're free to go jog in a snowstorm while I sit in front of my computer and eat potato chips.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Maybe. I'm only 32, but I would definitely take the live-forever serum if it was offered to me at this point. I'm already having to snip lower-priority things off my life goals list just due to lack of time. Maybe after I'm fluent in all spoken and written languages, fully understand current mathematics and number theory, fully grok current physics, have an encyclopedic knowledge of world history, have mastered cooking, dancing, martial arts, race driving, race flying, have built a computer by hand and written a POSIX-compatible operating system in its native assembly language, have built a car by hand and raced it, have visited every culture in the world and learned their customs well enough to interact freely with them... by the time I've done all those things I have a feeling I'll have thought of a list twice as long of things yet to do, but that sounds like at least three or four hundred years I'll need before I even get through the obvious stuff, and that's if I don't spend a large amount of time just relaxing with my family (which I will).
You seriously couldn't think of any fulfilling ways to spend a couple thousand years?
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