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Gene Therapy Extends Mouse Lifespan
Grond writes "ScienceDaily reports, 'Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre have demonstrated that the mouse lifespan can be extended by the application in adult life of a single treatment acting directly on the animal's genes. Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average (PDF), and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals' health, delaying the onset of age-related diseases — like osteoporosis and insulin resistance — and achieving improved readings on aging indicators like neuromuscular coordination.' Notably, the therapy did not cause an increase in the incidence of cancer."
But they will be divided by a contest for power, for whoever takes the head of another shall gain his might.
I just hope they don't electrocute us all.
the singularity was gonna come from silicon.
old > wise > profit
Yet another lab test of effective life extending drugs. Which, like with the amount of transistors that can fit onto the same area of a computer chip, will probably exponentially increase in effectiveness.
Oh, and mean time from such tests to a product on the market is 13 years.
If you are younger than fifty, be prepared to live forever *(getting run over by a bus, spaceship, miniaturized black hole excepting). And remember to tell your non-existent great grand kids about retirement, because having kids will be outlawed due to over population.
about mice not getting cancer. It makes it so much harder to scroll through websites when they do.
Scientists at Harvard announced the very same thing, over a year and a half ago.
what about side effects?
So how do I get it?
Posting AC because of Slashdot's Chrome bugs that mean you can't log in properly.
This reminds me of the "calorie restriction" guy, who found out rats live 50% longer if they are fed less food then they actually need.
So...they lived 3 years instead of 2.
So...would a human gain 35 years...or 2?
Same thing here.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Just make sure to get it before you reach the age of 1 or 2
We keep trying to live longer, but I can't see a life past 90 being very comfortable or enjoyable. I think no amount of drugs or therapies can fix the human psyche--it wasn't made to last forever. The older you get, the crazier you become in most peoples eyes.
..do we want to live longer ?!!
no cancer is a pretty good side effect, tho
how about just making some stem cells from a tissue sample, and then treating them with the telomerase virus, and then injecting them back into you?
mice everywhere must be celebrating this good news.
-dirtbag
I for one welcome my new immortal mouse king
If lifespans become significantly longer, we can do away with Social Security (wouldn't be able to afford it, anyway). People can just put a bunch of money in the bank when they're young and let the wonder of compound interest make them rich in their later years. And, 80's glam rock will be around forever!
Who'd have thought it?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
"The Quiet Place", by Richard Maynard?
I really don't need mice that live longer. I need them to find a gene therapy to KILL mice. What's the point of this?
Long Live our new cheese eating over lords!
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
If we really want mice to live longer ...
shouldn't we ban mousetraps?
When I read the title I wasn't sure if they meant a computer mouse or a biological mouse. I'm sort of disappointed to find they mean the biological creature.
but this would would have been great news for Roy Batty
They report no statistical increase in cancer, but an absence of signal is not a signal of absence, and the methods alone should clue you in.
I guess my tolerance for cute sayings as explanations has declined as my crotchetiness has increased. The phrase you are looking for is "small sample size". Glancing at the rear of the article:
Separate groups of mice were tail-vein injected with 2*10^12 (viral genomes)/animal of either AAV9-GFP, AAV9-mTERT or AAV9-mTERTDN, a catalytically inactive form of mTERT (Sachsinger et al, 2001), at 420 days (AAV9-GFP, n=14 [50% males and 50% females]; AAV9- mTERT, n=21 [52% males and 48% females]; AAV9-mTERT-DN, n=17 [53% males and 47% females]) or either AAV9-GFP and AAV9- mTERT 720 days (AAV9-GFP, n=14 [58% males and 42% females]; AAV9-mTERT, n=23 [52% males and 48% females] of age. All mice are of a >95% C57BL6 background. Longevity comparisons were always made within the same mouse cohort to avoid minimal possible differences in genetic background between the groups.
They had five samples from 14 to 23 in size. That's a bit slim for some of the claims they make such as the bit about cancer.
They report no statistical increase in cancer, but an absence of signal is not a signal of absence
What...the...fuck?
You took something you heard people legitimately saying about certain inferences and used in a way that is not legitimate.
Here's an example that is legitimate. A cold will sometimes, but not always, be accompanied by a cough. Therefore a researcher could be trying to examine the incidence of colds by examining the incidence of coughs. Because it's entirely possible to have colds without coughs, you may then legitimately claim that the absence of the signal, the cough, is not a signal of the absence of colds. It's sufficiently correlated that it is a useful metric, but it is not a sufficient metric to draw strong conclusions. The absence of coughs are, however, most certainly indicative of the absence of coughs
No statistical increase in cancer most certainly means no statistical increase in cancer (I'm a member of the tautology club!). It is possible that the the lack in statistical significance was an anomaly (and just how probable an anomaly that would be is quantifiable, and I'm sure is quantified in the paper in the form of a p-value), but it is certainly indicative of no increases in cancer. That is exactly what they were measuring.
Whatever happened to the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag? This story sounds like the beginning of a Michael Crichton novel and we all know how those end. Joe Haldeman's Old Twentieth also had something like this called the Becker-Cendrek process. Made you immortal. Somehow I don't think it would be too difficult to get human volunteers for this one.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
He' been saying that telomerase lengthening is a good area of research for life extension for years and years. It's good to see one of his 7 therepudic targets for immortality verified.
Maybe if we had the resources to sustain an enourmous population... but we already have an enourmous global population... and there's a serious energy crisis, as well as ... polution, global temperatures... etc.
Maybe scientists should be figuring a way to make people live shorter, but far better quality lives. I kid... of course. But quality of life is important, and as the population increases, so does competition for limited resources, and individual quality of life will decrease. If we suddenly have a way to easily allow humans to have an average life expectency of 110, how are we going to support a population growth like that? I guess we'll have to increase all the milestone ages... age of concent, drinking age, voting age, and retirement age... maybe make celebacy trendy somehow... really start giving gays and lesbians huge incentives... and start heavily taxing marriage and procreation.
The Admin and the Engineer
Many people have been saying it for years; unlike him, many of them then spent those years actually trying to prove it instead of just talking and writing about what other people should do
The value of being first to publish is wat youre talking about. Clearly the lab will reproduce the scenario dozens of times on hundreds of mice as they pursue further refining/expansion of this very interesting technique.
Massively slim for aging research in mice actually.
Population increases have been leveling off faster than just about anybody predicted. Rates are down in Africa, China, India (the worst "offenders" of recent history).
Granted, things will probably get worse before they get better, but I just don't see the population apocalypse that others in the past have predicted, actually happening.
According to census figures, if it were not for immigration, the population of the U.S. would actually be lower today than 10 years ago.
"The value of being first to publish is wat youre talking about."
Except that they aren't. See the Scientific American article I linked to way up above. Others have been studying lengthened telomeres (achieved by other means) for many years now, and none of them have reported any increase in cancer rates. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Some of the research suggests that short telomeres might actually be a factor in causing cancer, or helping it to grow.
(Sorry about the abbreviations). A friend of mine pointed out that extending the life of a mouse by say 25 percent cancer free may not do the same when extending the life of a human by 25 percent.
The reason of course is because if it takes say 3 years for a cancer to develop because of this therapy (given to the mice when they were adults), the mice would still have died of other causes before the cancer could kill them (a 25 percent increase in a mouse's lifespan is only about a year). Whereas with people, if the therapy causes cancer just 3 years after the treatment then they have really got a problem because the therapy (should hopefully) make them live 20 years longer.
Still I am hopeful for this (or other treatments) to hopefully add on a decade or two of (very hopefully) healthy life to my lifespan. As my friend also pointed out, even a modest increase in lifespan will absolutely wreck every social safety net and pension. Perhaps there will be legislation correcting this saying, perhaps, if you elect to get this treatment you agree that your benefits won't kick in for another decade or two.
Working longer (or being poorer) is still preferable to dying younger.
You probably know that, in most developed countries population actually decreases. And most of women giving birth are young. So population growth almost independent of number of people dying. So if you want to control population growth you need to educate African and Asian women so they give birth later in life. Death of old people on the other side of Earth is irrelevant to number of children born in Sub Saharian Africa.
Resources are plenty. Even peak oil is a myth. It's just very damn cheap oil not so cheap anymore. And if we give solar energy decade we will get clean water in every place on Earth, which will lead to drop in child mortality, which will lead to decrease in typical family size, which will solve "overpopulation" problem.
In any event, we better be used to starvation diets if such things come to pass. If the Duggars and the Octomom and Kate Gosselian prove, it is impossible to keep people from irresponsibly overpopulating the world.
But let's say that we extend human lifespan to say 200 years. Is this increased lifespan going to be one in which everyone is healthy in a youthful manner until they clock out? Probably not. More likely they will have a growing, young adult, middle age, and old age similar to now, just with each portion extended.
There will probably be greatly increased chances of becoming ill with Cancer, or various brain degenerative diseases. That just as a result of living longer.
But the real kicker is that the old age and death part is likely to be drawn out over many more years than it is now. My mother in law spent the last ten years of her life as a dementia patient - interestingly enough, this was a person who "did everything right, no smoking, no drinking, etc. But it might stand to reason if a lifespan is tripled, she might have expected to spend 30 years that way. Let's cut off a third of that, and say 20.
I really have to say that you do NOT want to spend 20 years in a nursing home, shitting in adult diapers, incontinent, only knowing who you are or anyone around you 5 percent of the time. Having a prescription list that looks like a big day at the grocery store. And one of them, a drug tho more or less mitigate the dementia symptoms. Which just drags out the heartbreak another 5 years or so.
Hell, if I had an inkling that that was my fate, I'd take a reduction in lifespan as a more than even tradeoff.
I've seen our futures, and it ain't pretty.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And the results might survive the larger sample size.
I wanted to question why DNA could possibly affect the lifespan of my wireless mouse, but I'm just going to look the other way and save on batteries.
Look up otto warburg. Or more recently look up brian peskin connecting the dots of warburgs work and the "modern" diet. Cancer cells appear from lack of cellular oxygenation which is promoted by our food stuffs, the ones your great grandparents would not be able to identify as food.
Obligatory Alpha Century reference: The longevity vaccine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdCB9yE9Hcc
Correlation... is... not... causation...
They do not report on cancer statistics to increase the signal is not the lack of a sign
I guess we'll have to increase all the milestone ages... age of concent, drinking age, voting age, and retirement age... maybe make celebacy trendy somehow... really start giving gays and lesbians huge incentives... and start heavily taxing marriage and procreation.
Marriage and procreation are taxing enough as it is.
Unless 1 year in mice = 1 year in people.
I guess we'll have to increase all the milestone ages... age of concent, drinking age, voting age, and retirement age... maybe make celebacy trendy somehow... really start giving gays and lesbians huge incentives... and start heavily taxing marriage and procreation.
Marriage and procreation are taxing enough as it is.
Well said, but I don't believe a word of it. One can only go so far alone.
The Admin and the Engineer
While some resources are indeed really limited, many others are limited artificially only. Scarcity and poverty are necessary components of our current economy. If a scientist would invent a "quality enhancer" tomorrow, what do you think would happen? Exactly, it would sell at high prices to rich people (or those with expensive insurance plans) first.
that's actually alot of mice for a study of this nature. They must have had really good funding to get that many actually. most of the articles that i've read about stem cells use around 25 mice total. The explanation that i got was that the animal cruelty people are hounding the bioethics people to cut down on the number of sacrificed animals.
Bring on the advanced haptic interface now!
With all the government entitlement spending being put on the "credit card" of "future generations", don't forget to raise the MAXIMUM benefit age along with the raising the MINIMUM benefit age. No sense in creating more pesky loopholes to deal with later...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Im a bit sceptical that just lenghtening of the telomerase will cause such a result. But hey....i looked over the paper (which is open access btw so thats awesome!). And things seem to be in order.
also the vector is a good choice. Adeno associated virus is a very good and safe choice when making gene delivery.
So im gonna go out to my office now and print that article and will enjoy reading in depth tonight after lecture (Evening saved!)
But quality of life is important
Significantly delaying the onset of age-related diseases is one of the biggest contributors to quality of life I can imagine. And if we have to work an extra twenty years for an additional twenty years of youth and health ... well, that's a tradeoff I'd certainly be willing to make, and I expect a whole bunch of other people would feel the same.
There wouldn't be any need to delay the age of adulthood as you suggest. We'd just have longer, healthier, more productive, and all-around better adult lives. Sign me up.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
n/t
This is good news as Diablo III is around the corner. I have lost 2 good mice the last time they released a Diablo game. Oh... you mean real mouse?
I'm glad they are doing something to extend the lifespan of my mice... I can't recall how many of them I've lost while playing Diablo 2.
This is science for the 1% on top. We won't be able to afford it.
Fruit flies.
Time flies like arrow
Fruit flies like ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
From the first line of your link (emphasis mine):
This is a list of countries by life expectancy at birth.
To properly counter GP's life expectancy quip, you need to find life expectancy tables for adult males of an age near where Walford was presumably healthy (i.e. not known to have ALS).
However, we all know GP was trolling anyway, since ALS is not known to be caused by diet, and a sample size of 1 is worthless.
Carry on!
"Gene Therapy Extends Mouse Wingspan"
I just pooped your party.
Life is measured, not in the number of breaths you take, but in the number of cheeses that take your breath away.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
The lifespan of all humans everywhere won't increase by 25 years in a blink. It will take many, many years just until such a therapy becomes available to rich-world citizens, never mind the population as a whole. We'll have time to make the cultural adaptions necessary.
[FUCK BETA]
The rats that can afford the cheese will come out of the woodwork, congress will pass a law to make it all illegal in the USA, and life with death will go on for US and EU.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
> (I'm a member of the tautology club, which includes me as a member!)
FTFY.
Maybe the animal cruelty people should volunteer themselves as test subjects instead.
1 Put incold virus.
2 Release in wild
3 Watch the fun begin
Imagine the fights for resources when everybody lives 10-20 years longer absent injury or infectious disease.
You can't sum monetary values that occur in different time periods; In order to compare them, you have to discount them to the present.
consider it as an annuity, with an annual real return of 6% (which is about what good investment managers can do after fees and inflation):
i = .06/365 (daily discount rate)
C = $25/3 (wage for 20 minutes)
n = 365 * 40 (I'm using a more reasonable 40 as employable years, not 63)
therefore: cost of exercise =C*(1-(1+i)^-n)/i = $46,094.64
(explanation here: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/present-value-annuity.asp)
If the cost of this magical therapy was less than $46,000 and was available right now, it would be a good buy. Assuming you didn't need the money for food, shelter, etc - which also promote your health and increase your life span. Also assuming that you had gainful employment available for every waking moment, and did not otherwise have 20 minutes available per day to exercise.
This story is more interesting..
From http://www.33rdsquare.com/2012/04/eating-buckyballs-double-rat-life.html
Scientists at the University of Paris and colleagues fed the molecule fullerene (C60 or “buckyballs”) dissolved in olive oil to rats and found it almost doubles their lifespan, with no chronic toxicity.
The results suggest that the effect of C60, an antioxidant, on lifespan is mainly due to the attenuation of age-associated increases in oxidative stress, according to the researchers. Moreover, the researchers speculate that a longer treatment could have generated even longer lifespans.
...
“C60 can be administered orally, and as it is now produced in tons, it is no longer necessary to resort to its water-soluble derivatives, which are difficult to purify and, in contrast to pristine C60, may be toxic.
From the article: "In 2007, Blasco's group demonstrated that it was feasible to prolong the lives of transgenic mice, whose genome had been permanently altered at the embryonic stage, by causing their cells to express telomerase and, also, extra copies of cancer-resistant genes. These animals live 40% longer than is normal and do not develop cancer."
Why can't we have cancer free humans based on this research?
People who do biomedical research on mice have to have their research approved by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). As part of the approval, the researcher has to justify the numbers of animals used. To do that, the researcher performs a power analysis, matching the number of animals to the experimental design.
If you actually look into power analysis you might be surprised at how few animals you need. It's certainly not the case that you can just look at the sample size and declare them "a bit slim" without carefully examining the experimental design.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I thought we were in some kind of mouse-induced experiment on humans? To my knowledge, they've been lord over us for a while now.
It's worth noting that exercise may have other benefits which gene therapy may not provide.
Improved endurance.
Improved mood.
Improved sleep patterns.
Improved physical appearance.
These have value too.
And some people even find they ENJOY exercise, once they get in shape.
There are chemical markers that they are looking at to show per-cancerous states, much like measuring PTSA for evidence of prostate cancer. They are measuring these markers, not counting tumors.
love is just extroverted narcissism
There are chemical markers that they are looking at to show per-cancerous states, much like measuring PTSA for evidence of prostate cancer. They are measuring these markers, not counting tumors.
Are you sure? Since they're measuring life-span, I figured they'd just wait until the animal died, and then figure out if it died of a type of cancer after the fact.
It's certainly not the case that you can just look at the sample size and declare them "a bit slim" without carefully examining the experimental design.
I don't buy it. Sure, experimental design can help compensate to a point for small sample size and bad experiment design can destroy the value of an experiment no matter how large. But the researchers are trying to make a number of disparate conclusions based on less than 100 rodents. I doubt they'll be able to see cancer risk increases in the low double digits, for example.
True, but it will only now become evident, once they have tricked their human servants into giving them eternal life.
There will be no cheese left for the pilgrims.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
You are clearly not involved in science. As Ive said in other posts, the difference between the experiments is drastic, and the anxiety to publish increases as progress is made and potentially competing labs maybe finishing ahead. If you don't understand the significant difference between the experiments, you shouldn't pretend to (and thus equate them as so similar).
I do stemcell research in a top notch lab.
Also, if it was published in Nature (one of the top 3 big journals), it is groundbreaking by the sheer fact Nature accepted and published. Ask an experienced colleague what it means to publish in Nature. I can save you the hassle: its a big golden trophy that will qualify your career as outstanding.
She is worth way more than some damn lab mouse. She needs this treatment NOW so that it can have maximum effect.
"You are clearly not involved in science."
You are clearly not very logically-minded.
The issue under discussion was whether the methods involved here might increase the incidence of cancer. (And I chose to include whether the lengthening of telomeres itself might increase the incidence of cancer.)
And many years of research, and using these same techniques, have shown nothing of the kind. While granted, in general absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (the more generic way to put it), years of research with many researchers involved, and still no signal that these techniques, used properly, increase cancer rates, is significant data in itself.
I don't need to BE a scientist to understand science.
"I do stemcell research in a top notch lab."
Then Grid help us all. Given the general quality of the posts of yours that I have read, and the fact that you often seem to have trouble constructing a coherent English sentence, this does not serve to raise my confidence in contemporary research.
Actually, the post I replied to about 'first to publish' was about the small sample size. I made that clear when I stated they would likely reproduce the experiment hundreds of times on new experiments refining the method.d
And then you saif they arent the first, and referenced a very different experiment that you could not discern as different....
Anyway... you should read better. Bye.
"Actually, the post I replied to about 'first to publish' was about the small sample size. I made that clear when I stated they would likely reproduce the experiment hundreds of times on new experiments refining the method"
And I repeat: given that these same techniques have been used by many researchers studying many different things, and that other researchers have also been studying the effects of lengthened telomeres for years, then the small sample size in this particular experiment is not terribly relevant to the question about cancer.
Go repeat that to the person you were talking about that topic with. My first post in this thread was a reply to the user KHallow, and my post set the context of the discussion I was having. You chimed in with offtopic replies, etc. Go reread it... its laughable watching it end with your 'i repeat' assertion.
You should have seen my cat's eyes as I read her this article.. MMM .. healthy rats...
It was your own initial reply about "first to publish" that was laughable. Let me repeat these things yet again, in one place so that maybe you will see how they fit together:
(1) The techniques they used were not original. They have been used not just once before but many times, although perhaps in different contexts.
(2) The results of those techiques in this case, were also not unique: lengthened telomeres. Now, it may be that those particular results were never achieved with these techniques. I grant you that. But that was NOT the topic of the post you were replying to. That was about cancer, AND whether the small sample size was significant. Then YOU chime in about "first to publish", which in this context is pretty ridiculous, because there is ONLY one unique thing about this experiment, which was achieving that particular result (lengthened telomeres), with this particular technique. However, that has little to do with the claims made in TFA, or the cancer question to which you were replying.
(3) So here we have unremarkable techniques that achieved unremarkable results, and here you are talking about "first to publish". And none of that has ANYTHING to do with the cancer issue that was the topic of the post you were replying to.
(4) Then I pointed out explicitly that they were not the first to publish, at least about many of the claims that were made in TFA.
(5) You replied (also laughably) that I "am clearly not involved in science". But what is even more clear is that you had not even understood what I was saying to you. (Nor were you familiar with the earlier research which I had been reading about years ago.)
(6) Then you mentioned that your remark was a reply about small sample size... when the MAIN topic of that post was the cancer question... the small sample size was only in relation to the larger issue, and I pointed out that it was irrelevant, given the OTHER research. But you STILL failed to see how that OTHER research ties in to your comment about "first to publish".
(7) Now you claim that I must have been replying to someone else... you STILL haven't gotten it through your head that I was demonstrating how asinine YOUR comments were, given the ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC CONTEXT of what was being discussed.
(8) And you say you are involved in stem cell research, and apparently don't understand -- either -- why that concerns me.
Just wow.
Lol. Bye.
I am glad you find it amusing. While I, on the other hand, find your lack of understanding to be somewhat alarming, given that you say you are a scientist.
What * I * have been discussing all along has been your failure to understand item #4 above, which is what I first commented to you about... in the CONTEXT of the comment about cancer by khallow:
That's a bit slim for some of the claims they make such as the bit about cancer.
NOT that the experiments were not different... I never claimed they were the same, and in fact acknowledged that they were different.
The issue here is that the specific procedures they used have not demonstrated -- in OTHER research -- to increase the incidence of cancer, AND that lengthened telomeres -- also in other ongoing research -- has not been shown to increase cancer rates. These things HAVE been published before, and that was my main point.
If you had been referring to being the first to publish only that their technique resulted in lengthened telomeres, fine, but that would have been rather off-topic, given that the posts that came before were all about the cancer question. So that is not a valid defense of your reply. In fact your comment strongly implied that you were referring to the publishing of the other effects that appeared in TFA, which, as I mentioned, are hardly unique and have been published before.
In short, I think it is pretty clear that either: (a) your comments were made in ignorance of that prior research, or (b) out of context, given the post to which you were replying.
And yet you claim that I am the one who does not understand science. And your basis for saying that appears to be simply that I called you on a dumb comment you made.
Tldr lol.
"Tldr lol."
Okay, fine. Short and sweet:
You made a dumb comment, given the context. And when called on it, your defense was to call other people stupid and make further comments that were irrational given the existing research in the field.
If that's too long for you (and we both know it isn't), then whatever. My only intent was to see that you understood why the comment was dumb.