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Key Gene Found Responsible For Accelerated Aging and Cancer
First time accepted submitter gbrennan123 writes "Researchers at NYU School of Medicine have identified a single gene that simultaneously controls inflammation, accelerated aging and cancer. From the article: '"This was certainly an unexpected finding," said principal investigator Robert J. Schneider, PhD, the Albert Sabin Professor of Molecular Pathogenesis, associate director for translational research and co-director of the Breast Cancer Program at NYU Langone Medical Center. "It is rather uncommon for one gene to have two very different and very significant functions that tie together control of aging and inflammation. The two, if not regulated properly, can eventually lead to cancer development. It's an exciting scientific find."'"
a gene called AUF1 controls inflammation by turning off the inflammatory response to stop the onset of septic shock.
The new discovery, which they apparently discovered and will be shown when their paper is published, was that AUF1 also releases telomerase to repair telomeres.
The current study reveals that AUF1....also maintains the integrity of chromosomes by activating the enzyme telomerase to repair the ends of chromosomes
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's usable immediately, in the form of directing future research.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Depends on what you mean by usable. It immediately prompts a study of human populations to identify how certain defects can impair it's function which will likely lead to the development of gene therapies to correct those defects, and if beneficial variants can be identified, could later lead to general purpose gene therapies to slow the rate of aging. It may also lead to studies for the development of drugs to modify it's action, but thats probably farther out than basic gene therapies for those with defective instances of these genes.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
Don't worry, this guy found it. Down with regulations!!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765(12)00341-3
Without the upwards pressure of too many humans we'll never get off this shit hole of a planet :)
If you've "cured" aging there are no "old people".
how does one regulate aging?
Convince Republicans that it involves gays marrying.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
I have to say that I agree with this sentiment. I'd much rather be me living now, than The Buddha himself, as I still get to breathe, etc.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
There were sci-fi short stories sbout this theme that were written in the 1950's, before suburbanization. One was that a drug called Eternitol or something similar was found and that led to three or four grnerations of the same family living together. Others had the roads department deliberately timing traffic lights and placing street signs to cause as many traffic accidents as possible to achieve population control. The other had families fighting in home invasions in order to get birth permission documents.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Human DNA has teleomerase and teleomeres . Its known that inflammation and infection leads to swelling. Like arthritis patients - when the immune system gets hyperactive, white T-cells go into an "angry" state and attack healthy cells. The eventual destruction due to this pricess ends up with joints losing cartilage, grinding agsinst each other and causing more inflammation.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The secret to a long life is actually very simple: Keep Breathing. That's all there is to it!
Obviously this sounds like an amazing and important discovery, perhaps the holy grail of cancer research.
Imagine a world where you just pop a pill and keep living as long as you want. Without additionally having drastic population control, that's going to doom us to a totally unsustainable world, if we don't have that already. But even with that unlikely flip-side, imagine a population that is just fixed at some point with the people it has right now, never dying, never having offspring. How creepy would that be?
Jut sayin' - food for thought (and maybe a sci-fi novel).
Jack Vance explored some of the social implications of selective immortality in his weird murder mystery. To Live Forever As I read about possible life extension breakthroughs in the news and contemplate the implications -- we really do seem to be getting somewhere -- I often catch myself thinking about this insightful lesser known work of the reclusive and gifted Mr. Vance.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
cancer is evolution. It's how DNA tries new stuff. If it works, survival. If it doesn't work, death.
Most of that applies to mutation. Are you saying that all cancers are the result of mutation, all mutation causes cancer, or something else?
On the other hand, Shakyamuni Buddha lived into his 80s, Jean Manual Fangio only gave up professional motor racing in his 90s, and the Queen Mother was conducting human experiments on the effects of gin past the century mark.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Different things mean different things to different people. Who's to say someone watching TV and playing video games wasn't interesting to them? Or do we as a people dictate whether someone can have a greater life expectancy only if they are reasonably sure to do something perceived extraordinary by the general public?
There's still the genetic, physical and mental wear-and-tear of an extended lifespan to deal with. There's no cure for entropy. People will still have varying levels of skill and experience, and most likely will become more cautious and set in their ways as they age.
Buddha didn't go to Nirvana when he died, the entire point is that he achieved enlightenment (got to Nirvana) while alive.
Letting nature control population means relying on one or more of nature's methods. These are also known as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Human choices of control are preferrable if they beat nature's. By beat, we could be talking about "less wasteful", "kinder", or somehow "ethically fairer", and the exact conclusion will vary depending on which we emphasize. In fact, we could be trying to balance many such goals. You may be arguing from some definition of "ethically fairer", "less wasteful", "less arbitrary", or some other standard. So if you really want somebody to tell you what's faulty about your proposal, until you can explain what you are trying to accomplish better than by just letting nature take its course you don't really have any logic behind your claim to refute. Without that understanding, your proposal is an emotional argument disguised as a reasoned conclusion.
Knocking out aging actually has relatively little effect on population growth in some ways, for example women still stop having fertile eggs at menopause even if they typically live much longer. How many of those opportunities to fertilize an egg actually get used has a direct effect on population that is really larger than any possible additional lifespan.
(Yes, try the math. Increase the lifespan to a blisteringly worst case full 800 years, which would be about the average if we assume nobody dies of anything except violent accidents and deliberates such as being struck by a bus or shot in a war, and add some additional worst case for population assumptions such as that most of the people who kill themselves either do it early or wouldn't do it at all if they had their health. Assume ALL fatal diseases are cureable, and all people enjoy a biological age of about 25 for as long as they live, but women still stop being fertile about 45 to 50. Now instead assume current longevity prevails, but take the worldwide reproductive rate back up to about 4.2 children per generation, add that we can somehow feed all those kids for a few generations and so the rate can (temporarily, from a long enough perspective) stay that high, and now guess which group eventually gets bigger than the other way.).
By the way, surgical sterilization is seldom reversable. The usual effect is that closing off the tubes (for either gender) triggers internal scarring and often within a couple of years an autoimmune reaction sets in which causes the eggs to become infertile or the sperm to not fully form. The odds of a pregnancy resulting from a successful reversal are as low as 20% for the most common methods of female sterilization, although there is a procedure involving simply banding the tubes with clips or rings and doing no cutting and this gives odds as high as 70%. Male sterilization reversal has slightly better odds than that, but this assumes the surgeon did the original procedure with an eye towards eventual reversal, the reversal can include more than a simple reconnection but be followed as necessary with a complete epididymal repair (with a doctor who can determine on the fly which of three different procedures should be used after he or she actually gets in there) and the auto immune reation didn't happen. We're talking about a great success rate if you have one of a few dozen extremely skilled doctors who can do that work, but those guys are a bit like heart transplant surgeons - they don't grow on trees, and they don't come cheap. If you pay a doctor public clinic wages to bulk sterilize poor people, he or she won't be a doctor with that sort of success rate on reversals. You're making something sound simple and reliable which is actually pretty much experimental rocket science, and nobody should get sterilized with the idea that it can reliably be fixed if they change their mind or circumstances..
Who is John Cabal?
does this mean researchers know where to look in regards to a cure for accelerated aging diseases?
Define 'waste', please.
If suddenly I could live for another 500+ years I don't see what harm it would do if I spent some of that time enjoying myself.
I would still be able to read more books, study more things and be more productive than I ever could have if I only lived to be 80 or so.
The argument you're making is hardly unique and when taken to its logical conclusion is that we should all sleep on the ground, work all waking hours and eat mass-produced nutrient slurry because anything more than that would be decadent and wasteful indulgences.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Maybe, but "curing" aging means fixing those genetic and physical weat-and-tear issues. Mental is another story, but who knows maybe massively extended lifespans makes people less cautious. Since we don't have them we don't know.
And of course there's a cure for entropy. Humans are not closed systems after all. Heck the heat pump in my house "cures" entropy.
More cautious makes sense - you have more to lose dieing early, you have more to lose by losing your wealth, etc. Then again you've already lived a long time, maybe you consider it worth taking more risks just for the excitement value, maybe knowing you have huge amounts of time to make up that lost wealth makes risk taking more attractive?
Maybe centuries of wisdom more than compensates for whatever youth brings.
Let's not forget the most likely cause of future reduction in America's middle-class (and above) birth rates: thirtysomething men who happily occupy their rent-free wing of Mom & Dad's McMansion, and have relatively high-paying jobs that finance cool toys, nice cars, a half-dozen vacations, and casual sex with college-age girls roughly 2/3 their age (shamelessly outspending their frustrated, mostly celibate college-age male peers) and have zero interest in dating girls their own age, because those girls all seem to be obsessed with marriage and having kids -- something they have zero interest in. Their college-age fsckbuddies view pregnancy as a major social disaster, use birth control, and run to their local abortion clinic at the slightest hint of pregnancy.
Thirtysomething women, meanwhile, increasingly find themselves forced to choose between having a child by artificial insemination (and rendering themselves un-dateable and likely to be single until their kid(s) are in college) and rolling the dice with a first pregnancy in their 40s by holding out hope that maybe some guy in his late 40s or 50s will finally grow up and decide he wants to be a dad... and that he really, truly DOES want to get married -- now -- and have kids, and isn't just losing his ability to score with 20something college girls & settling for "Plan B".
It's already happening, but the trend is clear -- given the chance, men can (and will) defer marriage (and parenthood) as long as they possibly can, and are perfectly happy extending adolescence into their 30s and beyond. Women, meanwhile, are running against a fairly fixed deadline that might be a tiny bit negotiable, but will ultimately arrive LONG before men their age who feel zero pressure to cooperate will feel the same way. Parents who are tolerant and smart recognize that grandkids are nice (in theory), but having their son around well into adulthood is potentially more useful. It might not be a strategy Evolution would smile upon, but from the rational viewpoint of two self-interested parents, it's not a bad idea.
It's actually not hard to see a future where a large plurality of kids in school have a lesbian couple as parents (because they'd be one of the only groups left that still tended to be married and having kids in their early 30s), and a slightly larger group of heterosexual women who form households, have kids via artificial insemination, and eventually engage in "reverse polygamy" -- finding one of the few men of their age, educational background, and social class who actually DOES want to get married and have kids, and marrying him together. And of course, the remainder of kids, with mothers who won't be twice their age until they're in high school.
And the guys who didn't marry into a reverse-polygamous household and eventually get to be too old to pick up college girls, regardless of how much money they have? They eventually end up dating women their age, after those women's kids are in college (or beyond).
The thing is, that people with these excessive sense of self-importance think that the enlightened West should teach the world about how to reduce the population so the Western way of life could continue. That's the real problem here not the idea of birth-control.
First of all, look at the Western countries. It's not all that fun, if we put our demographics in perspective. An ageing population with decreasing number of active hands and hence, falling productivity. You can catch the tendencies of the problem around funding the healthcare, the education, and other stuff not because of immigration, but quite the opposite. We have a declining number of productive, healthy, young, fresh people, hence their political position is declining too, and the politics now in the western countries is characterized by the "politics of pension". The younger generation gets bleaker and bleaker prospects of life compared to the more numerous successive older generations. Gonna be great!
The western countries, this lifestyle certainly produces less children than the poverty stricken, poorly educated masses in places like in India. However, you should know that the rate of population growth around the globe has declined, and now barely up a little to the sustaining level 3 kid-model (World average between 2005-2010 was 2.52). Given that the wealth distribution is ridiculously uneven in the world, and the advance of technology, there's absolutely no reason why the world population should decrease. Enforcing one-child policies need social engineering and state power that contradicts with the very thing we would like to achieve: wide-spread growth in the general quality of life. In fact, such a social engineering also threatens with an other problems, such as gender parity issues (like the one in China, which could turn out quite nasty on the long term).
If we manage to sustain the population on the current level or only a slightly higher the future of human race is tied up with the quality of life we can spread around the planet. The more people get healthy, proper nutritious food, good education, stable circumstances, learning to cooperate with the rest of the world, the faster we get to a blooming human race, that can evolve in all sense to reach further than this lovely, but limited gravity well.
No matter how people like simplify things, the demographic issues are more complex than they think. It's all about social-political-economic-cultural system that you want to redesign or even revolutionize to get to finally flourish the human race and the rest of the planet.
Most wide-eyed researchers started off expecting 60,000 genes in the human genome yet we found something closer to 20,000 when the mist settled.
By my early childhood instruction in improper fractions, it's not impossible that all 20,000 genes are holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Hi... I am a member of the screwed over generation.
1)Home is worthless because of the irresponsibility of the previous generations
2)Saddled in huge student loan debt because of the lack of care that previous generations had for controlling the cost inflation...they got theirs as it were.
3)Stagnating wages so the old people can keep their high wages and pensions
4)If the wrong people get elected, I will lose middle class tax breaks (mortgage interest deduction, child deduction, etc), because the middle class is apparently a special interest?
Maybe centuries of wisdom more than compensates for whatever youth brings.
Pert titties, that's what youth has going for it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Right, because the only way to become a real adult is to have a kid. What the fuck? If that's your reason for having kids, you probably aren't mature enough to be having kids.
zero interest in dating girls their own age, because those girls all seem to be obsessed with marriage and having kids -- something they have zero interest in. Their college-age fsckbuddies view pregnancy as a major social disaster, use birth control, and run to their local abortion clinic at the slightest hint of pregnancy.
I think what you mean is that they *assume* women their age are so obsessed. There's actually an emerging trend of thirtysomething women who are less concerned about marriage per se than about partnership, and who have no particular desire for children (or, at least, for biological children -- which negates most of the pressure of that pesky "biological clock" people so enjoy clucking their tongues about). We're well aware of how much people give up by having kids, and just because we have ovaries doesn't magically render us incapable of a hint of selfishness. And the majority of my female friends who've gotten abortions have done so in their thirties. As a thirtysomething woman, were I to wake up pregnant (in spite of the precautions I take to prevent it), that's where I'd go, myself. I suspect such men's preference for younger women stems less from the rational "I want people who want the same things I want" point of view you seem happy to infer on their behalf, and more from a troublingly immature "I don't want to have to deal with women as people, so I'll date someone too young to know who she is yet" perspective.
Thirtysomething women, meanwhile, increasingly find themselves forced to choose between having a child by artificial insemination (and rendering themselves un-dateable and likely to be single until their kid(s) are in college)
When I hear people talking this way about dating someone who has a child, I certainly agree that there's an undateable person in the equation -- and it's not the one with the kid. As an aside, I always find it entertaining when people decide on a particular way of viewing human nature, come up with a halfway-believable attribution to evolutionary pressures, and call it "evolutionary psychology." It's kind of like a college freshman who's decided he's a "philosopher" because he just learned why the cogito is important.
If this weren't Slashdot I'd swear you were a thirty something husband hunter.
The best correlation with birthrate is female education. That strongly suggests that it's the women who want to defer (or skip entirely) having kids in favour of building careers.