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Biological Clock Discovered That Measures Ages of Most Human Tissues
starr802 writes "A biological clock capable of determining how old different human tissues and cells are has been discovered by a team of researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (abstract). 'To fight aging, we first need an objective way of measuring it. Pinpointing a set of biomarkers that keeps time throughout the body has been a four-year challenge,' Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health said in a statement. 'My goal in inventing this clock is to help scientists improve their understanding of what speeds up and slows down the human aging process.'"
This technology will be used only for forensics.
Just wind up your biological clocks with "Wind Up"(tm). Our medicine will reset all your biological clocks. Feel young again! ..
consult your doctor before taking "Wind Up"(tm). Side effects include laughing, loving, and lasciviousness
If you the TFA you will see at the bottom an interesting note: "In an unexpected finding, the cells of children with progeria, a genetic disorder that causes premature aging, appeared normal and reflected their true chronological age" Doesn't this make the results inconclusive at that point? Since children with this disease age faster than anyone else? If his "clock" was accurate wouldn't these children display clocks point to a much older person?
Turns out breast tissue in women ages faster than most of the rest of their bodies.
However, read the actual paper which describes the population chosen for the study first. Don't draw conclusions based on news reporting, which is almost always wrong.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A lot of the problems in our society would be corrected if people lived a great deal longer. That is counter intuitive because many people believe we have over population issues. But in the developed world we don't. The issue is actually that our mortality rate exceeds our birth rate. The difference made up in immigration.
Worse, we have big problems with education and not just education but experience. We invest a lot in people for relatively few productive years of service. Imagine if you could train someone up and they'd be viable in that job for 50 years. Obviously some booster training over the years as required. But consider the wealth of knowledge people would bring to the table.
It might stagnate certain segments as industries became saturated with people more accustomed to older tech... but then we might just get standards that update the tech without changing the way you use it.
Who can say. Regardless, life extension would be useful.
That said, I don't think this discovery is going to be particularly useful in it. Sure. Great they're doing this research and good for them for finding something. But the clock they found appears to be correlative instead of causative. Its a log. Its tree rings. It doesn't cause the aging it is instead caused by the aging.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
so .. what happened with the telomere theory:http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/traits/telomeres/ ?
Versus "inventing"
Which is it?! No, I'm not 'TL;DR', but there's a wall clock
that insists there are only 24 hours in a day.
The core discovery is nice, even if their problem isn't the there : Their clock is normal BUT their cells interpret it incorrectly, so the problem could be found elsewhere, like a bad clock multiplier when overclocking your PC (could result with it being slower or faster).
At least, now you know that the problem is not the "aging flag" itself, but something that's reading it.
I can't call that English
The activity of the immune system has something to do with this too. You can either have an hyper-activated immune system and it will kill every slightly mutated cell, causing premature aging. Or you can have a suppressed immune system in which case, cancers and tumours are more likely to grow.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
'My goal in inventing this clock is to help scientists improve their understanding of what speeds up and slows down the human aging process.
That's a misprint. The actual quote is "My goal in inventing this clock is to become really stinking rich. I don't mean a little rich, I mean Bill Gates rich. Famous too. 'The guy who solved aging' has a good ring to it. Mostly, however, I just want sacks and sacks of cash.
Did the article imply that the clock was use in that way at all? The body read sthe clock and then decides to recede a hair line, put in a few more grays, or make your bones more brittle?
I would imagine a clock like this is used more for general maintenance, knowing when a cell needs replacing/cleaning/replenishing.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's a real-time clock, apparently.
Ezekiel 23:20
Obviously progeria causes asynchrony then.
Whoever said progeria has the same underlying mechanism as actual aging?
Since atoms themselves are ageless, I've always wondered what is "age"? The universe is 14 billion years old, the Earth 4, me I'm 38 but we're all made of the same atoms that have been on Earth for billions of years, barring the occasional nuclear event, which makes "new" atoms but they act exactly the same as any other atom of the same element.
Maybe if our society viewed aging as a disease, we would be spending more on anti aging research. I personally wouldn't mind if up to 50% of my income went towards it.
A lot of the problems in our society would be corrected if people lived a great deal longer.
A lot of problem in society are corrected when people die. A friend of mine loves to repeat a saying he picked up somewhere: "If you could live to 1000, imagine all the weird kinds of racist you would be".
You really want assholes like Strom Thurmond living to the ripe old age of 1000?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
".. UCLA has filed a provisional patent on Horvath's clock .."
I thought he discovered something that was already there..
But I guess since it's *his* clock (or UCLAs), we shouldn't hold our breath on an anti-aging drug.
Are they trying to say through this analysis that your potential maximum life span would be N years and that you are some percentage of the way there?
...like a bad clock multiplier when overclocking your PC (could result with it being slower or faster)....
This is Slashdot, sir. Couple you place restate your analogy using cars? Maybe something with transmissions or torque converters?
If you the TFA you will see at the bottom an interesting note: "In an unexpected finding, the cells of children with progeria, a genetic disorder that causes premature aging, appeared normal and reflected their true chronological age" Doesn't this make the results inconclusive at that point? Since children with this disease age faster than anyone else? If his "clock" was accurate wouldn't these children display clocks point to a much older person?
Maybe. If progeria were literally "premature temporal aging". But it isn't. It's just a genetic disorder that causes certain symptoms that appear similar to premature temporal aging. Nobody on Earth has ever actually "aged" faster or slower than anyone else. A 35-year-old person with a full head of prematurely gray hair is still the same actual age as all other 35-year-old people. He or she just has premature graying; a specific symptom of a very specific biological system, which resembles a symptom of general aging. But the gray hair does not mean the person has actually aged 90 years while the rest of us have aged 35 years. It just means that some metabolic process has reacted differently at a different time on the biological clock. Now we have to figure out what triggers all of the other independent metabolic systems to react in certain ways when they read certain timestamps from the biological clock.
What the result regarding progeria cells tells us is that this biological clock quite literally tells time, i.e. the actual temporal age of the organism. Like tree rings. Which is interesting in and of itself. If this clock is accurate enough we might finally have a way to test whether those people who are supposedly 120 or 130 or 140 years old are really as old as they think they are or whether they're just misremembering what decade they were born.
...immortality will be invented shortly after we die.
Progreria is not actually an aging process, although it has many of the appearances of aging. It's actually a defective protein encoding that weakens cells and shortens cell lifespans. This is not a process that occurs during normal aging. So the finding confirms what you'd expect to find in the cells of progeria affected individuals.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Every time I look in the mirror, I can see More gray hair and estimate that I'm getting older.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Oh no, you're supposed to grow old gracefully, and accept the infirmity of age as the price of wisdom. Or some crap like that.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My first thought was forensics and palaeontology - There are plenty of people in those fields for whom it would be very useful to take a scrap of human tissue and tell exactly how old its owner was when they lost it.
Not necessarily. Think of it this way: Hang two wall clocks, one inside your house, and one outside. They both keep perfect time, but over time, the one outside, battered by wind, sea air, etc... corrodes quicker, the outside beaten all to hell. So, appearance is aged, internals are aged, but both can still keep the same time (up to a point of course) which is akin to what happens to kids with progeria.
Ha! Now I can *prove* that I'm the one that's supposed to be here! They can now confidently set me free and lock up that other guy.
In your (my) face, Future-Me!
It's like when you put the gate on your shifter upside-down. So instead of first gear, you get fourth. And reverse? Ouuuuuch.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }