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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.'"
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?
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.
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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
It's a real-time clock, apparently.
Ezekiel 23:20
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And anal seepage. You can't have a drug without that as a side effect.
When I was very young, I did get a little anal seepage from time to time.
REPORT CLOSED: WORKS AS INTENDED
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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.
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.
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.
So long as there were term limits, I don't have a problem with it.
You think there aren't young racists? You do know we have lots of racists under the age of 20... of all races, genders, religious backgrounds, and sexual orientations. Any flavor of person out there is going to come in the racist variety. Welcome to planet earth.
I'd much rather have seasoned racists that have at least been around the block a few times then naive ones that on top of being bigots are also clueless of just about everything.
Here is the thing. Its a zero sum game. Over time assuming your brain didn't rot, you'd have more knowledge and your character would be more seasoned. You'll probably be a better person at 60 then you were at 20 especially if you get to keep a mostly young body. What is more, you'll be more useful to society. You'll pay taxes. You'll participate somewhat intelligently in the political process.
And the whole thing will be a giant hedge against volatile cultural/political/economic trends because the majority of the population will remember previous ages and will know if things can be done better. They'll see things and say "I remember when we didn't have that problem because we didn't do that other thing." And maybe... MAYBE they'll say "okay, lets not do that anymore because it clearly not working out."
Think further of the highly technical professions. Engineers. Doctors. Scientists. Imagine once getting trained up to their profession they could give you a century of useful work before dying. See. That makes them more useful.
Right now we have to invest about 25 years in a person to train them up to that level. From birth to when you could roughly call them an actual scientist or Doctor. But today... they'll probably retire at 50 or 60. Which means you put in 25 years of teaching to get out MAYBE about 25 years of work. And even then there is a horrific failure rate with many people being taught things that they never apply to anything.
Its a question of efficiency. Doubtless you'll argue here that science would stagnate without old scientists dying off and old doctors dying off to make way for newer practitioners that will embrace newer methods. Possibly. Actually, that will in some cases certainly happen. We see it today in several fields. But if its an issue then you can address it. Force them to update at intervals. There are many ways to do that short of death.
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