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Researchers Accidentally Discover How To Turn Off Skin Aging Gene
BarbaraHudson sends this excerpt from The Province:
While exploring the effects of the protein-degrading enzyme Granzyme B on blood vessels during heart attacks, professor David Granville and other researchers at the University of British Columbia couldn't help noticing that mice engineered to lack the enzyme had beautiful skin at the end of the experiment, while normal mice showed signs of age. The discovery pushed Granville's research in an unexpected new direction.
The researchers built a mechanized rodent tanning salon and exposed mice engineered to lack the enzyme and normal mice to UV light three times a week for 20 weeks, enough to cause redness, but not to burn. At the end of the experiment, the engineered mice still had smooth, unblemished skin, while the normal mice were deeply wrinkled.
Granzyme B breaks down proteins and interferes with the organization and the integrity of collagen, dismantling the scaffolding — or extra-cellular matrix — that cells bind to. This causes structural weakness, leading to wrinkles. Sunlight appears to increase levels of the enzyme and accelerate its damaging effects.
The researchers built a mechanized rodent tanning salon and exposed mice engineered to lack the enzyme and normal mice to UV light three times a week for 20 weeks, enough to cause redness, but not to burn. At the end of the experiment, the engineered mice still had smooth, unblemished skin, while the normal mice were deeply wrinkled.
Granzyme B breaks down proteins and interferes with the organization and the integrity of collagen, dismantling the scaffolding — or extra-cellular matrix — that cells bind to. This causes structural weakness, leading to wrinkles. Sunlight appears to increase levels of the enzyme and accelerate its damaging effects.
Or is the rest of the body "not aging "also?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Interesting, but I can't help wonder if this enzyme exists for a reason. I presume these scientists are working hard to determine what evolutionary role it fills (before working on selling it as part of an anti-aging cream)
I believe it's already known that avoiding sunlight helps prevent this enzyme from being released, and in turn keeps skin looking younger. This is just artificially lowering it even further in an attempt to to create immortal, sunlight-fearing vampires.
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Why would they do that? If you're a cosmetics company and you can buy a startup that owns the patents on a technique that actually works, then you'd be stupid to keep competing on a level playing field when you could be the only company that's selling the real thing. Even if you multiply your normal profit margin by a factor of ten, you're still going to be selling huge quantities and raking in the money.
The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they assume that people with large entrenched interests and lots of money somehow have an aversion to turning their big pile of money into an enormous pile of money.
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I'd also add that even if this research is valid, and even if stopping the action of this protein reduces skin aging in humans, there is a very good chance that the protein does other things that are quite important for health. It's conceivable, for instance, that you might have great skin, but a weakened immune system or have your digestion of certain important nutrients stunted. So even if there's no fraud, there's a lot of reason to remain skeptical.
I suspect it is part of the scarring/regeneration trade off. This collagen scaffolding action possibly helps skin heal faster after a cut, the trade off is wrinkles. Slower healing skin, but doing so blemish-free was not likely a good survival trait when a break in the skin barrier would increase chance of infection.
With modern medicine, infection risk might be abated by antibiotics/antiseptics.
This might also be awesome for burn victims (assuming you can keep infection at bay)