Slashdot Mirror
Telomere-Lengthening Procedure Turns Clock Back Years In Human Cells
Zothecula writes Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a new procedure to increase the length of human telomeres. This increases the number of times cells are able to divide, essentially making the cells many years younger. This not only has useful applications for laboratory work, but may point the way to treating various age-related disorders – or even muscular dystrophy.
Yeah thats the Hayflick limit which is designed to stop that.
Theres actually a damn good reason why cells are designed to stop reproducing after a certain limit. In fact one of cancers strategies is to artificially prevent telemere shortening to try and circumvent the hayflick limit.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I suspect that this will be one of the most expensive treatments ever.
There is no particular reason to believe this will be expensive. It is just some RNA, which can be inexpensively replicated. Even if it is patented, it is likely that someone else can some up with a similar technique, making it a competitive market, and driving down prices.
If you really want to be a pessimist, you should instead focus on how this is going to bankrupt Social Security. People are going to retire at 65, and then collect benefits for the next 55 years.
Yes, the article mentions that, and says extending by only 1000 nucleotides is a good thing because "cells that divide endlessly could pose a increased cancer risk if used in humans.". Of course if you kept repeating the treatment, it would be the same as dividing endlessly anyway.
Good for you. At least you're not having to watch all those damned social engineering commercials.
The ads this year suck big time. Half the time I can't tell what they're trying to sell, if anything.
You jest, but this is why we have children instead of just living forever. Think of reproduction as, in a sense, compressing all the information required to make an animal down into a much smaller amount of storage medium than the entire animal takes up. That's a far smaller volume for 'bad data' (mutations, genetic abnormalities etc) to exist in. Then the process of 'unpacking' this data applies a bunch of checksum checks (changes are liable to render the embryo non-viable rather than continuing). In the end you have a genetic copy of the parent(s), but with all of the bad data and random junk squeezed out.
It's not as simple as adding extra telomerase to the end of your DNA strands. The reason we have this genetic equivalent of a MAX_LOOPS constant is that once cells have subdivided that many times, they error rate gets too high. Extending cellular life in this manner without some form of added error correction will just result in cancer.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.