Aging Process May Be Reversable, Scientists Claim (theguardian.com)

New submitter TheNinjaCoder writes: A new type of gene therapy is showing promise in reversing the aging process. The scientists are not claiming that aging can be eliminated, but say that in the foreseeable future treatments designed to slow the process could increase life expectancy. The Guardian explains the scientists' experiment in its report: "The rejuvenating treatment given to the mice was based on a technique that has previously been used to 'rewind' adult cells, such as skin cells, back into powerful stem cells, very similar to those seen in embryos. These so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have the ability to multiply and turn into any cell type in the body and are already being tested in trials designed to provide 'spare parts' for patients. The treatment involved intermittently switching on the same four genes that are used to turn skin cells into iPS cells. The mice were genetically engineered in such a way that the four genes could be artificially switched on when the mice were exposed to a chemical in their drinking water. The scientists tested the treatment in mice with a genetic disorder, called progeria, which is linked to accelerated aging, DNA damage, organ dysfunction and dramatically shortened lifespan. After six weeks of treatment, the mice looked visibly younger, skin and muscle tone improved and they lived 30% longer. When the same genes were targeted in cells, DNA damage was reduced and the function of the cellular batteries, called the mitochondria, improved. Crucially, the mice did not have an increased cancer risk, suggesting that the treatment had successfully rewound cells without turning them all the way back into stem cells, which can proliferate uncontrollably in the body." The study has been published in the journal Cell.

Comments

Things to solve

[NotInHere]

Congratulations! But even if you have the cure for aging you'll have to solve some (quite big) problems:

* The danger of overpopulation. If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies, our planet will become overcrowded soon. Which system should be implemented? A policy where you need permit by the government to have babies? Will we make a gigantic ponzi scheme where we put those extra humans on mars, then on other plantes, colonizing the galaxy? What when the whole galaxy is colonized? Intergalactic travel outside of our local group is quite hard, as expansion of space will make those galaxies leave us faster than light before we can get to them.

* The danger of cancer. Often when rejuveniating cells you put them in a mode where they like to multiply. You artificially increase the likelihood for cancer with this to an extent of almost certainity.

Re:Things to solve

[Applehu Akbar]

"Overpopulation can be dealt with by moving people to other planets"

Or, we could just gradually lower our fertility rate as life extension catches on. This normally takes place anyway when an agrarian society industrializes and the five children per family become two.

Re: Things to solve

[NotInHere]

You people don't seem to understand how exponential growth works: you will always get to a limit. Whether its the limits of a planet or the limits of a galaxy, or some other limit isn't really relevant.

You "point them off into the stars" method has a couple of issues: first, its expensive resource wise to build and maintain those ships. Space colonisation is much easier doable with spaceships filled with fertilized human eggs, with actual infrastructure to breed and raise those humans once the destination is reached. Second, you need something to target those ships to. Either you target them into nothingness, meaning the people inside the spaceship is almost certain to die (who wants to go on your spaceships then?), or you target them at actual promising locations. But even there it might turn out to be hostile to higher life.

Re:Things to solve

[skids]

Our species, it appears, has better tools for advancement than those that evolved naturally. When you start intelligently editing gene expression and genomes, you're kinda in uncharted territory.

Re:Things to solve

[NotInHere]

That will only work if there is something to inherit. For most people, there is nothing.

Re: Things to solve

[thinkwaitfast]

You get to the limit with linear growth also.

Re:Things to solve

[Wycliffe]

Congratulations! But even if you have the cure for aging you'll have to solve some (quite big) problems:

* The danger of overpopulation. If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies, our planet will become overcrowded soon. Which system should be implemented? A policy where you need permit by the government to have babies? Will we make a gigantic ponzi scheme where we put those extra humans on mars, then on other plantes, colonizing the galaxy? What when the whole galaxy is colonized? Intergalactic travel outside of our local group is quite hard, as expansion of space will make those galaxies leave us faster than light before we can get to them.

* The danger of cancer. Often when rejuveniating cells you put them in a mode where they like to multiply. You artificially increase the likelihood for cancer with this to an extent of almost certainity.

The summary specifically mentions that they found no increased chance of cancer and besides cancer and overpopulation are not reasons not to pursue it. If you could keep someone healthy to 150 and then just took them out in the streets and shot them that would be preferable to what we have now which is where a 100 year old is frail and decrepit.

There are other problems too that need to be dealt with. Society changes because the older generation dies out. If you think the top .01 percent of the rich are bad now, imagine how much worse it would get if they never died and could continue to amass wealth and power indefinitely.

Re:Things to solve

[Anonymous Coward]

Nay-saying everything and bashing everyone over the head with your 'maturity' hammer is a form of childishness. You wanna be an adult? Make some effort toward forward progress instead of being a useless critic of everything.

Attitudes like yours are what hold people back in fear of ridicule. It's the people taking risks on unknowns who what have made the most progress to the advancement of knowledge, not comfortable and safe scientific prediction.

Re:Things to solve

[Coisiche]

I think they might set the bar a little higher because that's probably in the grasp of hundreds of millions around the world. It'll definitely cost more and be carefully controlled.

And no matter how much it costs you know who will always be able to afford it? Politicians.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if governments establish a rule that elected members, or non-elected like UK House of Lords, get rejuvenation therapy during their tenure. This would establish an even greater desire to maintain office, which would lead to blatant gerrymandering, changes to election rules and restrictions on voting rights.

Sometimes something that looks like a good idea just doesn't turn out that way.

Re:Things to solve

[helpfulcorn]

* The danger of overpopulation. If old people don't die, and young people keep making babies, our planet will become overcrowded soon. Which system should be implemented? A policy where you need permit by the government to have babies? Will we make a gigantic ponzi scheme where we put those extra humans on mars, then on other plantes, colonizing the galaxy? What when the whole galaxy is colonized? Intergalactic travel outside of our local group is quite hard, as expansion of space will make those galaxies leave us faster than light before we can get to them.

If overpopulation is really the biggest issue, why don't we just kill a lot of people? This isn't flamebait, I'm serious. If it truly is the worst possible problem, then let's just handle it, have a lottery or something.

I hear this all the time and it's so stupid. Nobody complains about overpopulation thanks to vaccines, cleaner water, cleaner/better food, etc, but start talking about keeping people from getting old suddenly it's a big deal. Do you think people in horrific places in the third world say "well, clean water would be nice, but then less children would die, and that would mean overpopulation!"

You can encourage birth control, you can send people to space eventually, you can encourage birth control, you can promote birth control, fucking birth control. And while we're at it, let's stop with this fantasy that children are a legacy as if we own vast farm land that need to be inherited.

And nobody is stopping a bus from hitting you, or a car accident, or anything else, it will catch up to you eventually, and hell as you even say without any irony at all:

* The danger of cancer. Often when rejuveniating cells you put them in a mode where they like to multiply. You artificially increase the likelihood for cancer with this to an extent of almost certainity.

As opposed to now where it's damn near certain as you get older anyway? If anything this helps your overpopulation problem, why the hell are you complaining!?

Re:Things to solve

[TheRaven64]

Overpopulation can be dealt with by moving people to other planets.

No it can't. At current birth rates, you'd need to move about a million people off planet every week. To put that in perspective, every day roughly 100K people get on planes at London Heathrow. That means that your spaceport would have slightly more departures to space then Heathrow has to terrestrial destinations, every day. Most travellers at Heathrow have under 20Kg of luggage: you're talking about permanent emigration, where people would need a lot more. Let's be conservative and say 100Kg of baggage allowance per person, making a total of about 100Kg. The energy cost to geosync orbit is 50 MJ/Kg. Assuming that in your future world, you have a 100% energy efficient solution (and you have a magical space drive to take them somewhere else), that's 10,000MJ (10GJ) per person, or 10PJ per week.

Now, to put that in perspective, that's about a tenth of the total world energy production currently, just to lift these people and a modest amount of baggage to orbit, using an unfeasibly efficient system and assuming that your magical space elevator is a sunk cost. This sounds almost feasible, but it has a number of unfeasible assumption. Current power beaming (the method of choice for powering a space elevator) is 0.5% efficient and scientists hope to get it up to 2%. That multiplies your energy cost by 50 and means that you're now talking about using five times the current total world power output just to lift people to orbit.

Now, you might say, if you have a space elevator then you could power it using photovoltaics in Earth orbit. Okay, let's look at that. We'll assume 40% efficient solar panels (about the theoretical maximum for photovoltaics). That gives us 400W/m^2. To get our 500PJ/week, we need a constant supply of around 825GW, or a square of solar panels 45km on each side, along with all of the associated cabling and infrastructure. That might just about be possible to build, once you have the space elevator running (though assuming 1Kg per square metre panel, with estimated costs of space elevator operation, it would cost around $400bn in today's dollars, so not exactly a cheap project).

And that's just to get people up to orbit. If you want to actually get them to another planet, you're going to need enough interplanetary ships to carry them somewhere else. And then there's the question of where you send them. Mars? Even if you terraform it, it has the same land mass as Earth, so even if you ignore the children of the colonists then it will fill up in about the time it would take the population of the Earth to double, so that's only going to buy you a few decades.

Since we're talking future hypotheticals, let's say that we find exoplanets with a compatible biosphere and develop a faster-than-light drive (and we'll not even think about the energy costs of that). Unless you reduce the birth rate, the human population is still going to keep doubling every few decades, so all of those newly colonised planets are going to start exporting people soon too. You'll need to double the number of human colonies every few decades and unless human-friendly planets are startlingly common, that's not sustainable. And if you do manage to reduce birth rates to a manageable amount, then the need to export people from Earth goes away.

Re: Things to solve

[limaxray]

Nonsense. You're still thinking with a 20th century mind. We're not that far off from being able to launch autonomous drones into space to harvest the asteroid belt and construct a dyson swarm - it's now more of an engineering challenge than a science challenge. As long as you get your materials outside the gravity well of a planet like Earth, constructing massive space based living platforms would be relatively trivial. No need to travel anywhere to be able to reach a carrying capacity many times that of Earth. And assuming we're never able to reach speeds greater than a fraction of the speed of light, we can still hop from star system to star system until we have engulfed every star in the galaxy. Even if we reproduced at premodern rates, we'd be more limited by the age of the galaxy than any carrying capacity we couldn't engineer around. But, as the standard of living increases and people find other sources of enjoyment in life, the rate of reproduction has dropped below 2 per couple. The galaxy is just so massive and our capabilities are so limitless that over population will never be a wide spread problem, as has been demonstrated time and time again.

Progeria mice

[_Sharp'r_]

The scientists quoted say 10 years away from any sort of human clinical application. One interesting thing to note is that these are progeria mice, who would normally age very rapidly from their condition. So it's more like making them age more normal, not extending their lifespan abnormally. Will be interesting to see if they can use this technique to actual reverse normal aging and extend a normal lifespan, not just one which was previously going to be cut very short.

Rather low bar

[Empiric]

Genetic disorder mitigated by genetic manipulation. Yes?

Instead of progeria-afflicted mice, why not attempt the technique on otherwise healthy mice? If that can be made to result in a 30% lifespan extension, that would be notable.