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Naked Mole Rats Defy Mortality Mathematics (discovermagazine.com)

Posted by msmash on from the stranger-things dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Naked mole rats are adorably ugly creatures that challenge what we think we know about aging. Naked mole rats can live to be 30 years old. Further, female mole rats show no signs of menopause, and remain highly fertile even into their final years of life. Neurogenesis in naked mole rats continues over two decades, and their hearts and bones don't seem to change significantly over time. They rarely get cancer. Hell, they can even live up to 18 minutes utterly deprived of oxygen.

[...] At Google's biotech company, Calico, in San Francisco, California, biologist Rochelle Buffenstein is looking to the naked survivors to unlock their secrets of aging. Buffenstein says naked mole rats violate to the Gompertz-Makeham law, and she has over 3,000 data points to back her conclusion. After reaching adulthood six months into their lives, a naked mole rat's mortality risk remained the same for the rest of its days her analysis revealed. Rather than grow exponentially, a naked mole rat's risk of death on any given day, no matter their point in life, hovered around 1 in 10,000. Surprisingly, their mortality risk even fell a little when they grew very old. In this sense, Buffenstein writes, naked mole rats have established themselves as "a non-aging mammal. This life-history trend is unprecedented for mammals," Buffenstein and colleagues wrote in a study published recently in the journal eLife.

12 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Google by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All the Google engineers are getting older and are looking for ways to extend their lives. And all your money won't another minute buy.

    1. Re:Google by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Money certainly can buy more life. It can't buy endless life - at least not yet - but a plentiful supply of money allows access to a lot of expensive treatments which will cure conditions that might kill a less-financed patient. Buying time, in a quite literal manner.

    2. Re:Google by avandesande · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Trying homeopathic BS doesn't count, no matter how expensive it is.

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
    3. Re:Google by cayenne8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Tell that to Steve Jobs.

      Steve had the money AND the medical advice to try to help extend his life.

      However HE made the choice to ignore them and try more holistic types of tx...and waited too long to try more proven medical tx.

      He could likely still be alive if he'd listened to the original medical tx advice.

      Not that other sources and types of medicine aren't valuable, I believe they are, but when it comes to cancer, you need to try the prevailing medical recommendations there, you don't fuck with the big "C"...

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    4. Re:Google by cayenne8 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is, much as we ego-centric people dislike it.

      If nobody died, the planet would be even more overrun with us than currently. Imagine the population crisis then!

      I'm not so much concerned with everyone else, I want ME to live on.

      :)

      Hell, if the vampire thing really worked, I'd opt in for that for immortality in a heartbeat.

      I really like living here on earth, and would do just about anything to prolong my time here, especially if I could stop the aging process.

      To me, and I'd guess most everyone else...your own life *IS* the most precious thing you own and would do most anything to keep it.

      At least with normal people....

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    5. Re:Google by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Your outlook changes as you get older. When you get in your 80s and 90s death isn't seen as such as bad thing. But thanks for admitting you are self-centered at this point in your life.

    6. Re:Google by Harvey+Manfrenjenson · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Perhaps your outlook changes in your 80s and 90s because there is no point in dreading something which is inevitable. If medical science changes to the point where people can live to 150+ with good quality of life (a very big if), then I would expect most 90-year-olds would want to hang on to life as much as I do.

      That's assuming, of course, that your original premise is correct. That's a hard thing for me to know, because I'm not old enough yet.

    7. Re:Google by CanHasDIY · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So Nikola Tesla is as worthless as you, because he died? Yea, never mind all that contribution he made to society, all that technology he invented that dumbasses like you use and fail to appreciate every day.

      You really should have stopped about 20 comments ago.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    8. Re: Google by Immerman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's really hard to manage your resources effectively when you've been strip-mined by a foreign military power, and continue to be governed by colonial-style governments which, while now under the control of locals, are still designed to their core to pillage the natives, rather than function as anything resembling a Western-style government.

      Meanwhile, most of the aid we've delivered could hardly be delivered in a manner better designed to destroy any hope they have of getting back on their feet. Local farms are struggling to produce food in a cost-effective manner, so what do we do? Supply the farms with the infrastructure (pumps, etc) necessary to produce the food needed? No. Guarantee them a fair price for their produce so they can secure the funding needed for such upgrades themselves, and then distribute that food to the starving? No. We ship in and distribute free food, and predictably destroy the local market for food, forcing farmers to grow non-food export crops to have any chance of paying their bills.

      Bottom line - the problem is not the starving people, they've done nothing wrong except not rise up and overthrow their well armed colonial governments. The problem was created and sustained by the interference of Western governments. If our goal was to help them, then doing nothing whatsoever would have been a better long-term strategy than what we've done.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. So naked and ugly by nospam007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...is the way to go if you don't want to die.

    They always say that they don't age and that they don't get cancer, but nobody ever tells us what's killing them.

    Are they eaten by a grue?

  3. Isn't the question why they die at 30? by mykepredko · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, they reach maturity at 6 months and stay at the same point for the rest of their lives. I would like to know what kills them at 30.

    Is it the telemores in their cells being used up and shutting down the animal or is there something else at play? Did they pass through a different evolutionary process which makes the established Gompertz-Makeham law invalid for them?

    Can anybody comment?

    --
    Mimetics Inc. Twitter
  4. Re:Hardly by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've actually looked into these pretty heavily over the years, they have more or less the same set of survival genes we have (things which don't make cancer pop up in under 30 years, things which don't lead to heart disease in similar timeframes, etc.) There's nothing groundbreaking in them aside from their paws.