Naked Mole Rats Defy Mortality Mathematics (discovermagazine.com)

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.

Comments

Hmm!

[Mikkeles]

Maybe hanging out in your mom's basement in the dark is a successful long-life strategy>

Re:Hmm!

[lowkeyknight]

for the individual perhaps, but like extending strategies which reduce chances for procreation tend to be selected against...naturally.

Re:Hmm!

[lgw]

, but like extending strategies which reduce chances for procreation tend to be selected against...naturally.

Unless you take the path many insects do, where most individuals aren't involved in procreation: there's just a queen, and a few males kept around for the purpose. Bizarrely, this is how naked mole rates work - they have an insect hive, complete with drones and massive queen.

Google

[110010001000]

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.

Re:Google

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Re:Google

[avandesande]

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

Re:Google

[cayenne8]

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"...

Re:Google

[cayenne8]

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....

Re:Google

[110010001000]

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.

Re:Google

[Harvey Manfrenjenson]

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.

Re:Google

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:Google

[lgw]

For the high UIDs in the room, GPP was quoting a Kansas song:

Now, don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money won't another minute buy
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind

It's more of a philosophical statement than a practical one: entropy is going to win in the end.

Re:Google

[Immerman]

Having enough space is not the problem - the problem is having too much space, so that the finite amount of mass-energy in the universe gets spread too thin to support complex structures.

Also, if you have black holes then heat-death hasn't struck yet - they're still complex structure. But don't worry, they'll evaporate eventually, and then, when the last black holes have evaporated, heat-death will finally be complete.

And then, eventually, maybe, just the right quantum wrinkle will appear to spawn another big bang and spontaneously repopulate the universe - opinions vary on that question.

Re: Google

[Immerman]

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.

Re:Google

[Ocker3]

Jobs had a very specific kind of pancreatic cancer

Once it was clear that Jobs had the rare islet-cell pancreatic cancer, there was an excellent chance of a cure. According to Cleveland Clinic gastroenterologist Maged Rizk, MD, there’s an overall 80% to 90% chance of 5-year survival. In the world of cancer survival, that’s a huge milestone.

https://blogs.webmd.com/breaki...

Absence of Solar Radiation?

[lowkeyknight]

No solar radiation in their normal habitat is the biggest environmental factor. A bugger to properly design a human trial for without significant ethical issues, particularly as you'd want to eliminate screens, Wi-Fi etc as well.

Re:Absence of Solar Radiation?

[arth1]

No solar radiation in their normal habitat is the biggest environmental factor.

There are plenty of other underground species that don't show this neoteny. And some that do, like axolotls, but without a greatly increased life span.

Nudity

[Oswald McWeany]

The secret to a longer life is nudity.

Where is my science grant to study people in nudist colonies?

Re:Nudity

[Hal_Porter]

I imagine after not too long you and the below ground nudists will *wish* for a quick death.

Or they'll evolve into Morlocks and farm your Eloi ass.

So naked and ugly

[nospam007]

...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?

Re:So naked and ugly

[Immerman]

No, absolutely not a bathtub curve.

A bathtub curve gives you a high probability of failing early on (manufacturing defects, etc), then a long period of relatively low, constant odds of failure, and then a climb back to a high probability of failure as things wear out. So that if you graph the odds of failure you get a U shape, or "bathtub cross-section"

They're claiming mole rats never get that final climb - in fact as they get really old the odds of dying actually *diminish*. That means that the older a mole rat gets, the better its odds are of still being alive in 10 years time.

Re:So naked and ugly

[Immerman]

According to the article - exactly. That what makes them so incredibly interesting. Not just that they live an extremely long time for their size, but that their mortality curve is completely unlike any other animal we know of. Their mortality curve is flat at a constant ~1/10,000 per day, regardless of how old they get, and actually falls slightly as they get older.

They "live to thirty" not because they get old and die around age thirty, but because most of them die at a much younger age so things average out to a 30 year "expected lifespan". At those odds, the "halflife" of a mole rat is 6931.125 days: (1-1/10,000)^6931 = ~50% chance of not having died. So, they have a 50% chance of living to see 19, and if they make it, they have a 50% chance of living to see 38. And if they make it to 38, they would have a 50% chance of making it to 57 - assuming age based mortality doesn't start to show its head by then. As they mention in the article, perhaps age-based mortality starts making itself felt eventually, but their oldest individual made it to 35 and they're not seeing any evidence of an age-based increase in mortality yet.

If they make it to 29 then they've got a better-than average chance of making it through the next 10 years as well, but they only have a 35% chance of making it to 29 in the first place.

Re:Hardly

[Calydor]

Humans live about 40-50% the span whales do, they just seem abnormal because primates don't normally live that long.

Isn't the question why they die at 30?

[mykepredko]

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?

Re:Isn't the question why they die at 30?

[Herkum01]

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.

Researchers?

Re:Isn't the question why they die at 30?

[Hartree]

This why I chuckle when people worry about "immortality" and the moral impications.

If you just end aging and the accompanying decline, you'll still die at some point from accidents (Even if you do something like put your brain in an armored box and tele-operate your body).

So, if nothing else, there's a rusty old Volkswagen on an unfortunate spacetime trajectory intersecting with you at some point in your future.

You can reduce risk, but not eliminate it.

Re:Isn't the question why they die at 30?

[Immerman]

If we clone you, and then kill you, you're still dead. Having a clone still running around doesn't make you any less dead.

Similarly, if we clone your mind, and then kill you, you're still dead. Having a mind-clone still running around doesn't make the original you any less dead.

Re:Hardly

[NicknameUnavailable]

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.

Re:Hardly

[Narcocide]

Rodents don't usually even live one tenth that long. 30 years for a small mammal is an absurdly long time, and the fact the life span doesn't have the usual rough correlation to body mass and metabolic rate in this case would be the equivalent of humans living 1,000 years. You'd better believe this is a hat trick worth learning.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The interesting question is...

[110010001000]

It was started when the founders hit their 40s and realized that they can't take it with them.

Re:Missing the point

[Camel Pilot]

If this were the case then people living in northern latitudes and in areas with little sunshine (think Seattle) would demonstratively have longer lives. You are reasoning rather shallow here.

Everything finite is inherently worthless

[Camel Pilot]

"everything finite is inherently worthless"

Far as we know everything is finite... therefore everything is worthless. You are on step 1 of being a Buddhist.

The proviso is that if the Universe is infinite then everything is infinite. For example you will make the above post an infinite number of times and I this one. A toast to infinity.

Re:The Immortal Mole Rat?

[Immerman]

Humans can live to 80. That doesn't mean they all die by then, just that that's how long you expect a human to last on a good run. The article even mentions that the oldest rat in their lab is now 35.

With a 1/10,000 daily chance of mortality, mole rats have a half-life of ~19 years. Which means that the average lifespan of a molerat = 1.44*19y = 27.4 years.