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Withered brain cells restored (in monkeys, anyway)
lisa writes "You've heard the old theory that we lose 10,000 neurons a day after the age of 20. Well, that may not be true. Scientists revived and restored aged brain cells thought to be dead in a group of old monkeys. " Interesting-very succesful tests-we'll see how the human trials go.
Perhaps even more fitting for the "Genetic engineering boosts mouse intelligence" story, given that "Algernon" in Flowers for Algernon was the mouse on which they'd done the initial intelligence-boosting experiments, before trying them on the narrator of Flowers for Algernon.
Because it's a big risk. Inserting cells producing a nerve growth factor into the skull could cause all sorts of problems with overgrowth of nerve and related tissues - resulting in nasty brain damage or fatality. A particular risk is brain tumors, especially mama/baby tumors where two types of cells, at least one immortalized, manufacture each other's growth factors in a positive feedback loop.
So they'll start with people who are ALREADY having their brains slowly but unstoppably destroyed by another disease process. At worst it will just speed up something that's already happing. At best it might slow, halt, or reverse the disease - perhaps by promoting replacement of the brain tissue as it is destroyed, perhaps by invigorating the existing cells to resist the problem or switching them to a mode where they aren't "yet" susceptable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I take it at least some people here have read Asimov's books about the spacers; basically they got all this tech where they could extend their lives to about 500 years or something; consequently their birth-rate became next to zero so that they didn't run out of living space. But this extended life-span made them paranoid about early death and due to the lack of upcoming young minds with different viewpoints their technological development ground to a halt and they were overtaken by the short-lived earthmen who didn't extend their lives. While the spacers all but died out the earthmen went on to colonise the galaxy.
It seems to me to be a really bad idea to extend life, no matter how attractive it may be for the individual. After all, as far as the species is concerned, death is a pretty healthy part of life.
axolotl
Check this out
Although NGF may help in rejuvenating atrophied nerve cells, according to this study, it doesn't help in cases where there is nerve damage (as seems to be assumed by several of the posts).
The study, conducted in people with diabetic peripheral neuropathy, failed to show that Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) could restore function to impaired nerves.
Dorao
With everything that researches are doing, and the RATE at which things are progressing, how old do people think we're going to get, for people currently in their 20's? I have to really sit back, but do I really, REALLY want to live to be 100? 200? 250?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Dr. Strauss sayz I should rite down evrything that happens too me from now on....
--
It's been coming for a while now; I reckon we're abut ten years away from a practical application.
For more on regeneration, check this out.
This article, and all the others in recent [months|years], are indicating a definite trend toward the day when we can arbitrarily and indefinitely prolong the life of the human brain. Couple this with cloning research and the eventual evolution of nanotechnology (specifically, tiny little machines that we can use to repair damage in a fraction of the time that our body can naturally), and within fifty, maybe sixty years, science will have achieved the ability to make a person effectively immortal -- even if they are already advanced in years. Painless restructuring of an elderly body into a younger, stronger form, and eternal neurons, will allow any human (short of violent trauma or nuclear explosions) to live for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years (if you're lucky). Sign me up. :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Gotta disagree with you there. The brain -- the Mother of All Neural Networks -- can store many overlapping patterns and still be able to recall them distinctly. A memory is not stored in a specific place, but instead distributed throughout a web of connections. A single brain cell may be involved with the recollection of many memories.
The ease of recall is determined by the strength of the dendritic connections between the brain cells that make up the pattern -- how strongly the pattern is "burned in". This is the point of rehearsals and rereading important items. With more patterns overlapping, you may be more likely to make connections between seemingly disparate topics, but you should still be able to distinguish them. If two *weak* patterns overlap (items that haven't been recalled in awhile) it might be possible to confuse them.
If the volume of data were primary factor, wouldn't teenagers have better recall than twenty-five year olds? I think we'd all agree that a 25-year old remembers just as well or better than a 16-year old. So why does mental performance decline over time? Well, aren't the late 20's when you are no longer forced to learn new things?
Without anyone forcing you to learn new things, you're on your own. If you keep learning, mental performance should actually improve until serious brain cell degradation sets in -- I guess this is what these researchers are trying to reverse. On the other hand, if you learn nothing new the patterns start to atrophy.
Anyway, that's my $.02, any neuroscientists care to weigh in?
when they think of an absolutely amazing idea and their head explodes. I hate it when that happens.
+&x
Use it or lose it.
Atrophy is generally linked to lack of use, and I've heard many times (and seen a few supporting examples) that your mind stays sharp as long as you keep using it, especially for learning. I've also heard that the brain contains stem cells, and can actually grow new neurons if it needs them.
Makes your wonder...
This is great news. My pet monkey has
been getting on in years and is no
longer the chess partner he used to be.
The data are not great, but the relevant studies actually suggest a higher incidence of Altzheimer's in poorly educated people.
Ah... I can just see it now. Imagine, if we can someone revive or reactivate dead brain cells, what kind of world would we have?
:)
- Farrah Fawcett would finally get that Nobel Prize for her work on superstring theory that clearly shows the interrelations between the weak force and this year's hemlines.
- AOL becomes the Internet center for reasonable discussion and carefully crafted thought.
- Oprah's latest book club selection: "The Meditations Of Marcus Aurelius".
- Network executives realize their impact on civilization, build an advanced spacecraft, and then hurl themselves into the sun. "Crusade" is renewed for four and half more seasons.
- Cheech & Chong for President!
Let's hope they actually get this work in humans. I recommend that they begin testing immediately. They could begin testing on lawyers - no one will bother to stop them, although one never knows if the data collected from them will be applicable to humans...
No lawyers were harmed in this post. I'll try harder next time.
Yes. The brain, as a whole, atrophies because of the loss of cells. The brain cells, on the other hand, do not atrophy, but rather become derranged (e.g. neurofibrillary tangles and plaques) and/or die. Under the microscope, Altzheimer's disease looks much different than simple nonspecific loss of brain cells. The neurons are dying in a very peculiar way.
Artificial Neural Networks (ANN's) can be trained so intensively that they lose their ability to generalize. For example, if you train a network to recognize a photograph of a telephone pole, it should be able to recognize it during differing light conditions, different orientations, etc. An overtrained network will not generalize, but will only recognize a single instance of a telephone pole and ignore all the others.
One way to improve the generalization of neural networks is to feed them a bit of random data every once in a while.
During sleep it appears that random signals are being emitted into the rest of the brain by the brain stem. Sometimes you might be aware of the random signals, and put them into an imaginative framework called a dream. Anway, what do you suppose those random inputs periodically injected into a brain could be doing????
It's all speculation, but still fun to think about.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Soma thoughts:
1) Smart pills: People are generally non-compliant medicationwise...I see people every day who have (or had) the means to deliver themselves from imminent morbidity/death, but do not. I hesitate to use the term "choose" because they really have the best intentions but their actions belie some lack of will or something. I posit that mere neuronal fluffiness is not motivation enough for anyone to do anything about. It reminds me of the ironic* mope of the Life Extension crowd in the late 80's, "I forgot to take my Hydergine."
2) You can forestall the detriment and up your charm points just by cross training your brain NOW so you have a higher baseline functionality. Remember the awesome global mental shift that occurred when you learned to play chess? Where is the challenge and growth now? Go out there and schmooze and dance and paint and juggle and use that other lobe. At least get so you can memorize 16 digit credit card numbers over people's shoulders.
onjay
(not one of those pi-memorizing MENSA types)
*True irony, not like "rain on your wedding day."
"Scientific discoveries by those under 25."
The conclusion that your declining is wrong in my opinion.
Why do you suppose people under 25 were making those discoveries? Well, you graduate from college at age 21 or 22, then if you do a Masters you'll be 23 to 24 years old after you complete that. So,
by the time you're WELL into your Doctoral research you'll be 25 years old provided you don't slack too much.
Anyway, Doctoral students don't research in a vacuum. They are mentored by OLDER professors who often have long running research programs (that they GUESS WHAT started when they were Doctoral students themselves - heh heh). Anyway, these Older professors say to these Doctoral students "Why don't you take a look at this little gem..." meaning some line of inquiry which the old guy doesn't have time to track down because he's busy with his other work.
In short, the mentor feeds ideas to the young person who is cracking his ass 24 hours a day to get a Doctorate. The old guy is busy thinking a bit, drinking a bit, playing golf, driving kids around, vacationing, sabbaticalling, tenuring, politicking, etc.
If the old guy would put his nose to the grindstone like the young guy he'd make just as many important scientific studies. But it's hard work, and after you've got your tenure...the rest is human nature. Leave a few things for the younger students.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Now is as good a time as any to throw on the table a little hypothesis I've been thinking about.
In all our struggles to understand the brain, I don't think very many have approached it from the following direction: could it be that the patterns we develop in hardware and software are subconsciously based on the way our brain functions? And if so, could we not use our own complex creations to learn more about ourselves?
For example, dead cells reviving sounds similar to garbage collection in Smalltalk and Java. The concepts of input/output, memory, and a central processing unit are all obviously modeled on ourselves. Even packet-based communication is modeled on our own form of speech: instead of attaching a wire to each other's heads, we broadcast a few words and hope they arrive correctly. A conversation is like a TCP/IP connection in that the connection is only perceived.
So, as technology advances and new solutions are discovered, we intuitively better understand ourselves. If the hypothesis is correct, brain research is being indirectly benefitted by the advancement of computer science!
(See Previous Article) :-)
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I want something now that would restore me to the level of intellectual and learning ability I had when I was 25. At the time I didn't put it to good use, but now (mhmm hmm years later) I think I could really use some extra brain cycles, plus I would have the wisdom to utilize them in a somewhat more constructive manner.
Seriously, I am wondering why they want to restrict this to alzheimers patients. There is no doubt that our intellectual capacity lessens over time and that we peak in our early twenties. It doesn't mean we get stupid, but we certainly do take a little longer to make connections between things or learn something new. To be able to gain both the wisdom of age and the mental vigor of youth would be truly wonderful!
And besides the above, how far are we from being able to pump up cerebral functioning to new levels? The gene therapy mentioned in the article merely revives new cells. Is there something that could add more? Or that could make the ones we have more effective? Dang it, I wanna be a genius instead of merely bright...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Excellent.
There's hope for me yet.
But do "revived" brain cells help you do useful things? Or, perhaps, are those simply "idiot" cells that the more advanced brain cells have killed out of mercy? It sure would be disappointing to go get my "brain cell revival" treatment, and find out that those were the brain cells that thought BASIC was cool.
Or maybe those are "evil" cells that want me to kill and devour my roommates?
314-15-9265
They say those that have full memory of every event in their live are often driven insane by the experience. Me? I thought it was kind of funny.
+&x
A couple points that interst me:
1. What happens to modified NGF generating cells after the job is done? I wonder if it is regulated. Do they die off? If so, is there a clean up mech. within the brain? (blood brain barrier is almost impervious... although there are studies that show some of the smaller peptids do pass through (e.g. prions).) If not, might they grow like a cancer?(skin cells do multiply quickly)
2. What could be the adverse effects of too much NGF? (having too much of any growth factor that I can recall cause rather severe negative effects.)
With this in mind, couldn't it be more effective to just inject the NGF rather than the cells into the brain? (this way, you can regulate the doses + not worry about the side effects as much).
Over all, I still believe that mastering gene -> protien regulation (where we could reproduce such a thing with cells we create) will be a key to many of the issues. We can generate cells to produce any protein of our liking, but AFAIK no regulation has been mastered. (e.g. CTLs expressing modified TCRs which recognize hiv infected cells, but expression levels not great enough to overwhelm the disease).
Prehaps a receptor for the product that triggers a reaction to turn on another gene, (which produces a protien) that inhibits the the production of the inital product. (enough babbling)
Dorao
for not mentioning bill gates or microsoft in relation to this article.
I guess it was too much to hope for.
Some people here have one tracked minds.
That's easy. You said what you were going to say anyways, so that's redundant. If you had said something other than what you were going to say, it wouldn't have been redundant. Now do you understand?
Drinking doesn't kill brain cells, it merely prunes them. One of my hobbies during college was Brain Cell Topiary, in which the object was to rearrange my neurons into decorative shapes. It is comforting to know that I can hope to escape any detrimental effects of my hobby thanks to modern monkey research.
I had always been of the belief that the reason learning ability and linking slows down as one ages is not due to the loss of brain cells as such, but more the fact that you've already got a lot of information stored in there and it takes longer to make leaps and jumps around in it.
For a programming analogy take your average hash table, the first bunch of inserts and recalls are 1 step, because the bucket at the hash point is empty, so its the first reply you get, but as you fill up a hash table, you begin to get collisions, so you have to do step-searches through the buckets, or jump to overflow lists etc, slowing everything down. The hash is more useful because it contains more data, but to get any data out of it takes a longer time, and to insert new data in also takes a longer time.
Admittedly the brain is of a considerably different structure to that of your average hash table, but it seems an appropriate analogy to me.
You can't win a fight.
What if this technology were used with head transplants (reported a week or two or three ago here on Slashdot)? We're one step closer to immortality. Scientists and Doctors would use cloning to create the rest of the body, transplant the head to the new body, and revive dying brain cells. The only technology we're really missing out on now is reconnecting the spinal cord and all the nerves, and I'm sure that will be developing soon enough. It's incredible to think that maybe by the end of my lifetime (I'm 18 now) the technology will exist to extend my life another 80 or 90 or 300 years. I'm sure I speak for a lot of us when I say that I'd love to see what technology develops after my "regular" life span has come to an end. It would be incredible to be able to extend life using this technologies. Incredible.
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