Step 1: Sequence the genomes of every animal on the planet. Step 2: Determine computationally how these animals diverged and back calculate a viable ancestor genomes. Step 3: Build synthetic genomes of those animals that are viable. Step 4: Transfer those genomes wrapped around histones with the correct modifications back into the an egg.
The technical problems are things like DNA methylation, back calculating genomes, and the fact that we don't know how most non-coding RNA works for organism development. I'm sure I left out a bunch of stuff but we are currently developing the technology to do all these steps!
I'd prefer that stuff like this stay firmly in the scientific process, and not put out the press release until they have done enough testing to be reasonably sure of the result.
It was a paper and the press release was from a scientific journal. The purpose is to get the information out to people that are curious or directly involved with related research. I read the intro and discussion and noticed calreticulin. I cloned that protein for someone and I just forwarded the article to him. I would never have have noticed it if it were not on slashdot.
I have thought about this problem for a long time now. Does the oxidative damage occur first causing aging or does aging lead a reduction in the cell's ability to combat oxidative stress?
A lab at the University of Michigan has done some great work on this, but the still have not quite answered the question. http://www.mcdb.lsa.umich.edu/labs/jakob/scerevisiae.html
My opinion for a long time follows the article. I don't think that antioxidants from foods prevent DNA damage. I think that fruits and vegetables actually have compounds that are potentially carcinogens, and your body's oxidative stress response is upregulated by these. Yeast cells that are challenged with a low does of an oxidant are better able to handle a higher dose of oxidant than cells that were not. It's akin to whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Bruce Ames who invented the ames test to determine the mutagenic potential of compounds has published articles about how natural carcinogens are just as common as synthetic ones. Plants produce many of their own pesticides which have been shown to be carcinogens. I would highly recommend reading about this for any of you are into organic food choices.
So, fruits and vegetables help us live longer, but possibly by exactly the opposite reason that everyone believes.
As someone that actually went through this experience. Write your paper and your patent. Submit your paper, and submit a provisional patent. The patent is now pending. If your paper is popular, then you can make a decision to patent.
Many herbs are known to be effective treatments, but exactly what dose are you getting? Aspirin overdoses can happen. Do you have any idea how much bark you need to chew? The level of the active ingredient in herbs can vary by huge amounts.
There are plenty of reasons that people want to isolate the natural compound besides dose.
What enzyme is the compound targeting? What compounds are similar? Is one of these similar compounds more effective and less toxic? Can we modify the compound to make it more effective and less toxic?
Toxicity is an enormous problem in drug discovery. Aspirin probably wouldnt even get through the FDA these days because of all the side effects it has compared to other available drugs.
Someone that steeps willow bark to show its effectiveness compared to aspirin would have to demonstrate that the amount of acetylsalicylic acid remains constant no matter which tree was used, which source of water was used, how much time it took, etc. I would rather pay a bit more and get a known dose than make some tea and get a dose equivalent to 20 aspirin.
Just imagine how long it would have taken people to figure out why children were dying of reye's syndrome if everyone were treating themselves with a tea!
Herbs contain active compounds. If you have a herb that treats a disease, then you fraction the herb, and test the compounds you isolate on either live cells, or in a biochemical assay to determine if they have an effect.
This is exactly how many drugs are found. Artemisinin is the most recent one I can think of.
You decide what evidence you need before you even start to work.
Targeting the diseased cells is probably the biggest problem we face for treating disease today. How can you tell the difference between a cancerous cell and a healthy cell. If you could get all these "breakthroughs" to the correct cells, we could cure cancer easily.
As far as these "breakthroughs" are concerned, its all about PR. If I run a lab and I have something that might have the possibility to cure a disease, I might encourage my department to advertise it by talking to the press. A potential philanthropist might see the article and decide to donate money to the university where I do my research.
Everytime I see one of these press releases, I go straight to the target of the compound. Is it important for all cell types or just cancer cells. It this case I would say that there isn't enough information known about the pathway to jump up and down yet. See for yourself! http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=gene&cmd=retrieve&dopt=default&list_uids=3397
Until you learn enough biology to understand this URL, its best to just keep doing those breast cancer walks, and raising smoking awareness.
As a biomedical researcher who has worked in both academia and big pharma , I think this guys rant is hilarious. He has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Its just a good ole fashion rant against something he is absolutely clueless about.
Biologists are reverse engineering the most complicated machine that has ever existed. It is so complicated that we only recently learned that the 99% of the blueprint of the machine (DNA) really does have function and we are trying to elucidate exactly what it is. Even if a new drug passes the labryith of testing, it can still be pulled from the market and then that company WILL be sued for millions of dollars by every joe shmoe that thinks he might be a victim. Could anyone here imagine what would happen if we definitively learned that cell phones and computers caused cancer and every single new tech product had to be tested on animals for a decade?
My wife also has Crohn's disease. Thankfully it is a mild case. There is one main reason why there is no cure yet for Crohn's disease. Its the same reason why we don't have a cure for cancer either. We don't completly understand it.
You may know something about programming, but you don't seem to know anything about biology. We are all molecular machines made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfer, etc. I can at least understand people that make the argument that it will take us hundreds of years to develop AI. But to argue that only "biological" systems are capable of it is absurd.
You are correct. We don't know one tenth of one percent about anything. That means we should just ignore everything that we do know until we know everything.
You speak like one of the many homeopathic nutjobs I talk to all too often. Having worked in drug development in industry and now indirectly in academia, I wish people like yourself would learn how difficult treating diseases let alone curing them can be.
How do you "cure" aging?!? You can only treat it. I don't want to defend the industry because I know profit is the main motivator for the decision makers, but even in academia, the drug development process is the same and so are the goals. The only difference is that we can work on diseases like yellow fever and rare childhood leukemias that drug companies care very little about./end rant
Your DNA is composed of genes. These genes are the blueprints for proteins. Proteins are the workhorses of cells. They carry out most of the chemical reactions in your body that give you energy, build muscle, etc, etc, etc.
A protein is composed of amino acids that fold around each other into different helix and sheet type shapes. In general, if you unfold a protein with chemicals and then place it into a solution where it can refold, it will go back to the same shape. Even if we knew exactly what amino acids the protein is made of, we can't predict the final shape.
How is this relevant to you? Most drugs interact with proteins. If we could predict how proteins folded and interacted with drugs, we could design new drugs without having to do as much lab work. Many more drugs could potentially come to the market years earlier. There are also diseases that are directly caused by misfolded proteins such as alzheimer's disease.
As a person that does research on proteins, having better algorithms for protein folding would be a god send. . You have no idea how much time and effort is wasted on designing and expressing protein constructs that have no chance of folding properly. What we currently use for design (Tango, FoldIndex, PONDR, DisEMBL) is still inadequate. $300 may sound like a lot of money, but it is nothing compared to the cost of research.
Where did you get your numbers from? They sound like you made them up.
On another note though, you are right. Normal humans will be obsolete. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing though. I think I would rather have an ultra intelligent benevolent machine in charge than some of our current world leaders.
You can level to 60 in 15 minute increments in WoW, and probably have fun doing it. I think its one of the few games designed for a casual as well as a hardcore base.
If you want to find a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder, you need to find what causes it. An enzyme for example. You would then need to find a small molecule that interacts with that molecule. You create an assay where you can detect changes in the enzyme, and then you add small drug-like molecules to the assay. This will help you determine what interacts and what could become a drug.
You could theoretically make every single small molecule that is drug sized and use it for the assay. The problem is that you would need more matter than is contained in the universe to create just one of every molecule. You need a starting point. Nature is the starting point. Organisms create molecules to defend themselves, interact with the environment, etc. Billions of years of evolution has allowed for optimization of these interactions.
Medicinal chemists need something to start with and nature often provides the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1: Sequence the genomes of every animal on the planet.
Step 2: Determine computationally how these animals diverged and back calculate a viable ancestor genomes.
Step 3: Build synthetic genomes of those animals that are viable.
Step 4: Transfer those genomes wrapped around histones with the correct modifications back into the an egg.
The technical problems are things like DNA methylation, back calculating genomes, and the fact that we don't know how most non-coding RNA works for organism development.
I'm sure I left out a bunch of stuff but we are currently developing the technology to do all these steps!
I'd prefer that stuff like this stay firmly in the scientific process, and not put out the press release until they have done enough testing to be reasonably sure of the result.
It was a paper and the press release was from a scientific journal. The purpose is to get the information out to people that are curious or directly involved with related research. I read the intro and discussion and noticed calreticulin. I cloned that protein for someone and I just forwarded the article to him. I would never have have noticed it if it were not on slashdot.
I have thought about this problem for a long time now. Does the oxidative damage occur first causing aging or does aging lead a reduction in the cell's ability to combat oxidative stress?
A lab at the University of Michigan has done some great work on this, but the still have not quite answered the question.
http://www.mcdb.lsa.umich.edu/labs/jakob/scerevisiae.html
My opinion for a long time follows the article. I don't think that antioxidants from foods prevent DNA damage. I think that fruits and vegetables actually have compounds that are potentially carcinogens, and your body's oxidative stress response is upregulated by these. Yeast cells that are challenged with a low does of an oxidant are better able to handle a higher dose of oxidant than cells that were not. It's akin to whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Bruce Ames who invented the ames test to determine the mutagenic potential of compounds has published articles about how natural carcinogens are just as common as synthetic ones. Plants produce many of their own pesticides which have been shown to be carcinogens. I would highly recommend reading about this for any of you are into organic food choices.
So, fruits and vegetables help us live longer, but possibly by exactly the opposite reason that everyone believes.
Actually, the Acai Berries has twice the amount of Anti-oxidants than blueberries.
Maybe fresh ones do, but reducing agents disappear over time, especially in a plastic bottle on a shelf.
As someone that actually went through this experience. Write your paper and your patent. Submit your paper, and submit a provisional patent. The patent is now pending. If your paper is popular, then you can make a decision to patent.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7236/pdf/nature07841.pdf
If you have access to nature.
From glancing at the article, this is not a replacement for blood yet, but they are moving in the right direction.
Many herbs are known to be effective treatments, but exactly what dose are you getting? Aspirin overdoses can happen. Do you have any idea how much bark you need to chew? The level of the active ingredient in herbs can vary by huge amounts.
There are plenty of reasons that people want to isolate the natural compound besides dose.
What enzyme is the compound targeting?
What compounds are similar?
Is one of these similar compounds more effective and less toxic?
Can we modify the compound to make it more effective and less toxic?
Toxicity is an enormous problem in drug discovery. Aspirin probably wouldnt even get through the FDA these days because of all the side effects it has compared to other available drugs.
Someone that steeps willow bark to show its effectiveness compared to aspirin would have to demonstrate that the amount of acetylsalicylic acid remains constant no matter which tree was used, which source of water was used, how much time it took, etc. I would rather pay a bit more and get a known dose than make some tea and get a dose equivalent to 20 aspirin.
Just imagine how long it would have taken people to figure out why children were dying of reye's syndrome if everyone were treating themselves with a tea!
Herbs contain active compounds. If you have a herb that treats a disease, then you fraction the herb, and test the compounds you isolate on either live cells, or in a biochemical assay to determine if they have an effect.
This is exactly how many drugs are found. Artemisinin is the most recent one I can think of.
You decide what evidence you need before you even start to work.
I always thought it was one step above a community college! Either I was wrong or they have improved a lot recently.
Not all subscribers pay the same. Players in China pay as little as 6 cents an hour.
Targeting the diseased cells is probably the biggest problem we face for treating disease today. How can you tell the difference between a cancerous cell and a healthy cell. If you could get all these "breakthroughs" to the correct cells, we could cure cancer easily.
As far as these "breakthroughs" are concerned, its all about PR. If I run a lab and I have something that might have the possibility to cure a disease, I might encourage my department to advertise it by talking to the press. A potential philanthropist might see the article and decide to donate money to the university where I do my research.
Everytime I see one of these press releases, I go straight to the target of the compound. Is it important for all cell types or just cancer cells. It this case I would say that there isn't enough information known about the pathway to jump up and down yet. See for yourself!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=gene&cmd=retrieve&dopt=default&list_uids=3397
Until you learn enough biology to understand this URL, its best to just keep doing those breast cancer walks, and raising smoking awareness.
Bacterial maintenance is really quite easy. I have been maintaining my own methane producing bacteria for decades now.
As a biomedical researcher who has worked in both academia and big pharma , I think this guys rant is hilarious. He has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Its just a good ole fashion rant against something he is absolutely clueless about.
Biologists are reverse engineering the most complicated machine that has ever existed. It is so complicated that we only recently learned that the 99% of the blueprint of the machine (DNA) really does have function and we are trying to elucidate exactly what it is. Even if a new drug passes the labryith of testing, it can still be pulled from the market and then that company WILL be sued for millions of dollars by every joe shmoe that thinks he might be a victim. Could anyone here imagine what would happen if we definitively learned that cell phones and computers caused cancer and every single new tech product had to be tested on animals for a decade?
My wife also has Crohn's disease. Thankfully it is a mild case. There is one main reason why there is no cure yet for Crohn's disease. Its the same reason why we don't have a cure for cancer either. We don't completly understand it.
Driving is a privilage, not a right.
You may know something about programming, but you don't seem to know anything about biology. We are all molecular machines made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfer, etc. I can at least understand people that make the argument that it will take us hundreds of years to develop AI. But to argue that only "biological" systems are capable of it is absurd.
You are correct. We don't know one tenth of one percent about anything. That means we should just ignore everything that we do know until we know everything.
You speak like one of the many homeopathic nutjobs I talk to all too often. Having worked in drug development in industry and now indirectly in academia, I wish people like yourself would learn how difficult treating diseases let alone curing them can be.
/end rant
How do you "cure" aging?!? You can only treat it. I don't want to defend the industry because I know profit is the main motivator for the decision makers, but even in academia, the drug development process is the same and so are the goals. The only difference is that we can work on diseases like yellow fever and rare childhood leukemias that drug companies care very little about.
Try ignorance
Your DNA is composed of genes. These genes are the blueprints for proteins. Proteins are the workhorses of cells. They carry out most of the chemical reactions in your body that give you energy, build muscle, etc, etc, etc.
A protein is composed of amino acids that fold around each other into different helix and sheet type shapes. In general, if you unfold a protein with chemicals and then place it into a solution where it can refold, it will go back to the same shape. Even if we knew exactly what amino acids the protein is made of, we can't predict the final shape.
How is this relevant to you? Most drugs interact with proteins. If we could predict how proteins folded and interacted with drugs, we could design new drugs without having to do as much lab work. Many more drugs could potentially come to the market years earlier. There are also diseases that are directly caused by misfolded proteins such as alzheimer's disease.
I guess you are part of the "I'm Magical" Camp.
As a person that does research on proteins, having better algorithms for protein folding would be a god send. . You have no idea how much time and effort is wasted on designing and expressing protein constructs that have no chance of folding properly. What we currently use for design (Tango, FoldIndex, PONDR, DisEMBL) is still inadequate. $300 may sound like a lot of money, but it is nothing compared to the cost of research.
Where did you get your numbers from? They sound like you made them up.
On another note though, you are right. Normal humans will be obsolete. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing though. I think I would rather have an ultra intelligent benevolent machine in charge than some of our current world leaders.
You can level to 60 in 15 minute increments in WoW, and probably have fun doing it. I think its one of the few games designed for a casual as well as a hardcore base.
If you want to find a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder, you need to find what causes it. An enzyme for example. You would then need to find a small molecule that interacts with that molecule. You create an assay where you can detect changes in the enzyme, and then you add small drug-like molecules to the assay. This will help you determine what interacts and what could become a drug.
You could theoretically make every single small molecule that is drug sized and use it for the assay. The problem is that you would need more matter than is contained in the universe to create just one of every molecule. You need a starting point. Nature is the starting point. Organisms create molecules to defend themselves, interact with the environment, etc. Billions of years of evolution has allowed for optimization of these interactions.
Medicinal chemists need something to start with and nature often provides the answer.
Eating people is evil. Lions have been know to eat people. Lions must be evil.
Really simple logic?