Geneticists Claim Aging Breakthrough

Quirk writes "The Science section of The Guardian is reporting on recent experiments by geneticists 'to unlock the secrets of the aging process has created organisms that live six times their usual lifespan, raising hopes that it might be possible to slow ageing in humans.' 'In the experiment, Dr Longo's team took yeast cells and knocked out two key genes, named Sir2 and SCH9. The latter governs the cells' ability to convert nutrients into energy. They found that instead of dying after a week, the cells lived for up to six weeks.''Research has now begun to test whether the effect works in mice.' So it looks like we might soon have near immortal, fearless mice."

It's gonna get..

[earthloop]

..real crowded in the world if we're all immortal.

Moral Questions:

[under_score]

If this works (eventually) with humans, who will get access to it? How will we justify the use of this when so many people die very young from preventable causes that are beyond their control (as opposed to simply not taking care of oneself)? How will we prevent the extreme accumulation of wealth that this would allow if it is not equally accessible to everyone?

transhumanists miss the point

[jimjamjoh]

without waxing too poetic, life isn't about accumulating more moments, it's about investing the ones we have with as much quality as possible. life is short, but beautiful on account...if we had lifespans that measured on the geologic scale (or any scale much beyond the one we have present), the individual choices we make become less and less meaningful. quality over quantity, as always...

Re:Apologies in advance, but...

[joey_knisch]

The fear gene makes sure they stay alive.
The aging gene makes sure they die eventually.

If you turn both off you just get a dumb mouse that dies to stupidity instead of old age.

Do not go gently into that goodnight....

[truckaxle]

Longevity will provide the next inflection point of human capacity and progress. Imagine if the great people of science could continue to contribute and innovate for the equivalent of several lifetimes. Gauss was the last mathematician who was said to be able to be conversant with the entire spectrum of mathematics. Currently it takes a human a decade to two just to be abreast of a specific field of science to be able to make any significant contributions. The period of time available to advance our understanding is getting shorter and shorter due to increase in the body of knowledge and our limited life times.

I know there will be the crowd that says - but we were designed to die. That is bunk! Self aware intelligence is bound and destined to perpetuated and proliferate.

This is not something that was previously unknown.

[Biotech9]

Here's a simple way to increase your lifespan. Eat less. In fact, halve the amount of food you eat.

There are papers that you can search for with sciencedirect.com or scholar.google.com that show rats that are given half the calories of the control group living almost 50% longer. It's just not exactly something that you can sell to people. You can live longer, if you live LESS. There's a reason animals that live very long lives have very slow metabolisms (such as Turtles) and animals that have very high metabolisms live less (such as humming birds and mice). To put it simply, you can 'burn the midnight oil' and live a short life, or eat less and do less and live longer.

Putting it more complicatedly, the reason you age is generally regarded to be because of damage your body and cells accumulate over a lifetime of living. The damage often comes from 'Oxidative stress'. This is just a very broad umbrella term for anything that causes the generation of 'Reactive oxygen species' that are highly reactive molecules that zip about your cell damaging proteins and DNA. ROS are made by things such as too much Vitamin K, smoking, UV light or certain other radiation bands, too much iron in the diet, and so on.

And the biggest contributor to ROS in your body over it's life? The Mitochondria. The 'power plant' of each cell. It makes ROS as a part of the process used to make ATP (the 'batteries' of your cells) and inevitably some escapes and causes damage. Over a life-time the damage builds up.

The biggest contributor to ageing is just plain old living (kind of obvious really), and the best way to therefore cut down on that damage is to eat less, slowing down the metabolism and decreasing the amount of ROS the mitochondria produces.

IMHO, not really worth it! you could get hit by a bus tomorrow! Dig into your fresh Chiabatta and Fetta cheese!

Re:We have that already

[chinodelosmuertos]

This is true. Now ask yourself why cells which undergo more frequent mitotic divisions are the ones that develop cancer more commonly: your colorectals, your prostates, your lungs (in smokers, where there's constant damage).... the more replications a cell does, the more your errors you are likely to accumulate. This includes, but is not limited to, the examples you mentioned above. Take a cell and extend its lifespan, allow the DNA damage to increase and the DNA mismatch repair to fail, and voila, instant neoplasm.

Re:great...

[aminorex]

Half of Africa is malnourished because we don't let people move to where the jobs are, and we don't send food to where the people are. This has nothing to do with aging.

China's one child policy is a big mistake. China needs more urbanites, not less, in order to build the infrastructure to convert to industrial agriculture. But growth is high enough anyhow, so that
the damage of the policy is not visible.

You can reliably predict that as longevity increases, birth rates will decline. Simply applying the existing correlation between life-expectancy and birth rate observed internationally today would allow you to see this, let alone considering the underlying factors behind that correlation.

Immortality would last about 800 years.

[orichter]

I asked a friend of mine in the insurance industry once how long people would live if we eliminated all natural causes. He said given current accident rates, people would live on average about 800 years. I do wonder if a lifespan was 800 years on average, we might be more careful, but I doubt it. If you think about it, this number means that roughly 1 in 10 people die in accidents over the course of a lifetime. That sounds about right to me. As for people dying of diseases, I believe that most of the diseases associated with end of life are heavily related to aging itself, so many of the diseases you mention may be lessened or eliminated through extending lifespan.

Re:We have that already

[tongue]

this is hardly the case. telomerase, as it turns out, is already active past the embryonic stage of development, in exactly two cell types: spermatocytes, which give rise to sperm, and for the win, care to guess the other kind?

Cancer cells.

just having telomerase activity isn't something that's going to let us live forever. the key to long life for a cell is very different from that of long life for humans in general. in some cells, you really DON'T want them to live forever, because they'd never divide. Think scarring and skin. or your intestinal surfaces: food always scraping the sides away and never growing back? recipe for disaster.

Short version: we need to get used to the idea of getting older and dying. immortality ain't in the cards anytime soon.

Bruce Sterling's prophecy coming true?

[TheNarrator]

As anyone who has read Bruce Sterling's excellent Schismatrix series knows, Sterling predicts a movement both scientific and political called the "Shapers" who pursue genetic modifications to themselves to extend their lifespans and their physical and mental capabilities. They are opposed by the "Mechanists" who seek to integrate themselves with machines to attain the same feats. The main character Abelard Lindsay, who lives for several hundred years and is followed throughout the book at one point is offered an antique of immense value, the first 500 year old immortal mouse.

The present version of the "Shaper" movement is known as "Transhumanism [wikipedia.org]". The modern day version of the "Mechanists" would be those who believe in the Ray Kurzweils, Verner Vinge (Singularity Sky) version of the future wherein artificial intelligence becomes integrated with and even exceeds Human Intelligence.

A bit about Transhumanism:: Transhumanism (sometimes abbreviated >H or H+) is an emergent philosophy analyzing or favouring the use of science and technology, especially neurotechnology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, to overcome human limitations and improve the human condition.
...
Dr. Anders Sandberg describes modern transhumanism as "the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, physically, mentally and socially using rational methods," while Dr. Robin Hanson describes it as "the idea that new technologies are likely to change the world so much in the next century or two that our descendants will in many ways no longer be 'human'."

Immortality

[PGC]

Just what we need :

6 billion people crammed on a planet, reproducing like rabits....

....and a death rate of next to nothing.


War will become just a method of controlling the population.

Re:This is not something that was previously unkno

[fdicostanzo]

Actually, I spoke with someone researching caloric restrictions and she had a great point (example theory) as to why it might not work with people: the rats that they restricted the diets of lived in relatively clean environments where they were not exposed to disease. Seriously reducing calories can have the effect of reducing your ability to fight disease. These rats did not have to deal with as much disease so a weakened immune system would not have hurt them so much and the benefits the low calorie diet had on oxidative stress could take place.

So a "normal" diet may be a trade off between reduced oxidative stress and strong immune response.

Re:That's not a joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's called a pyramid scheme. Put simply, there is no way to sustain a pyramid scheme, because it requires exponential growth. You don't need enough people to match the number of people retiring. You need more people, so that the quality of life of the person retiring and the people paying for them isn't dropped to something so abysmal that they say, "fuck this," and turn to looting. Then for every N people you used to pay for 1 person, you need N people to pay for them. Then for each of them you need N people. And so on and so forth.

Social security was originally designed to provide a revenue stream for the Federal government that wouldn't be collected on because it was aimed at the average age of death, that would apply to everyone (and the employers of everyone) and thus be a more stable revenue stream than the income tax. It's a regressive pyramid scheme.

Which isn't to suggest that I oppose social programs. This one just happens to be funded in a nonsustainable way, and fixing it without changing the way it's funded will just fuck over the middle and lower class disproportionately. FICA taxes cap at a fixed level of income, and everyone pays.