Key Step In Programmed Cell Death Discovered

Investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered a dance of proteins that protects certain cells from undergoing apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death. Understanding the fine points of apoptosis is important to researchers seeking ways to control this process. In a series of experiments, St. Jude researchers found that if any one of three molecules is missing, certain cells lose the ability to protect themselves from apoptosis. A report on this work appears in the advance online publication of Nature.

Cancer applications?

[PinchDuck]

I wonder if they could trigger apoptosis in cancer cells? That would be very cool

Re:immortality available to who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution is simple: free immortality, all you have to do is agree that you die if you ever have babies without permission. Not right away, but you start aging and eventually die as the treatment is reversed. Have a baby without permission, and grow old then die (your baby gets immortality treatment). That way when someone dies someone else gets an *authorized* baby, and the population remains stable. Maybe have a reversible sterilization (like a vasectomy) to prevent... accidents, while keeping baby-making ability in case of emergencies.

Now, obviously that stinks of china's "one baby" policy... but if people aren't willing to stop having babies on their own, either someone else has to stop having babies for them, or more people have to die. There is just not enough room for all the babies people want to have, sometimes. And if people aren't dying of old age... well then they can't keep making babies.

On a completely retarded sci-fi note... if we assume that we continue the trend of the west evolving into tall blond beautiful people, we stop aging about 20 and get quasi-immortality, and we advance science to the point where it looks like magic to most people and then integrate it into our biology and then our genetics... and then undergo an apocalypse so we forgot all this ever happened... Well then "we" get to be elves while people who didn't get (technology-so-advanced-it's-indistinguishable-from) magic, quasi-immortality, and a distinct look get to be regular humans. It could happen!

Throwing some ideas out there

[Metasquares]

That's why I always thought the most successful treatments would be the ones that somehow exerted selective pressure to favor the weaker cells - those most vulnerable to a particular treatment, for example.

Failing that, an "ensemble method" is probably the way to go, since cells that survive that would have to be immune to the intersection of every treatment you're throwing at them.

Another idea that avoids the selectivity problem is to use things that cause cancerous cells to differentiate, rather than killing them off - that's what makes ATRA such a great therapy for acute promyelocytic leukemia, for example. Those sorts of things should probably become easier to find with advances in genetics and more targeted therapies. Other things that don't kill cancer cells but render them harmless, like angiogenesis inhibitors or telomerase antagonists, also offer promise, since either the cells are immune but can't complete the steps required for proliferation or they're not immune and are affected by the treatment (the problem is that cells sometimes have more than one way to do these things...).

(Disclaimer: IANAO)

Cancer death of aging kill or save by immortality

[FromTheAir]

Cancer the death of aging, killed or saved by immortality Part I Is an interesting perspective, which explores the idea that cancer is a failed immune response for repair. Part II includes the recently discovered by key to stopping wasting disease which improves the chances of not succumbing to cancer. Most people are not actually killed by cancer; the treatments kill them before it ever gets a chance, and the death certificates are actually false statements. Does anyone think it odd that the compounds used in Chemotherapy cause cancer? They are extremely carcinogenic.

Dr. Chojkier and lead author Martina Buck, Ph.D., of VA, UCSD and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, have described the steps by which tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha, an immune-system protein, prevents the production of albumin. Low levels of albumin, a critical protein made in the liver, is a keynote of wasting.

According to Dr. Chojkier, a gastroenterologist and liver specialist, antioxidants such as vitamin E might halt wasting in humans if these supplements were delivered in very high amounts-or even better, if they were targeted to the liver.
Read it all here http://iamblogging.net/archives/2008/02/cancer_the_deat.html [iamblogging.net]

Re:Approaching Immortality and the end of disease

[cavebison]

Then there's this:

"The physical material of the body is not persistent; the data is persistent. A life term is only limited by the ability to replicate the data provided the life force or animation principal persists."

Ok, where does the "data" reside, if not in the physical material of the body? Is it not DNA which codes for the entire material body, aka its "data set"? But wait, DNA is material! So explain then, what you mean by "the data is persistent".

*What is the point* of throwing around a "theory" which:

a) misrepresents established scientific principles (challenging them is ok, misrepresenting them is not),
b) is internally inconsistent, or at the very best, full of large gaping holes in reasoning, and
c) uses technical language for no other purpose than to sound technical.

It's the same age-old approach used by snake oil salesmen and, more recently, "intelligent design".