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Comments: 187 +-   Aging Discovery Yields Nobel Prize on Monday October 05, @08:47AM

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 05, @08:47AM
from the i'm-still-getting-older-here dept.
medicine
science
An anonymous reader writes This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes, called the telomeres, and in an enzyme that forms them."
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  • Good find (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MistrX (1566617) on Monday October 05, @08:55AM (#29643693)

    It's great news however how are we going to solve the population crisis when the Earth gets too small?

    I always knew I was going to be 512 years old before I die. :]

    • What, you live in binary years? So, you'll die when you're 0x200?

    • Re:Good find (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dunbal (464142) on Monday October 05, @09:02AM (#29643747)

      Well of course the wealthy elite will be allowed to breed and live longer, while the serfs will be culled at regular intervals, through war, etc.

      Business as usual, really. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

      • breed and live longer

        There's the important phrase. As long as you don't breed, there is no economic problem with your living forever. Good news for Slashdot denizens, not such good news for Catholics.

      • You forget the wealthy don't like to get their hands dirty and they like to believe they are better than someone else. If the poor / middle class never existed they would be killed off by those with more power then them. There are some things you just can't get away from.

    • Technology will continue to make food production cheaper. We haven't even expanded into the oceans and large cities like Tokyo are still fairly rare on the earth's surface. We might have to give up some luxury foods for more efficiently produced goods. But I doubt that will be too crushingly widespread. More importantly; as people get wealthier the amount of children they have drops down, for example I am an only child and so is my cousin.

      Beyond that; there's plenty of room among the stars.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dword (735428)

      Some say it got small a long time ago, because it can support around 500.000 humans at the rate we're "eating" its resources.
      Source [youtube.com].

      • Re:Good find (Score:4, Insightful)

        by corbettw (214229) <corbettwNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday October 05, @09:42AM (#29644179) Homepage Journal

        If that number were anywhere close to accurate, we would have massive amounts of starvation across the globe, considering the current population is more than 12,000 times the number you provided for the theoretical max population.

        • Re:Good find (Score:5, Insightful)

          by DrLang21 (900992) on Monday October 05, @09:57AM (#29644403)
          It's also worth pointing out that the starvation we do have is not for lack of food production.

            • I always hate it when people go on about how the world is going to collapse due to overpopulation but forget to take into account that the number of people the earth can sustain is not set in stone. Sure, infinite population growth on a finite world, its going to happen eventually, but in the foreseeable future, its not a problem. We were all supposed to have starved years ago. Borlaug proved that more than everyone, as long as we keep our agricultural practices and plants current (no sliding backwards i

    • Less reproduction.

      Of course that should be happening anyway, whether or not we achieve artificially increased lifespans.

    • I was planning on living to about 640 thousand years. Should be enough for anyone to do & see everything. Tom...

  • OK (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rik Sweeney (471717) on Monday October 05, @08:58AM (#29643719) Homepage

    So they've changed the chromosome code to encode data using a lossless codec instead of a lossy one. Terrific, now we have to put up with people moaning about the lack of FLAC encoding in their music AND genes.

    Thanks a bunch, stupid scientists.

  • I would settle for... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Vanderhoth (1582661) on Monday October 05, @09:15AM (#29643877)
    I would settle for being put to death at 85 to keep population under control, if it meant my bones, mussels and organs didn't age. One of the worst thing about watching someone get old is to see their self reliance taken away and needing someone to help them into and out of the bath, change their diaper, feed them and put them to bed. THE worst thing is realizing someday it could and probably will happen to you.

    It's sad but you start off with needing someone to look after you and that's how it ends, if you live that long.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I would hate to have my mussels age too. They really are better fresh.

    • Re:I would settle for... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05, @09:21AM (#29643935)

      One of the worst thing about watching someone get old is to see their self reliance taken away and needing someone to help them into and out of the bath, change their diaper, feed them and put them to bed.

      Speak for yourself.

      I had to change my kids' diapers. Turnabout is fair play.

      I, for one, look forward to being a burden to my family and making them change my diaper.

    • Speak for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arcite (661011) on Monday October 05, @09:24AM (#29643961)
      There was a story out the other day saying that 50% of the people being born now in developed countries will reach age 100.

      So Speak for yourself if you want to jump off a bridge at 85. I work with several incredibly bright people who are in their mid 70's who still travel the world. With the advent of information technology we can even do our work without being physically active, just a computer and internet access.

      By the time I turn 85 in the 2050's, it will be the new 55! I'll race you to the top of the mountain.

    • You don't see the health 85-year-olds because they are out doing things. They don't just sit in front of the TV and waste away. Okay, many of them do. But the ones that are physically fit are out there as well. Just saw an 82 year old that still works 6 hours a day (don't know how many days a week) at Walmart. He said he'll quit when he's dead, and I believe him.

      Over-population is going to be a problem with no easy solutions, but why put to death the 82 year old contributing member of society (just bec

    • Right. You say that now, but when you turn 85, we'd have to send out an enforcer to consummate the contract.

      (And don't even bring up Logan's Run. The last thing I want to imagine is looking up the robes of a gaggle of 85-year-olds, levitating skyward to their deaths.)

    • Youthful until the very end, then decline quickly.

  • old news (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tim4444 (1122173) on Monday October 05, @09:18AM (#29643907)
    The summary makes this sound like a recent discovery but this has been known for some time. Also, it has more to do with cell aging than human aging. It's very important in cancer research since abnormal telomere activity is one of the factors in making cancer cells immortal (so to speak). They mention this in TFA. BTW, senescence is (naturally) programmed cell death:

    Most normal cells do not divide frequently, therefore their chromosomes are not at risk of shortening and they do not require high telomerase activity. In contrast, cancer cells have the ability to divide infinitely and yet preserve their telomeres. How do they escape cellular senescence? One explanation became apparent with the finding that cancer cells often have increased telomerase activity. It was therefore proposed that cancer might be treated by eradicating telomerase. Several studies are underway in this area, including clinical trials evaluating vaccines directed against cells with elevated telomerase activity.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ashtophoenix (929197)
      I agree that the article makes it sound recent and I got misled too before reading TFA. But can you explain why you differentiate between cell aging and human aging? Isn't human aging a consequence of cell aging?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by herring0 (1286926)
        From what I recall of genetics, the cellular aging is (partially) what leads to shorter life spans and increased age related problems in clones. If you are cloning an animal it is kind of like making a copy of a copy since the telomeres are actually a part of the chromosomes they are transferred into the new host.

        This leads to the telomeres being extended far beyond their 'normal' lifespan and you end up with all kinds of abnormalities that usually wouldn't be present until the subject is much older even t

    • Re:old news (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KraftDinner (1273626) on Monday October 05, @09:35AM (#29644093)
      I'm not sure where you are seeing that the summary sounds like it's a recent discovery. The only thing would be that the scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize this year, which is true. And yes, you're right, this discovery is not recent. Of course, it sometimes takes decades for people to be awarded a Nobel Prize for work they did decades ago.

        • Re:old news (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Daniel Dvorkin (106857) * on Monday October 05, @01:01PM (#29647319) Homepage Journal

          Anyone who pays attention to how science Nobels are awarded knows that they're generally given for older work which has shown to be important over time. So anyone who thinks the story is calling it a new discovery, and criticizes it on that basis, is pretty much making an ass of himself.

  • It is certainly beginning to look like aging is less a series of complex interactions and more like a fairly simple "on/off" switch. Granted that we don't have the whole puzzle figured out but this discovery does not point to a massively complex series of systems that cause aging. if anything it seems to suggest that we only need to get good at inserting DNA into specific points in a cell in order to stop or reverse aging.

    Why even bother with things like HRT when you can just tell people's cells to sto

  • the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes

    The solution is left as a exercise for the reader.

  • I was actually wondering how viral technology was evolving. I'm far from a biologist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we able to reverse engineer and create our own viruses in laboratories now? Doesn't a virus take over your cell and reprogram it with the code wrapped up in the virus itself? It starts making the cell pump out tons of new viruses which ultimately bursts the cell and kills it. How much more difficult would it be to create a virus with your DNA from saved blood at age 20 (say your 60

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by myc (105406)

      no, engineered viruses are nowhere near that advanced. Most viruses are limited by payload; there is a limit to how much DNA (or RNA) you can engineer into a viral particle. (not unlike a BIOS virus I suppose). Also, the viruses that are able to modify the host genome do so at random locations, so it is hard to precisely control where you want a particular modification to occur. And, the virus only modifies a very small portion of the host genome. Finally, most viruses are highly picky as to what kinds of c

    • Viruses have very small genomes in comparison with the human genome; many viruses get by with fewer than ten genes, while we have around twenty thousand. In addition, viruses don't arrange their genes in structures anything like the chromatin we use. Packaging a replacement human genome to infect human cells would require a vector so completely re-engineered from what we would currently recognize as a virus that we'd probably want to call it something else. Getting that infection procedure to work withou

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hoggoth (414195)

      > There would have to be a few modifications made, for example, making it invisible to your immune system,

      That's just what we need... a human-engineered virus that is completely invisible to your immune system. There is no way THAT could ever cause any problems as it mixed with other viruses in the wild.

    • We need to remove the copy protection first, then there will be many.

    • Can you imagine being immortal like Duncan, and being buried alive? Assuming the soil was to hard to be clawed through, it would be an awful way to spend an eternity.

    • Re:Sooo (Score:5, Informative)

      by cashman73 (855518) on Monday October 05, @09:05AM (#29643777) Journal
      Yes, you can be immortal if you want. But part of the problem is that, in order to achieve immortality, you have to keep adding guanines to your telomeres. The problem with that, is that it gives you cancer,... ;-)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dissy (172727)

        Yes, you can be immortal if you want. But part of the problem is that, in order to achieve immortality, you have to keep adding guanines to your telomeres. The problem with that, is that it gives you cancer,... ;-)

        I think I would gladly take cancer if I was assured it was not going to kill me due to being immortal ;}

    • How in the hell is a joke about immortality in a thread about a discovery about aging offtopic?

      The joke wasn't particularly funny - obvious and all that - but it's certainly on topic.

      • actually, the number of retiring people who are invalids is statistically insignificant when considering load on earth's resources. the major problem is people just like you. so if you could kindly "take one for the team", so to speak, and better yet snuff a couple of your friends before you check out, we the remaining population will be most grateful.

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Vanderhoth (1582661)
            That's the cycle. The baby boomers retire, the supporting population is to small to sustain them, the world gets flung into chaos for a few decades and/or we learn to deal, the boomers start dying off, there is another period of prosperity because the future generations have learned to be efficient, future generations slowly for get how to be efficient as it's no longer required to support a large aged population, future generations start having multitudes of children, cycle starts over.

          • It's a good thing we'll have all those robots to do all our work for us, then!

    • Re:Bio 101 (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Monday October 05, @09:49AM (#29644297) Homepage Journal

      Nobel prizes are never awarded for new work, they are awarded for work you did sufficiently far in the past that it has been extensively peer reviewed and tested and is now accepted as being one of the bits of scientific knowledge that everyone in the field knows. This one is being awarded for work originally published around 1980 (as it says in TFA). Others have now tested this the published results in sufficient detail that it is now something that almost everyone with any awareness of biology knows.

      A Nobel Prize is not like a 'best paper in conference' award. You don't get it for new and exciting theories, you get it for theories that have withstood careful examination and testing. If the LHC finds a Higgs Boson then Peter Higgs will almost certainly get a Nobel, for the work that he did predicting it back in 1964.

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