DNA Sequenced of Woman Who Lived To 115 175
chrb writes "The DNA of W115 — an anonymous woman who lived to the age of 115 years and left her body to science — has been sequenced. Despite her old age, W115 showed no signs of dementia or heart disease, and tests at the age of 113 showed she had the mental abilities of a woman aged 60-75 years. Dr. Henne Holstege of the Department of Clinical Genetics at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam has suggested W115 had rare genetic changes in her DNA which protected against Alzheimer's and other late-life diseases."
Hopefully (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hopefully this leads to people being able to have their DNA modified so that we no longer have to deal with mental diseases like Alzheimer's.
And once a precedent has been set, it's just 20 precious years until GATTACA.
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Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Insightful)
Because if this is done in the germ line, it will end in a social catastrophy.
What will happen when a group of people can say with reason that they are better humans then the rest of us? Today, it is possible to climb the social ladder because if you raise your kid right, he might not be so different from the kid of a millionaire, but when the millionaire kids are more intelligent and healthy by default, how is anyone ever going to go up in society?
Imagine the riots that will happen once 90% of the population has no chance at getting a good job or ever having a family member get a good job, not because they do not work hard, but because they are "lesser" humans than the 10% on top.
The only way this technology can ever be used for enhancement without creating a dystopia is if the state intervenes to raise the bottom along with the top, but that is also difficult due to the costs, and the fact the rich will be the only ones who can keep up with the newer and newer "models" of DNA enhacement.
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The way I see it, the "free market capitalist" path will be one that leads to much evil. The "crazy Scandinavian socialists" path might be viable- most people do what everyone else around them does, so if it becomes cultural norm to just keep other people around alive and well (even though they're kinda stupid co
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Insightful)
when the millionaire kids are more intelligent and healthy by default
They already are. Better food / less heavy metal contamination / mental stimulation results in higher intelligence. Its laughable to claim rich kids are not healthier than other kids, first of all on average they're probably the only kids permitted regular pediatrician visits.
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Say what now? Not only are well-child visits and vaccinations mandated to have zero co-pay for all insurers under Obamacare, they weren't particularly expensive to begin with even if paying out-of-pocket. And although the Republicans are hard at work gutting it, CHIP and Medicaid gets poor kids decent access to healthcare, too.
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Actually, that regulation is enacted, based on the sign at our pediatrician's office.
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Cool, so get back to us in 30 years when these kids are well into the workforce and affecting society.
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4: insightful?
"Today, it is possible to climb the social ladder ...Imagine the riots that will happen once 90% of the population has no chance at getting a good job or ever having a family member get a good job, not because they do not work hard, but because they are "lesser" humans than the 10% on top."
You do realize it's exactly the same being born in a poor family on the wrong continent today?
Or you wanna say the opportunities is the same for someone born here in Sweden or in a wealthy family in the US as it is in a village in Somalia?
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Well it's more like society is better off so we don't have to live at the edge of starvation and wild animals and disease. The average lifespan even as late as the 1700's was only 40 years for even wealthy people. People simply didn't live LONG enough to display these diseases until recently and only in the last 30 years have we developed the social conscience to not just write these people off as lost causes.
What expected life span means... (Score:2)
An 80 year old grandmother takes two of her grandchildren (ages 4 and 6) for a walk in the park. They are the only ones in the park. What is the average age of the people in the park? And is there anyone in the park within 20 years of that average age?
The low expected lifespans in previous years was due mostly to the fact that half of all children died before they reached 15 or so. The adults lived almost as long as we do on average. Very few people died in their 30's and 40's. Please re-think your conclusi
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...i'd hate to see the antiviral resistant virii, and chemo resistant cancers.
(i do see your point, of course, but a nitpick in a post is worth two in the bush)
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One thing that I think shows promise for bacterial infections is phage therapy, researched extensively in the Soviet Union. Viruses are used to attack bacteria with the benefit that the virus evolves new ways to attack the bacteria as the bacteria evolves defences against it. Viruses are highly specific, so they won't attack the host.
*There are a very few exceptions. Some
School (Score:2)
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There is nothing wrong with a cast system that is created purely artificially because one cast has more resources to select for better genetic outcomes than another.
It's basically directed genetic breeding that would go on for the richer folks and the rest will be left to the normal breeding patterns. In reality this will only add diversity and the society may or may not be better off, I don't know, but it's certainly going to be an interesting experiment, I would love to see it happen, it's interesting in
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so the people that take more than their fair share today will be the same people in the future, only they'll be better looking?
sounds like society's standard of beauty will move on and the rich will have to turn their genes into a leatherface patchwork in order to keep up with the resultant frequent shifts in beauty standards. this will cause the kind of detriment on a genetic level that we see on people like Jocelyn Wildenstein or the late Michael Jackson. rich kids will have arthritis by the time they'r
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arbitrary gene selection has nothing to do with fitness for survival, as we've seen with dog breeding.
- as I said: it's an interesting theory and it's even more interesting in practice. What do you have against it?
As to this:
so the people that take more than their fair share today will be the same people in the future, only they'll be better looking?
- I disagree. When Jobs died people didn't say he 'took more than his fair share'. When people create businesses and make much more money than they ever use on themselves AND they continue working, they are basically benefactors. They build the economy so that then others can come and claim that they 'took more than their fair share'. They definitely pay more than anything that coul
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Fear of this outcome is a poor reason to cause millions of excess deaths.
Realistically though, this will not happen (at the very least not for long). Do you really think these methods will stay expensive forever? Technologies that are not dependent on some naturally scarce resource will eventually drop in price dramatically.
Furthermore, there is a great incentive to use these methods to improve public health and therefore reduce medical costs put on the state. Even if such a procedure is fairly costly in th
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You're right - it's probably closer to 2%
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For you the top 2 percent may contain work like programming or such. For someone else the top 2 percent may contain something else entirely.
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I like workouts and the outdoors. I also like programming yes. I don't think all construction or programming jobs would be "good" jobs. On top of that you have plenty of minimum wage jobs that don't count as good simply for the level of pay. You can only relax and stop worrying about money over a certain threshhold income.
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Well, if you impregnated as many females per year as a corn stalk does, you'd have something.
Such as a staggering child support bill.
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At least in the US and UK...
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"Mandatory" for some value of mandatory, with exceptions for believing in an invisible man that floats in the sky, illogical fears of vaccinations (e.g. the disproven autism "link"), etc.
Are there any that are *truly* mandatory, in that you absolutely will not get [some service] without it? I doubt it.
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One, it won't be them who worked to afford it; it'll be their parents.
Two, why do you assume wealthy people earned their wealth?
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In reality, wealthy people transfer most of their wealth before death and the benefits of being born to a wealthy family go far beyond inheritance. Inheriting money is for children of misers and people who hit the lottery late in life.
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For a great example of this, look at Paris Hilton. She will never be productive.
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What does the DNA sequence GATTACA code for?
The title of a movie.
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DNA_codon_table [wikipedia.org]
Aspartic acid, Tyrosine. In that order.
(The last A doesn't do anything)
T
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FTFY. Well, I don't agree with the "hopefully" either.
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Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a lame hope...
I hope we find the underlying cause and determine that simple dietary and behavioral changes will make such diseases fleetingly rare.
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Better than a naive hope, I'd say. Maybe you can tweak the percentages here and there but with all the diets and behavioral regimes people have tried we'd know if anything made you almost impervious to disease. Of course it helps to be generally fit but for the most part we need treatments, not just regular exercise and eating our vegetables. I have a friend who was diagnosed with cancer at age 16, never drunk, never smoked, excellent health. He needed a treatment for cancer, not just generally good advice.
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We don't do double blind 100 year studies, and without knowing the underlying cause, any foods, medication, procedure (pre or post natal) could be causing dramatically increased risk, and the cause and effect would be so far separate we'd never pick up on it.
Your own premise is belied by the vast amount of human history before germ theory was concieved, after untold large scale human suffering.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Funny)
"She did not have any children herself"
I think I discovered the reason she lived so long! ;)
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Another relative here, in the USA. :-) Send me an email if you want, my address is easy to find.
She was my father's aunt IIRC. I only met her once that I can recall, when my father and I visited her home around 1985. But she might have been at some get together or other other times we visited that does not stick out in my mind. I don't remember her speaking English and I do not know that much Dutch. They talked and I went for a walk around the area. I was overdressed in a overcoat and hat, and some neighbor
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Diet is overwhelmingly why we live longer and healthier than our dark-ages counterparts. The idea that diet is unimportant is massively wrong, and based in overwhelming ignorance.
If you want an example canonical case, look up scurvy, and just how many people were horribly afflicted by it, until it was discovered exactly what dietary supplement was missing.
What we believe is a "healthy" diet, changes every decade. For all you
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Diet is overwhelmingly why we live longer and healthier than our dark-ages counterparts. The idea that diet is unimportant is massively wrong, and based in overwhelming ignorance. If you want an example canonical case, look up scurvy, and just how many people were horribly afflicted by it
Scurvy was a huge problem to long-distance sailing and marching armies, but not your average farmer or fisherman. Here in Norway a male who was 80 in 1906-1910 could expect to live 5.90 years on average, a hundred years later 7.58 years. The same figures for women are 6.30 to 9.36 years. So the last 100 years has only stretched the maximum life span by 2-3 years, while the average lifespan has gone up 26 years. That's for the most part hygiene and medicine keeping people alive. While the accounts of people
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Great scientific method there, sparky.
Just because you're not fat, doesn't mean you're healthy. It's an indicator, but certainly not everything. You have no evidence as to whether diet or behavior helped or hindered. The scientific community is currently going through a shift where they're no longer proclaiming any fat to be bad (which apart from trans-fats and apparently hydrogenated fats, is complete BS). It's depressing to see a paragraph both criticising saturated fat while praising nuts (very high in f
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I have heard that it is possible that the obesity epidemic in the US may be because of Corn Syrup, which is in nearly every prepared food here. How is that for fatty (0) while being high in carbs (99%?)
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Yep, generally refined foods are pretty bad for us, I guess because we haven't evolved to deal with them. We're used to eating food with roughage and fat that slow digestion, so as not to dump energy into our bodies so rapidly.
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simple dietary and behavioral changes will make such diseases fleetingly rare.
It's obvious already. Finish a supersize meal or two at McD every day and you're unlikely to get Alzheimer's nor die of cancer.
p.s. meanwhile they should sequence the DNA of some of the ultra-obese, and figure out how they manage to get so fat ( > 500kg) without dying.
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I hope we find the underlying cause and determine that simple dietary and behavioral changes will make such diseases fleetingly rare.
I'll talk to the magic pink unicorns and get that set up ASAP. As I see it, if dietary and behavioral changes were enough, we would have seen it. Hoping for an easy win, when there's no reason to expect one, strikes me as rather futile.
Re: simple dietary changes (Score:2)
rollmops and advocaat with cream?
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Insightful)
Diet and learned behavior also run in families.
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I don't think it will go in that direction (or I hope, to be more precise). But understanding what in her genome protected here from dementia-like diseases may help to identified exactly where in the cellular process these illnesses act and how. It could give you a very fundamental understanding of how these diseases work. This is the first step in finding either a cure (which is very unlikely) but above all a first step to find a way to identify people at risk early and provide proper treatment/nutrition t
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Retroviruses work, for a small change it might not even kill the patient.
Hmm (Score:2)
This may be modded as flamebait, but I dunno if I want to have Alzheimer's treated by DNA modification.
My paternal grandma lives with us, and she is suffering from alzheimer's. It's is very painful, among other things, she does not recognise her own son and daughter-in-law, and thinks they are her father and mother, since she sees us call them dad and mom. So I know what it feels like, it's absolutely horrible and terrifying, and I don't ever want to go through that when I grow old.
But I don't know if DNA m
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I think you need to seriously re-evaluate your decision making. Let me help you lay it out in bare form:
One the one side, we have a 99+% probability of complete dysfunction and death.
On the other side, we have "some unknown side effect that could prove to be even worse and/or may not work".
Sit down and really think for a minute about your "unknown side effect" scenarios. What are the odds of it working, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of catastrophic failure, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of f
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But I don't know if DNA modification is the answer. I would never submit to that, nor would I submit my grandmother or any other family member to such a treatment. I would rather suffer Alzheimer, rather suffer some unknown side effect that could prove to be even worse, and may ironically not even cure alzeheimer!
That's your choice, and it's your right to make it for yourself ...
I would rather we not mess with DNA.
... but not for anyone else. If by "we" you mean yourself and family members who, like your grandmother, are unable to make medical decisions on their own, that's fine. If by "we" you mean everybody, there's a serious problem here.
My grandfather died with Alzheimer's last year. He was a brilliant man, and seeing his mind decay while his body was still relatively healthy was heartbreaking. If there had been any treatment that would have g
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I would rather we not mess with DNA.
You better not have any kids then.
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That's not a technical problem, it's a social problem. For instance, I'd recommend China make exception to their one-child policy for couples with 4 healthy grandparents beyond a certain age. That way the long-healthy-life genes will become more common over time, without people having to figure out which genes and combinations of them are "good" which will have signif
Cyborg (Score:2)
From the future. Just saying.
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You know, I'm going to consider changing my sig to something like "Put monkeys into Congress" or something similar. You just got friended.
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Yep, changed it. May need some fine tuning.
Not surprising... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Citation needed. This table [annuityadvantage.com] claims life expancy at 90 is 3.8 years (in the US?).
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fucking
***.
Well, do you want to curse me, or not? And how do you come to the conclusion that you have a 33% chance of dying?
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True, not everyone that smokes dies
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Oblig. Farnsworth Quote (Score:5, Funny)
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Anonymous-shmanonymous (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrikje_van_Andel-Schipper#Genome [wikipedia.org]
Not anonymous (Score:2)
She's not anonymous (Score:2)
She's the oldest Dutch person ever:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrikje_van_Andel-Schipper [wikipedia.org]
The retirement home where she lived until her death is just a couple hundred meters away from where I work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Since you actually have a problem most of us don't have, somebody might actually want your body, you should contact EFF or RMS and ask them to help you draft a special GPL-like license for it.
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RMS? I rather give my body to Bill Gates.
He is waiting.
http://www.neowin.net/forum/uploads/post-59416-1105987532.jpg [neowin.net]
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She had a very unusual life, at least by our standards. Reading about her life makes me think that it may not be the genes so much as the environment that made her live that much.
So go reproduce (Score:2)
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Congrats, you're going to have the lowest operational Slashdot UID some day.
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Congrats, you're going to have the lowest operational Slashdot UID some day.
I doubt it. I intend to sell mine to cover my medical expenses ;-)
Is there any real science about her longevity? (Score:2)
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Just so you know, everyone reading your post knows you're full of it.
W115 = Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper (Score:2)
Here in the Netherlands it was all over the news that Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper [wikipedia.org], a lady who died at age 115 and left her body to science, had speciale genes.
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Alzheimer's - Old timer's (Score:2)
Barely on topic, but:
Anybody heard people say "old-timer's disease [associatedcontent.com]" instead of "Alzheimer's disease"?
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It's an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn [wikipedia.org]
not anonymous (Score:2)
And translate for yourself.
a single subject is useless (Score:2)
Having her sequence information doesn't really help to identify any mutation that might affect aging. You need a lot of subjects with the same phenotype (and you don't really know what the phenotype is) before you can start to identify the gene(s) you are looking for.
Identity of the subject (Score:2)
It took me all of 5 minutes to figure out the identity of the woman. There are very, very few women who live to be 115, and Wikipedia has a comprehensive list [wikipedia.org] of them. Since 2006, only three women have died at the age of 115. The BBC article says the women entered assisted living at the age of 105. I tried cross referencing that with their Wikipedia biographies, and bam - "She lived on her own until 1999 when she was 105 years old, and resided at the Western Convalescent Home in Jefferson Park, Los Angeles [lasentinel.net]
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Whoops - swing and a miss [wikipedia.org].
If we can find out how to get this gene (Score:2)
If we can find out how to get this gene to appear in everybody, we could get to push the new age lifespan of humans to be 150....no?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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TFS says "tests at the age of 113 showed she had the mental abilities of a woman aged 60-75 years."
But wiki article says she moved into a nursing home at 105. Why was that?
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Knowledge of genetics is far from complete. Differences can lead to susceptibility/resistance to certain diseases, poisons, etc.. In some cases there's a tradeoff involved. There can be differences that might not qualify as an "error", that would nonetheless reduce the likelihood of living to extreme old age.
Yes, there's ignorance involved here, because knowledge of genetics is incomplete. But to imply that genetics does not strongly influence the odds of living to extreme age assumes facts not in evidence.
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"sequence" is a noun and verb.
Biologist use that all the time when ordering grad students around. "You! Sequence those 500 tissue samples!"
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