Changing a Single Gene Allows Mice To Live 20 Percent Longer 79
An anonymous reader writes "A research team at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has been experimenting with changing mouse genes and seeing how it impacts their life. In a surprising discovery, when targeting just one gene change it was found they could extend the life of a mouse by 20 percent. The gene the researchers focused on is called mTOR and is associated with metabolism. By lowering its expression (to about 25 percent of what is normal) in a batch of mice they did indeed live longer (abstract). They also displayed better memory, balance, muscle strength, and posture as they aged. However, the health of their bones deteriorated more quickly and their immune system was weakened, suggesting that extra time alive wouldn’t really be worth it in terms of overall health. Lead researcher Toren Finkel said, 'While the high extension in lifespan is noteworthy, this study reinforces an important facet of aging; it is not uniform. Rather, similar to circadian rhythms, an animal might have several organ-specific aging clocks that generally work together to govern the aging of the whole organism.'"
Re:Lazarus Long Unavailable for Comment... (Score:5, Funny)
Of course there are ways to 'live' forever...even in the flesh...the question is...how do you want to do it?
Let's run with a hypothetical here: let's say you got, I don't know, twenty different ways to live forever, which I will outline now:
1.) You join with the Almighty in His existence...you are really immortal, and really can't die, but there are some ground rules which you may or may not like, and He is your King...well, in theory He's your King whether or not you join up, but whatever. Free will and all that jazz. With the exception of that one war, everyone is just perfect.
2.) The Super-Galactic Mainframe of Quanticos 337 is willing to swing by, and back up your entire existence to its repository. It's an AI, built by an ancient civilization, that got bored with daily life, and decided that living on as cyber-elfs while the AI went around asking other civilizations / lifeforms if they wanted to join up...focusing on simply being, while enjoying a universe of their own design, which has some focus on merging thought with form. The denizens are reportedly very happy with their choice.
3.) The Earth itself has a crystalline matrix made up of nickel-iron which stores souls / imprints of lifeforms / moderates various attributes / functions of this planet. If you want, you can simply return to that, and be recreated, or, perhaps, 'talk' to it, if anyone on the lower planes can, and ask it about immortality (presumably with the eternal youth / regrowth of limbs / abstention of diseases, but constantly growing in wisdom kind of package which people here seem to care so much about).
4.) You can do the human scientist / Deus Ex Machina / 'Scare the gods' routine, and whip together a handful of wormholes / singularities / whatever, and use that apparatus to keep your existence going for a bit. Helps if you have some uber intelligent friends who are social enough to check up on you every once in a while (haven't heard from Bob in a while..going to check on him...hmm, his apparatus stopped...well, let's see why, check the logs, repair the fault, notify the others of the fault condition, and bring him back), and independent enough to not tie all of those apparatii together (single point of failure == bad).
5.) You could try transcending this reality...presumably with or without any 'help'...and in doing so, cast aside any mortality, or rather the mortality as defined by this plane of existence.
6.) You can clone yourself a few thousand times, either through direct cloning, by using a virus to inject your genome into otherwise unfertilized egg cells (awesome SciFi story about that), using a virus to overwrite everyone else's somatic cells (pulling a 'Master'), or just plain old having some sex. Or IVF. Personally I favor sex...but then, I'm old-fashioned when it comes to things like procreation. That's considered a form of immortality.
7.) You could write a book, a song, build a pyramid, some 'act of glory' to stand as a fitting testament that you once graced the planet Earth. Personally, I consider this a boring pursuit, bit of a midlife crisis, but then, who am I to judge?
8.) You could convince yourself that reality is the Kobayashi Maru....that the logical inconsistencies of this existence can only be sustained through tremendous action on the part of a symphony of minds or a supercomputer, and that the entirety of 'your life' is simply a test to see if you are fit to 'command' or 'lead'...something. As the saying goes, you could live with a man every day for 40 years, but not really know him; it's not until you pick him up, and hold him over a volcano, that you learn things that you could never learn any other way.
Re: Blatant conjecture (Score:2, Funny)
Perhaps you should work on your math in those extra years.
mTOR (Score:4, Funny)
he gene the researchers focused on is called mTOR and is
... That gene is no longer available. It was seized by the NSA and is being held in guantanamo bay for suspected ties to drug dealing and terrorism because it may somehow be related to the Tor privacy network.