Biological Clock Discovered That Measures Ages of Most Human Tissues 70
starr802 writes "A biological clock capable of determining how old different human tissues and cells are has been discovered by a team of researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (abstract). 'To fight aging, we first need an objective way of measuring it. Pinpointing a set of biomarkers that keeps time throughout the body has been a four-year challenge,' Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health said in a statement. 'My goal in inventing this clock is to help scientists improve their understanding of what speeds up and slows down the human aging process.'"
Re:Children with progeria make results inconclusiv (Score:5, Insightful)
The core discovery is nice, even if their problem isn't the there : Their clock is normal BUT their cells interpret it incorrectly, so the problem could be found elsewhere, like a bad clock multiplier when overclocking your PC (could result with it being slower or faster).
At least, now you know that the problem is not the "aging flag" itself, but something that's reading it.
Re:Its good they're doing this research (Score:3, Insightful)
But consider the wealth of knowledge people would bring to the table.
They bring that knowledge to the table right now, and the employer would still rather have two fresh college grads.
Re:Children with progeria make results inconclusiv (Score:5, Insightful)
If you the TFA you will see at the bottom an interesting note: "In an unexpected finding, the cells of children with progeria, a genetic disorder that causes premature aging, appeared normal and reflected their true chronological age" Doesn't this make the results inconclusive at that point? Since children with this disease age faster than anyone else? If his "clock" was accurate wouldn't these children display clocks point to a much older person?
Maybe. If progeria were literally "premature temporal aging". But it isn't. It's just a genetic disorder that causes certain symptoms that appear similar to premature temporal aging. Nobody on Earth has ever actually "aged" faster or slower than anyone else. A 35-year-old person with a full head of prematurely gray hair is still the same actual age as all other 35-year-old people. He or she just has premature graying; a specific symptom of a very specific biological system, which resembles a symptom of general aging. But the gray hair does not mean the person has actually aged 90 years while the rest of us have aged 35 years. It just means that some metabolic process has reacted differently at a different time on the biological clock. Now we have to figure out what triggers all of the other independent metabolic systems to react in certain ways when they read certain timestamps from the biological clock.
What the result regarding progeria cells tells us is that this biological clock quite literally tells time, i.e. the actual temporal age of the organism. Like tree rings. Which is interesting in and of itself. If this clock is accurate enough we might finally have a way to test whether those people who are supposedly 120 or 130 or 140 years old are really as old as they think they are or whether they're just misremembering what decade they were born.