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Science

Worm Lifespan Extended To Five to Six Times Normal 79

Posted by Hemos from the long-beyond-their-natural-time dept.
Trillian_1138 writes "Scientific America has a brief article, only two paragraphs, sumarizing research from a recently released longevity study done on worms. The worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, have been known to live 124 days, "the equivalent of a human reaching his 500th birthday." In addition, in worms which had their insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) altere, "lived six times longer than normal worms and remained active for most of their lives." "These life-span extensions, which are the longest mean life-span extensions every produced in any organism, are particularly intriguing," the team writes, "because the insulin/IGF-1 pathway controls longevity in many species, including mammals." Humans already live significantly longer than only a century ago, in large part simply from hygiene advances. What might the effects on society be if gene therapy or other medical treatement humans lived to be 500?"
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Worm Lifespan Extended To Five to Six Times Normal More

Worm Lifespan Extended To Five to Six Times Normal

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  • Good luck surviving heart attack, cancer and road accidents for 500 years.

  • The next boom (Score:2, Funny)

    by kinnell ( 607819 )
    What might the effects on society be if gene therapy or other medical treatement humans lived to be 500?

    Time to invest in zimmer frame and artificial hip manufacturers.

  • DAMMIT (Score:3, Funny)

    by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:02AM (#7318121) Journal
    You know the only people who are going to be able to afford any kind of longevity tratment are going to be rich people and politicians... Imagine a whole senate full of Strom Thurmonds!

    I, for one, welcome our new immortal legislative overlords.

    =Smidge=
  • Read the headlines and tought:
    "Hum? What happenned? They found a computer that STILL has code red?... Ho, REAL worms.... right..."

    Anyway, I already read about this years ago: this is not the first... Although the last time was about 80 day, or 300 humans-years.

    And like the article said it left the worms very lethargic...

    Live 500 years but have a brain that works slower than molasse at -40... sure....

  • But can the brain handle it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:16AM (#7318185)
    I've no doubt that we can cleverly shift the pace of the aging clock, but can we tweak the biochemical algorithms of the brain to handle life and learning over a 500 year span. If a person takes this drug when they are young, do they need to learn (or can they learn as easily as children learn) until they are 50 or 100? Will having too many 400 year-olds in the population hold back progess because they will veiw all the inventions of the last 380 years with suspicion? What about having 500 years of accumulated heartbreaks, lost friends, daily frustrations, etc?

    Its one thing to physically live for 500 years, its another thing to mentally thrive for that long. Even if our bodies can be tweaked to last, its not clear that our minds can.
    • Its one thing to physically live for 500 years, its another thing to mentally thrive for that long.

      On this flip side, would violent crime and war be taken so lightly if people lived for half a millinia? A race of immortals would probably find that they get along much better than they ever did as dying creatures. ("So what if those guys are occupying my land for two centuries? There's plenty of time to reclaim it before middle age...", "That guy screwed me out a million bucks! It'll take fifty years to
      • Additionally, making plans that go beyond the next quarter would not seem like such a bad idea anymore.

        Yes, people's priorities would change and some of the impacts might be rather strange. For example, would retirement ages be pushed to 400. Since no company or government pension plan could afford to give someone 440 years of retirement in exchange for 40 years work, these polices would need to shift. Yet, anyone who abuses their body would probably not be able to work til 400 and be force to retire

    • I think it is true that the people we are now are not emotionally well equipped to live very long lives. However, the rhythms of life now are very diferent from what they were for our shorter-lived ancestors, and somehow we adapt.

      Is there any evidence that healthy older people are in any way mentally impaired? Sure, some suffer from senile dementia or Alzheimer's, but many don't. Frank Lloyd Wright did much of his more famous work after turning 70, for example.

      Presumably living longer would mean aging m

    • Would anyone really want to live that long. There would be pluses. Part of me would like to see my great great grand kids. There are so many books that I would like to read. So much of the world I have not seen. Would we become batter long term planers. If it takes 100 years for a probe to reach another planet would we feel like it was more worth it since it is only 1/5 of our life? what about work? would we work until we where 400? What about children? Would we be still having kids at 200 or 300 or would t
    • What makes you think the human brain cna handle living 20 years? Or 40 years? Does having too many 30 year old hold back progress? What I think you've done wrong is treat our reality as some objective "this is how it should be" reality. Plato's cave my friend. We will make of it what there is to make of it.
      • Interesting points.

        Re: What makes you think the human brain cna handle living 20 years?

        I would say that the current world state suggests that the answer is probably yes. As screwed up as some parts of the world are, much of the world does OK. Admittedly, the effective sample size of one -- we could have a nuclear exchange tomorrow, a nasty biological epidemic, or irretrievably trash the environment. Whether such an event could be ascribed to the brain not handling X years of life, or the brain not
    • Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about this in the last book of his Mars Trilogy "Blue Mars" and in some of the additional short stories published elsewhere which served as postscripts to the trilogy.

      One of the most disturbing aspects of his take on extreme old age was his assumption that by the time you were a couple of hundred years old you would have completely forgotten *all* of your childhood and even most of their first century of adulthood, consigning all memories of what we turn-of-the-millennium humans
      • Exactly! The young and old are very different, from a cognitive standpoint. The switch-over from the learning-oriented, creative brain of youth to the execution-oriented, robotic brain of age is set by our current lifespan. If we live for 500 years we will either need to delay that switch or face a very very very long life as a less-than-adaptable adult.

        I also, like Kim Stanley Robinson (good books, BTW), wonder about the total capacity of the brain and whether it would be forced to dump early memorie
        • Speaking from a neuroanatomical standpoint I don't know that such dumping would occur. Not in such stark black and white terms, anyway. Surely a few vivid memories from one's youth would survive at least.

          I believe memory persists mainly through recall and rehearsal; as one tends to rehearse recent memories more, and remote memories less and less, the old memories simply fade while fresher ones are added. In which case it's not "capacity" (as so famously outlined by Conan Doyle) as such that underlies the
          • As I thought about this topic more, I came to suspect that it comes down to the brain remembering the top ranked memories in life (I'm not sure if N is 1,000 or 1,000,000 or more). The higher the rank of the memory, the more vivid and detailed that memory is. In childhood, everything is new and so every experience is a top-ranked memory. But at some point, new and intense memories start competing for the top-ranked spots (your wedding competes with your 6th birthday party). Formerly high-ranking memorie
            • Your final suggestion is correct: the way biological neurons encode memory in the formation of synaptic networks results in a dynamic model which bears little in common with silicon hardware. The most important difference is that unlike DRAM memory, in the course of normal operation synapses do degrade over time, and entire brain cells die.

              Incidentally, you suggested that the brain's memory capacity itself is finite. Well sure it must be, but taken in isolation the maximum information density of vertebrate
  • If we can live to be 500, we would want to live more safely as not to throw life away on a technicality. If it would be affordable to only a select few, which it probably will, the rich would take all sorts of measures to protect themselves: secure houses, clean environment and armed bodyguards, not to mention favourable legislation and furtherance of the gab between rich and poor. All in all, it would suck to be poor and to live among those scared shirtless of death methusalems... pardon the spelling...
    • The obvious solution: spend at least part of your 500 years amassing wealth. Yeah, it's cheesy. Yes, there are far more valuable things to do with your time. But, unfortunately, a lot of those things take some cash (i.e. research, etc.). Be smart, and it shouldn't really take that long. Use the rest of your life (which you would expect to be extended even more--surely, with 500 years they could come up with something) to achieve the things that you really care about.

      Or, spend your time trying to desig

  • From the article:

    Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California at San Francisco and her colleagues perturbed genes in C. elegans that affect the activity of insulin and removed gonad tissue...

    "Removed gonad tissue?" They cut off their balls! and this is considered living?!

  • You have to watch Slashdot repeat itself [slashdot.org] a hundred trillion times. (lower estimate)
  • It would take a long time for civilisation to adjust to longer life span. Especially if we aged more slowly. What age would you retire at? and who would pay your pension for *say* the next 200 years?The burden on society to look after the super-aged would be almost intolerable, workers would be taxed at incredible rates to provide. At the other end of the scale, you'd have kids running round at 25 years old, still not mature enough to be left alone, puberty would take a decade at least, would there be enoug

    • What age would you retire at? and who would pay your pension for *say* the next 200 years?The burden on society to look after the super-aged would be almost intolerable, workers would be taxed at incredible rates to provide.

      Social Security is already under strain, it wouldn't even takes this to make that fail.
      Perhaps that is for the better though,

      At the other end of the scale, you'd have kids running round at 25 years old, still not mature enough to be left alone, puberty would take a decade at least, wo

  • BLASTer (Score:3, Funny)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore@NoSPaM.gmail.com> on Monday October 27, 2003 @10:34AM (#7318557) Homepage Journal

    How many people read the headline as a way to extend the self-expire date of SoBig and the Blaster worm?

    Need...more...coffee.

  • at what price longevity? (Score:3, Funny)

    by bluethundr ( 562578 ) * on Monday October 27, 2003 @10:37AM (#7318576) Homepage Journal
    C. elegans that affect the activity of insulin and removed gonad tissue, which affects endocrine hormone levels.

    So the Doctor told me, "...okay so you can live for 500 years. All we have to do is remove your nads."

    Clearly, this process is do for some refinement before it's ready for mass comsumption. Ananova also covers this. [ananova.com]
    • > So the Doctor told me, "...okay so you can live for 500 years. All we have to do is remove your nads."

      Well, that would certainly cure the nasty overpopulation side-effect, wouldn't it? :)
  • Well... just build up some technology and blast a crew off to mars, Alpha Centauri, or wherever we can go in 100 years and let them build, reproduce, and thrive there in the next 400.

    Don't forget we can keep sending people there too.

    Or wait... would infecting another planet be a bad thing?
    • Or wait... would infecting another planet be a bad thing?

      Humanity is Mother Nature's way of getting the biosphere off of its dependence on Planet Earth. No number of dogs will ever create a thriving ecosphere on the Moon.

      Environmentalists too long used the idea of "Everything Man do to environment Bad!" should be pushing for space colonization with everything they have; there's an entire dead planet right on our doorstep waiting for us to give it life. The worst case scenario for the Moon's ecosphere is
    • infecting? I have to laugh. The environicks (man-haters) think man is evil, but nature is pure. hahaha. The environment only has meaning & purpose insofar as man gives it one. Ditto for the other nonliving rocks in the universe besides the one we live on. If we colonize, utilize or monetize a heavenly body, we give it meaning.

  • Ugh (Score:2, Funny)

    by gooru ( 592512 )
    God, I don't think I could deal with my parents for hundreds more years.

  • Article: Scientists may be able to extend lives.

    Slashdot: Grumble, gloom, doom, complain, pessimism, joke, off topic.

    At the time of this posting, no one had anything good to say.
  • Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California at San Francisco and her colleagues perturbed genes in C. elegans that affect the activity of insulin and removed gonad tissue, which affects endocrine hormone levels.
    What good is living longer if you don't have any gonads?! I think I'd rather just die earlier...

    It's also well-known that low-cal diets will cause you to live longer, but who wants to live like that?

    • As mentioned in the article, one of the researchers is personally following a low-carbohydrate diet after she saw that removing sugar from the worms' diet substantially increased lifespan. She also reported that it was MUCH more tolerable than low-calorie. I can personally vouch for that.

      Of course, low-carb is still politically incorrect. Quacks like Ornish and McDougal still rule the so-called 'medical' establishment, although some actual research seems to be surfacing in support of low-carb despite th

  • it is good, but let it be for all (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Madcapjack ( 635982 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @11:12AM (#7318769)
    Although I have heard and once thought that if we develop medications to radically extend our life spans it would be primarily the rich who recieve such treatments. Naturally, since it would probably be expensive.

    HOWEVER, I don't think it would work that way. I believe that after about 5-20 years of it being only for the rich, there would be such a movement to make the operation and freely available to all, that governments would do so for fear of revolution.

    I don't think that the short-lived poor would tolerate the long-lived rich for very long. Mortals don't dig the immortals who deny mortals immortality.

  • The first thing I thought of was overpopulation. Its already a problem in some places, now make that happen everywhere.

    Also unfair distribution could lead to an upper class who have exclusive rights to things like this.
    • If you play your cards right, you could have the government, or your health insurance provider pay for it. Obviously, the longer we all live, the more people there will be paying taxes and needing health care. It would be in their best interest to support this.
  • Is it possible that an otherwise healthy brain runs out of space for memories after, say, 300 years worth? Then, since natural selection never had to deal with this problem, maybe we wouldn't be able to influence which memories get "over-written", or maybe we would be unable to commit any memories to our long-term memory.

    Kim Stanley Robinson deals with this a little bit in the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy [amazon.com].

  • the downside, of course, is that assholes will live longer
  • It says it extends the life span. But does it slow down aging? Does this particular technique prevent the worms from dying of 'old age' or does it slow down the ageing process? Would you like to live 200 yrs without any teeth & having to take a piss thru a tube?

  • Not a good idea to extend human life yet (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Confessed Geek ( 514779 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @11:59AM (#7319197)
    Hey, great for me to be Lazerous Long, but I don't want that jerk down the street to live forever.

    Seriously though, while the article is facinating and may eventually lead to some great breakthroughs in life extention, I don't think humanity as civilization is socially ready for such huge extentions in the lifespan. As was pointed out we are already living about twice as long as we did 500 years ago, and what has happened? We have overpopulated. The great majority of our current world problems come from too many people.

    Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population. Our technology has been able to barely keep our heads above water, but look around and you will see that while we are fighting the good fight we are aren't winning just doing a losing holding action. Multiply lifespans by 5 and the total population would quickly overcome all efforts, or worse.

    How worse? Say the process is very expensive. If you think class wars and the struggle between the haves and have-nots is bad now, just wait till the Bill Gates or Kim Jong-Ils of the future not only have more money than you ever will, but will have more years of life than you can aspire to. Say hello to your new imortal overlord...

    While we will probably eventually discover how to extend the human life span indefinatly we will have to change our world society in regards to reproduction before it will spell anything but our doom if we succeed.

    The "proof" of this can be examined in the following lines of thought.

    People are a resource. The more of a resource that is available the less value of that resource. Thus the more people the less they are worth. So the value of human life, and the value of human labor goes down with each increase in the human population. In the past geography and cultural barriers have ment that seperated cultures could develop "independently" leaving "under" populated areas like the United States or Europe to thrive and produce high qualities of living and an abundance of natural resources - letting them dominate other regions that did not have the same advantages. As the world "shrinks" due to easy access to fast transportation and communication these benefits are dilluted and the world becomes more of one community, creating a greater equality. Unfortunatly for some, equality will mean moving down if you were on the top. This means that population issues are not the problem of "Those people" , "That ethnic group" or "That Country," but of all citizens of the planet who will share the responsibility.

    Do you like democracy? The existance of the middle class? Technology? Then you should thank heaven for the Black Plauge. The black plauge made the rise of the middle class possilbe and increased the value of human life throughout Europe. The plauge wiped out huge swaths of the population in europe. While horribly tragic for those who lost their lives or the lives of loved ones this huge reduction in population of europe made people and human labor worth significantly more than it was before. This meant that those who wanted to use that labor (nobles/kings/economicly powerful) had to "pay" more for the resouce. The coin of exchange was not only material resources but the end of serfdom and an increase of human rights and a greater restriction on the power of the Kings/Nobles/Landowners/CEOs. This led eventually to rise of the middle class, representitive government (of one form or another), and the idea that non elite were more than cattle. Also with this increase in the cost of human labor it became more advantageous to develop technology to make better use of the labor and increase the abilities /longlevity of the resouces. The Aztecs developed the wheel, and used it in toys for children, but never implemented it as a tool because human labor was so cheap that there was no reason to.

    Perhaps it makes more sense now why unemployment is so high, wa
    • As was pointed out we are already living about twice as long as we did 500 years ago, and what has happened? We have overpopulated. The great majority of our current world problems come from too many people.

      Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population.

      Yeah, 500 years ago there was NEVER any famine, war, plauge, class inequality or poverty... NONE WHATSOEVER! Or at least, seeing as it was mostly the dark age
      • From Webster's
        Famine: an extreme scarcity of food.
        Scarcity: the state of being scare.
        Scarce: deficient in quantity or number compared with the demand.

        War - you have to have people to fight, what do you fight over? Resources. Why do you refight over resources? Because you want more than you have. See Scarce above.

        Plague - A plauge is an infectious disease affecting large portions of the populous. Why does it tend to spread so fast and far? Because to many people are crammed together in too small of a spac

    • As was pointed out we are already living about twice as long as we did 500 years ago

      The average life expectancy might be double, but the extremes haven't changed all that much. Socrates died in his early 70s, and Sophocles (probably) in his 90s. That was 2400+ years ago (Socrates died in 399 bc, Sophocles in 405 bc). And those are reasonably reliable dates, they're not like Old Testament dates - we can track Sophocles, with huge gaping holes, from 468 to 405 bc, and Socrates from 423 bc (when he was alre

      • No argument.

        While intersting and informative (I didn't know the lifespan of either man) as you point out the Average person did not live that long, thus decreasing the over all population and its rate of increase.

        If we developed a method to increase active lifespan by a factor of 5 FOR THE AVERAGE PERSON- especialy if the period of viable fertility is also extended, then this would dramaticly increase population growth thus accelerating the problems of overpopulation
    • You make the fundamental misunderstanding of our modern era, that the only value a person has is his or her economic value. Even by this measure, your resulting valuation is only approximate, imperfect, flawed. For one thing, people who create our advances, whether in technology or otherwise, generally do not operate in a singular, solitary "vacuum". The Wright Brothers invented their airplane in the midst of a community of others working assiduously, and quite publicly, to enable manned flight. Word of bot
    • Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population.

      I would like to point out that all of these symptoms have been with humanity regardless of population size for nearly the entire span of recorded history.

      And with the exception of pollution and environmental damage, one can make a case that most of these items are better now, at the height of our population so far, than ever before. The industrial revolution vastl
  • I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.

    CEO Nwabudike Morgan
    MorganLink 3DVision Interview

  • With all those extra people crawling around, reading Slashdot, it's going to make getting 'First Post' that much harder. :)

    And I don't even wanna _think_ how much worse the Slashdot Effect would get!

    Then again, BitTorrent would be that much better!

  • is that the jokes about 80-year-old female genitalia in junior high school will no longer be funny (funny in the context of 14-year-olds, that is).

  • What good is longevity? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BurningTyger ( 626316 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @12:51PM (#7319646)
    What good is longevity if you are not rejuvenated?

    Living up to 500yr old, does that mean you live as an adolescent for the first 100 years?

    Or does that mean you become old by age 60, and live the rest of the 440 years as grumpy grandpa Simpson in an old folks home ??

    Moreover, how many more years do you have to work to make enough money for the retirement saving now that you can live up to 500 years ??

  • Drink to forget (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 )
    Once our bodies can live 500 years, barring accident, the obstacle to longevity will be our minds. With 500 years of memories, role models, lovers, enemies, how can we keep it together, running our current model of individual personality? Reinventing yourself will be a survival requirement. I liked Greg Egan's treatment of immortals in Diaspora [netspace.net.au] and John Varley's Steel Beach [kulichki.com]. What's your strategy for the long term?
  • Well, I guess I can give up that last fleeting hope of seeing some of that come back one day....

  • AVERAGES, kids (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BeaverCleaver ( 673164 )
    The statistic that the average lifespan of humans has doubled in the last 300 years is thrown around all the time. People tend to imply that 300 years ago everybody must have died at 40. This is obviously nonsense. The statistic used to calculate life expectancy is actually "life expectancy at birth". So the real influence is not healthy adults living a few years longer. Remember your 3rd-grade arithmetic? If a baby breathes for a coupla minutes, then dies,(ie age = 0) it will affect the average more than s
  • Christ, you mean Steve Ballmer could live for another 400 years?!

  • There's one caveat to the procedure...

    ...removed gonad tissue...

    If you want to live longer in exchange for your 'nads, you all go for it!

  • The spice... extends life, extends conciousness.

    He who controls the spice control the universe!

    It's only fitting that they do this on worms first. Maybe they will grow to tremendous proportions and we can start mining their growth factor stuff, ala Frank Herbert.
    That would rule.

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