Aging Discovery Yields Nobel Prize 187
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."
Good find (Score:3, Insightful)
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. :]
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Re:Good find (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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No, I'm not saying kill them off. Someone needs to clean the loo. Just manage their numbers so they don't become too much of a bother, wot eh?
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And it's already happening. Also, a "economic crisis" is a good way, to weed out people. "Health" systems designed for death and disease also work fine. But you're right: Combine them with "war" and you got a quicker solution.
Especially since it's easy to hide behind the stress that by laws of nature will come upon a population that has less and less resources per person. Naturally population growth will slow down and stall at the point of balance. Until there is a way to optimize things more, or someone fi
Become wealthy. (Score:2)
If you don't want to be a serf, and if you don't want to be culled, then become wealthy. If you don't like these options then stop supporting American capitalism.
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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:Good find (Score:5, Funny)
And some people never have any children, such as my parents.
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You joke, but this is possible through adoption. You can raise a child without having one...
(Unless of course that's what you meant)
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Oups, no offense intended to those who were adopted as this was supposed to be a joke and I forgot about that possibility.
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And some people never have any children, such as my parents.
That's sad, but even worse things happen. My children never had any parents!
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In the short term. In the longer term, as people get older and there are fewer young people in the workforce, you get a situation like is happening in Japan [wikipedia.org]. It's not happening here in the US quite yet due to an influx from Mexico and a different culture, but it's still something to think about.
The exact opposite of how it should be. (Score:2)
The wealthy should be the ones having 16 kids.
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'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 Soylent Green is People!
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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)
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)
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Norman Borlaug [xrl.us] singlehandedly saved the world from starvation due to food production.
(An exaggeration, but a slight one.)
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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
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The earth can only support 500 humans?
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The earth can only support 500 humans?
Precisely.
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Less reproduction.
Of course that should be happening anyway, whether or not we achieve artificially increased lifespans.
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Expect to get it via a combined immortality/sterilization jab.
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It's great news however how are we going to solve the population crisis when the Earth gets too small?
I dunno... Maybe we can actually have a good reason for space colonization.
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I'm thinking more like 640. That should be enough for anybody. ;)
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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. :]
One way trip to Mars... not actually a joke ;). http://www.universetoday.com/2008/03/04/a-one-way-one-person-mission-to-mars/ [universetoday.com]
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112752256 [npr.org]
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OK (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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.
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I would hate to have my mussels age too. They really are better fresh.
Re:I would settle for... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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The funny thing is: You will also start to act like a child again. :D
Speak for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I work with several incredibly bright people who are in their mid 70's who still travel the world.
My next-door neighbors are in their mid-80s. He just recently gave up farming, and she's having a great time writing articles for travel magazines. They go to their condo in Hawaii for a couple of months each year, and just left to take an RV cross-country.
My other next-door neighbors recently passed away. Their minds were sharp, but your body tends to give out when you're in your late 90s.
I'm really hoping that it's something in the water.
Complete BS. (Score:2)
The lifespans will be similar to what it's always been. 50% of the population wont be living to 100, trust me.
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The minimum age for voting, driving, drinking all go way up. We're all just skulls full of mush at 21 and have no business making important d
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The age for enlistment in the armed forces of course stays the same, as nobody else would actually do it.
And most people would not support soldiers who can't vote, so unless politicians stop making war the odds for progress are low.
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I would definitely love to live longer then 100 years, but consider what would happen if a person could live indefinitely. they'd have to have some pile of savings to support themselves, they'd have to have a pile of people in the supporting generation to support them or they'd have to continue to work as long as you were alive.
#3 sounds fine to me. Work for 30 years, take a mini-retirement for 3 years, then start a different career, repeat as often as you like. If your body and mind stay healthy there's no
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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
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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.)
aging model like movie "The Hunger" (Score:2)
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I suspect you'd feel differently about that when you're actually 85 and still in perfect health. Still, if an arbitrary age-limit can be set, who says it has to be 85, or will stay 85, or be 85 for everyone?
The world of Logan's Run [wikipedia.org] (movie: Logan's Run [wikipedia.org]) wasn't all that great for everyone...
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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.
You would want to not age, remain healthy throughout your life, then be put to death at 85 years? Somehow, I imagine chasing runaway 84 yr olds becoming a big business.
If you only have one kid (Score:2)
If you only have one kid you wont be driving the population out of control. Now if you have 20 kids and they all live forever and you are all on welfare like the Octomom, then we have a problem.
old news (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
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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?
cell aging is different than organism aging. Cells, by and large, are cheap to produce and are expendable. You produce cells via binary cell division; one cell becomes two new cells. However, most cell lineages can divide only a finite number of times. When cells from a lineage have undergone a certa
Re:old news (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:old news (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Of course it's not. It says so right in the title that it's an "Aging Discovery."
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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.
That's kind of funny. At first, I read the title as the discovery itself was aging, and came to the correct conclusion if it not being a new discovery, despite that being a clear misunderstanding of the title.
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Life doesn't revolve around making the lives of individual organisms comfortable or convenient. It revolves around the ability of the species genes to propagate. Having immortal organisms would actually hinder genetic variation and hurt the species. If an organism did stumble upon an unlimited source of energy, the specie's survival is best served if that organism still eventually dies and it's then the energy source is utilized by offspring, who in turn later die too.
It serves a purpose that's somewhat
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If an organism can live forever and continue to reproduce then it will be competing with itself and eventually die out (unless it has a lot of predators that keep killing it before it dies of old age, but then living forever isn't any kind of advantage so a mutation that removes this won't be selected against). If an organism can live forever and not reproduce then it is an evolutionary dead-end; it will cease to change while the descendants of its siblings continue to adapt to changing circumstances and e
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Evolution and immortality wouldn't mix well.
True, and that's fine. Evolution is slow and stupid; it took billions of years to produce marginally intelligent apes. We can do better.
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Do better for yourself, the individual, perhaps, but it could also have the very negative impact of intellectual stagnation for the species, causing progress to plateau.
How would any future Einsteins ever be born with a population that refuses to die and make room for new life?
Immortality, even for a sentient species, could be a bad thing in the big picture.
Reader (Score:2)
The solution is left as a exercise for the reader.
Where are we with Viral Immortality? (Score:2, Interesting)
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A very interesting idea, but...
I'm not a biologist either, but mammalian viruses are all RNA, afaik, and "additive" not replacements. I.e. they just make the cell do new things, they can't make it not do old things (apoptasis). Even retroviruses add more to the genome; they don't replace the genome.
This is all per my biology recall supplemented with Wikipedia.
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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
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far, far beyond current technology (Score:2)
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> 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.
Cool...let me be the first... (Score:2)
I want to know where the line up is for getting our dna altered to remove these telomeres from my body, so I can no longer age.
I have a lot of work to do, my boss keeps on piling more, so I need to know I can stick around for another 100 years or so.
Action! (Score:2)
A screenplay about a young woman who suffers a telomerase problem:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13561852/Breakfast-in-the-Next-Century-an-original-screenplay [scribd.com]
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We need to remove the copy protection first, then there will be many.
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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.
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Nothing is too hard to claw through given enough time.
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Rosencrantz: I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never *know* you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'
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Captain Jack Harkness from Torchwood was buried alive at least twice - once for a very long time under London, the other time he was embedded in concrete. You'd go mad, I'm sure.
Re:Sooo (Score:5, Insightful)
Better than being dead.
You really think so? I tend to think that there are certain fates that are worse than death.
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Re:Sooo (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry for the reply to myself. If you have never read "I have no mouth, and I must scream", it is very applicable. It is a classic of the science fiction genre, and a well written dystopian story.
This is the only link I could find. I know I have seen it in others...
http://web.archive.org/web/20070227202043/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/ellison/ellison1.html [archive.org]
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*shudder*
I remember reading that in High School. It freaked me out then, and it freaks me out now!
Re:Sooo (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, being immortal but still aging [wikipedia.org].
Re:Sooo (Score:5, Informative)
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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 ;}
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I think I would gladly take cancer if I was assured it was not going to kill me due to being immortal ;}
No, actually it will kill you. Keeping your telomeres ship shape only prevents a number of "old age" sort of problems. Cancerous material can kill you as well as it can kill any young person.
Then the OP is incorrect and you will not, in fact, be immortal.
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As long as we still have the fun aspects of sexuality. Count me in.
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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.
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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.
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It's a good thing we'll have all those robots to do all our work for us, then!
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Boomer Chow is made from real Boomers?
Re:Bio 101 (Score:5, Informative)
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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