9 ms·
Young blood does not reverse aging in old mice, UC Berkeley study finds
- darawk 10y ago> In many of these experiments, older mice that received younger blood saw either slight or no significant improvements compared to old mice with old blood. Young mice that received older blood, however, saw large declines in most of these tissues or organs. > The researchers think that many benefits seen in old mice after receiving young blood might be due to the young blood diluting the concentration of inhibitors in the old blood. How can these things be compatible? If it were diluting the inhibitors, that should have shown up as an improvement in the old mice, no?
- tominous 10y agoMy guess is that the effect of the inhibitors is not linear with concentration. Imagine that the effective (deleterious) dose of these inhibitors is, say, 10% of the amount found in old mice. So an equal exchange between two mice is enough to provide an effective dose to the young mouse, but not enough to eliminate an effective dose to the old mouse.
- ttflee 10y agoIf this inhibitor hypothesis were true, an experiment could be set up to determine which component/combination of components in the old-blood actually plays the inhibitor role, with injection of separated part by component of old-blood into the young mice, more or less like a binary search. After knowing the exact combination, it would be much easier to target the inhibitor itself.
- beachstartup 10y ago> older mice that received younger blood saw either slight keyword is 'slight' improvements. it's a poorly written sentence.
- lorenzop 10y agosad day for peter thiel
- rednerrus 10y agogreat minds and all.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JonnieCache 10y agoHis interns must be breathing a sigh of relief though.
- orly_bookz 10y agoThey probably shouldn't though... I'm sure he'd pull an Elizabeth Bathory even if there's no proof at all that it helped...
- greeneggs 10y agoIt's sad to imagine a day when Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, Fidel Castro can live forever. Even non-evil billionaires like Bill Gates living forever could be tragic, in that it greatly reduces the motivation for significant philanthropy.
- lawless123 10y agoI think if i was going to life indefinitely i would want to ensure the society around me is strong ,stable , healthy and happy to protect myself.
- JonnieCache 10y agoIf anything, once you've cheated death amassing more personal power might feel like a bit of a waste of time. Waste of time probably isn't the right phrase but you get my drift.
- daveguy 10y agoWhew. Thank goodness.
- Filligree 10y agoIt would have been convenient. But if anything so simple could work, then nature would likely have already done it.
- m3ta 10y agoPerhaps. Dying very easily is sometimes a good thing for a species from an evolutionary standpoint.
- hackinthebochs 10y agoYup. I'm of the opinion that aging just is a "feature" of evolution. A population with aging has a significant fitness advantage over a population without aging so its not surprising that everything ages (the next generation is almost always more fit than the previous gen so the faster a population transitions to the next gen the more fit it is). But if aging just is a trait rather than some inevitable result of entropy, it leads one to be optimistic for reversing aging at least in principle.
- JamesBarney 10y agoWhether a population that ages beats out one that doesn't doesn't matter as much as whether an individual that ages beats out one that doesn't.
- hackinthebochs 10y agoWell the issue is whether a gene survives. Sometimes the individual is a good proxy for this, sometimes the population. Sometimes you just gotta consider the dynamics of a gene in a sea of other genes. In the case of a supposed aging gene, consider that genes themselves preferentially want to exist in more fit organisms. If a gene could somehow manage this (i.e. be embodied with more fit genes), it will itself spread. But this is exactly what an aging gene does! Consider how an advantageous gene spreads through a population. This spread is a function of the number of generations that have passed. So a gene that could speed up the passing of generations will increase its own likelihood of existing in more fit organisms (increasing its own fitness), as advantageous genes within the population spread faster and are more frequently "paired up" with the aging gene. But the subpopulation with the aging gene is more fit than the subpopulation without it since the time for advantageous genes to spread is decreased, and so the aging population overtakes its counterpart.
- toodlebunions 10y agoWorth giving a try with humans anyway.
- talloaktrees 10y agoTry young virgins next (sarcasm)
- arrel 10y ago> found evidence for tissue rejuvenation in older mice when they are surgically joined to younger mice That's terrifying.
- elptacek 10y ago"Mice Splicer" on your resume, though? That'd be an interesting interview conversation.
- throwaway101416 10y agoI had to do exactly these surgeries on rats for a few years as a lab tech. Also did some other fun things such as mass killings of rats using mini-guillotines, harvesting bones and doing amateur brain surgeries while other rats watched restlessly and anxiously peeped from the smell of blood. This kind of stuff can mess with your sanity. For me it was a converse of how serial killers injure animals when they were children. Still have nightmares sometimes.
- Qantourisc 10y agoWhy let the other rats watch/smell ? That's just cruel, and the stress might actually skew your testing data, screwing over your experiments.
- trentlott 10y agoThey probably don't have much choice for where they did it. The animals likely couldn't see it, and the stress levels were probably minimal. It's not likely to be enough to harm the experiment. While, yes, everything can be a variable, the effect wouldn't be big. I imagine the person running the lab had done this before and has gotten good results: rats are expensive and a hassle to keep. If his experiments had been 'screwed over' because of practices like that, his PI probably wouldn't be able to gather enough useful data to afford funding for animal use.
- projektfu 10y ago
- throwawaymaroon 10y agofuck thiel and anyone who admires him
- delinquentme 10y ago"Importantly, our work on rodent blood exchange establishes that blood age has virtually immediate effects on regeneration of all three germ layer derivatives."
- ryanjmo 10y agoThis seems like this is a misleading way for these researchers to present their results. Yes, there study did show that young blood can not stop the effects of old blood. However if someone were going to get transfused with young blood the amount of old blood in their system would decrease, so then, presumably, you would see anti-aging effects. I don't know why they didn't present the research like that. It seems like they don't want to say it or I'm just missing some logical step in my thinking.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoThey didn't like how the previous results were sensationalized in the media so they are proactively downplaying anything that could be used as a sound bite.
- arca_vorago 10y agoIsn't that sorta not the point to science at all? Shouldn't findings be conducted regardless of whatever bullshit the media spews?
- mrfusion 10y agoI'm wondering if these inhibitors could be toxins from bacteria or bacteria themselves or another kind of parisite in the blood? My personal theory is older organisms get colonized by all kinds of bacteria that might trigger or speed up the breakdown the body.
- ajarmst 10y agoSo, if you had a few dozen pints of toddler blood in, say, a bar cooler, what would be the best way to dispose of that? Asking for a friend.