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No, this really is breaking the mice, not inducing something that looks like SENS-relevant damage in mitochondria. The details matter. Many means of breaking c
by reasonattlm 8y ago
No, this really is breaking the mice, not inducing something that looks like SENS-relevant damage in mitochondria. The details matter.
Many means of breaking cell biology can produce things that look superficially like accelerated aging in at least some ways. That doesn't mean it is aging: given that aging is widespread tissue dysfunction, anything that causes widespread tissue dysfunction can have overlapping phenotypes, but that doesn't mean it has anything to do with normal aging. DNA repair deficiency is the usual example - something that isn't all that apparent in normal aging, in comparison to the models in which DNA repair machinery is missing or broken.
So, similarly, pulling the rug out from under mitochondrial function can be done in countless ways that have very little to do with what happens in aging. I think the onus is still on these researchers to demonstrate that the method they have chosen has much of anything to do with aging per se.
- theothermkn 8y agoTo me, this is akin to finding out what happens to airplanes when their pilots die. If we're wondering about this because they have been dying of asphyxiation at altitude, we'd still learn something if we ran the experiment of shooting them dead at altitude. The conditions aren't exactly the same, but we'll still figure out that pilots are important to airplanes. The other thing worth noting is that there could be some confusion from the title. It has "aging-associated" in it. The charitable understanding is along the lines of my analogy. The uncharitable, and seemingly popular one, is along the lines of your counterargument, and I think interprets "aging-associated" as "due to or consequent of aging," rather than "due to a cause that is similar on one level to causes that come about by aging."