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Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging

108 points by charlief 16y ago

Jun8 16y ago
Amazing story! Two minor details piqued my attention: * How the journalistic storytelling style is different from the US one. I guess I have grown accustomed to reading NYT and other newspapers here. For example, I don't think the sentence "Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends" would have been used for a story like this. * And more importantly this: "Pakula [her doctor] practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs' house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper -- Brooke's file -- sits on his desk. "This can't be lost," says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents." It's outrageous that they are using paper records to track this girl. At this age of iPads and other amazing handhelds, doctors' offices are still operating in the 1960s.
- britta 16y ago
  To my eyes, this journalistic storytelling style is "feature" writing -- different from "news" style, but US newspapers have both. You'll see a form of it in NYT Magazine profile articles (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/ http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/).
  - ugh 16y ago
    Der Spiegel was modeled after British and American news magazines when it was founded in 1947 in post-war Germany (with allied approval as was necessary for all press at that time). The magazine is really very similar to Time, Newsweek or The Atlantic.
carbocation 16y ago
"Brooke holds the key to everything," says Walker. He's anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He's even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke's genome. It saddens me that the state of human genetics in the United States (perhaps elsewhere, but I've only done genetics here) is such that Mr. Greenberg would even have to consider such things.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  You're probably familiar with the case of Henrietta Lacks. Do you happen to know how these things are handled abroad? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
  - carbocation 16y ago
    Yes, very much so; her story took place at my hospital. The way that her story is presented to us varies with who does the presenting, but no matter the spin, it's hard not to feel terribly for her and her family. I'm not familiar with how this works abroad, which is why I tried to qualify my statement.
    - tensor 16y ago
      How do you feel her family is being hard done by? This girl is certainly not the model of immortality that the article makes her out to be. She's likely to have a very hard life. If anything, I think it's sad that the father sees his daughter as some sort of valuable item, rather than working with researchers to help figure out why this developmental problem came about. Even if the genetic information is an important piece of the puzzle of immortality, is keeping this information from the public, and himself, in anyone's best interest?
      - carbocation 16y ago
        There might be a bit of confusion here. In the post that you replied to directly, I am referring to Henrietta Lacks, not the Greenbergs.
    - possibilistic 16y ago
      What spin do you refer to? Shouldn't society be able to benefit from a novel cell line, regardless of the origin? If it were you or me, wouldn't we gladly donate the knowledge and utility of our cells if they can serve mankind? So what if we are not reimbursed or attributed? That's a minor misfortune that pales in contrast to the ultimate societal impact. Haven't several things been done for her family retroactively? If not, then we should honor them/her because we can. Lastly in respect to her cell line, I do object to all the patents that have been made in relation. All of this should be public knowledge.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
cullenking 16y ago
I am surprised this hasn't had more attention than the couple articles I've read about Brooke over the last 1-2 years. One of the worst parts about this (from a scientific standpoint) is probably the waiting game - will this person's DNA eventually mutate, forming cancer or other age related diseases? Are there tests, other than appearance of age related diseases, to determine if she is aging? [EDIT] VladRussian pointed out that they talked about the length of her telomeres corresponding to her actual age. Hence, she isn't "immortal", but there is something else going on.
VladRussian 16y ago
"The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. " how come "immortality" comes to play here?
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  +1 million. She's still aging, she's just not developing (by aging I mean the kind that kills you. Being an adult does not kill you; being old does.)
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > being old does. Actually, being old does not suffice. You need a combination of short telomeres and cell damage.
- cullenking 16y ago
  I must have read the article a bit too quick, I missed that part :( In that case, then this isn't really immortality. I wonder what it does imply then.
- sukuriant 16y ago
  I am so glad someone else caught this.
- pjscott 16y ago
  As a quick rule of thumb, any time a mainstream science article mentions the word "immortality", it should become suspect. People say silly things when they view age extension through the highly mythologized lens of "mortality versus immortality", rather than seeing it as a difficult set of scientific and engineering challenges, each of which merely extends your life expectancy. For example, suppose that we had medical treatments to prevent cancer, almost all infectious diseases, and aging. Your life expectancy goes up, but sooner or later you're going to be hit by a bus or something -- not exactly eternal life. But still a darn sight better than having a mere 8 years as your life expectancy.
runningdogx 16y ago
I think they are obsessing unnecessarily on the semantics of what "development genes" are. I strongly doubt there is a bright line separating developmental genes from normal steady-state genes. A multicellular organism is one hugely complicated, parallel, state machine. If certain states become unreachable, that doesn't necessarily mean all the genes responsible for those states are no longer doing anything.
DjDarkman 16y ago
Interesting. I always thought that living beings age just because they were programmed to do so, because that's how the genetic algorithm works I guess.
- tensor 16y ago
  Programmed isn't quit the right word. It is true that aging is in our genetic code, but it has arising via random mutation combined with selection. This case is hypothesized to be a result of yet another random mutation that has tampered with the aging mechanics. Thus, it's interest to scientists.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Death supposedly helps evolution by removing previous iterations of the genome from the gene pool, leaving newer, allegedly better adapted, "models" with less competition. It works cross-species - if your species does not provide better adapted generations for some time, it will be outcompeted into extinction.
    - possibilistic 16y ago
      A really ineresting way to look at aging is this: if longer life was evolutionarily advantageous, we would have evolved additional molecular mechanisms to support it. It's not that by dying earlier we keep the gene pool fitter, because that's not how evolution works. (We'd otherwise have a much more complicated algorithm on our hands.) Rather, we die simply because there is no advantage in having us persist--we only gained and conserved what was optimal for our species' lifecycle. Anything else requires extra energy and support machinery and is not likely to be amplified since occasional breakdowns are likely to be serious or fatal (and more common with the increased complexity!) Compare gymnosperms (conifers) and certain angiosperms (flowering plants). The former persist for long periods under drought and stress conditions and only bear seeds after a two-year long development. Some desert angiosperms sprout, pollinate, spread seeds, then die in the span of a week. -- Different evolutionary strategies evolved under different environments and selection pressures. (Concession: evolution isn't "optimal", but it has found good enough solutions that I often call it such.)
lukev 16y ago
Interesting, and I hope that we can learn from her condition. However, I wouldn't call it "immortality" until she's 70 and has the body and development of a teenager. Unfortunately, unless that happens, it's just a rather sad medical condition. Even if we can learn from it.
- joevandyk 16y ago
  I don't think anyone's making the claim that she will live forever (or even more than normally).
  - chc 16y ago
    The article doesn't outright say "she will live forever," but it refers to her as "Brooke the Immortal," says her DNA is the "key to immortality" through which humans can live "at least 1000 years." If they're not trying to claim she's immortal, they're being pretty deceptive.
oconnor0 16y ago
"Biological immortality is possible," says Walker. "If you don't get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years." Interesting that the definition of immortality is living 1000 years.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  The reasons his idea of immortality has an end time may be for other reasons. For example, perhaps you aren't going to die of old age but over the course of time your joints wear and can't repair themselves fully, so you wind up alive and healthy but broken. Or perhaps you inevitably accumulate CO or some other trace toxin in your bloodstream and can't get rid of it. Immortality in his sense I believe simply means you don't die of age, but there are a lot of other ways to die.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  I'll be surprised if there are still meat-based humans in zoos by the time I get to a 100... This one is to be a very interesting century, if we don't ruin it completely.
reasonattlm 16y ago
This case has no application in aging research, and is of no interest to the biogerontology community. It's an interesting developmental abnormality, but nothing more. Aging is caused by accumulated biochemical damage, and this person is apparently aging normally at the level of cells and macromolecules.
- astine 16y ago
  Exactly. Failing to go through puberty is a developmental problem and it is doubtful that this child will live any longer than an ordinary human being, assuming her condition doesn't present complications that kill her long before that. I don't know anything about this Walker fellow, but from what I get from this article, he strikes me as a charlitan.
  - rdzah 16y ago
    He's extremely lucky, but certainly no charlatan. He's stumbled across the human equivalent of a master developmental control gene knockout mouse. Someday you may get a replacement organ in time due to r&d stemming from this girl's DNA.
- lionheart 16y ago
  Even though I agree with you, I have to point out: You don't know that. Nobody does. We don't know exactly how aging works and this theory needs to be tested as well. If we stop research because we just know something, we'll never get anywhere.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    We know a lot about how a lot of different mechanisms of aging works. Although I agree, he very likely doesn't know which ones are and aren't in play in this case either.
- seanalltogether 16y ago
  From the article "Her teeth, including her baby teeth, are like those of an eight-year-old. The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit "The Hayflick limit was discovered by Leonard Hayflick in 1961,[1] at the Wistar Institute (Philadelphia), when Hayflick demonstrated that a population of normal human fetal cells in a cell culture divide between 40 and 60 times. It then enters a senescence phase (refuting the contention by Alexis Carrel that normal cells are immortal). Each mitosis shortens the telomeres on the DNA of the cell. Telomere shortening in humans eventually blocks cell division and correlates with aging. This mechanism appears to prevent genomic instability and the development of cancer." So basically she's gonna die from cancer after the average number of years.
danielnicollet 16y ago
Why the journalists and PR folks probably figured out calling her condition "immortality" would attract more attention just like it did here on HN, it appears obvious that there are many possible explanations for her condition, other than retro-aging. She could simply be suffering from a combination of genetic or non-genetic disease creating her very small stature and mental disabilities. See a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbG2tSDfOo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbG2tSDfOo
guynamedloren 16y ago
I've always wondered about the human body. Right now I am studying engineering, but eventually I would like to delve deep into anatomy and biology. An automobile can theoretically run forever as long as it is properly maintained, even if that means replacing major parts - engine, transmission, even frame (but at a certain point the repairs are no longer financially feasible). Why then, can't the human body last forever? As long as we are able to make repairs and replace parts when they fail, I don't understand why people have to die. With all of the knowledge and advanced technology of today, something tells me we should be able to figure out how to stop aging - or at least slow it. We should be able to cure cancer. We should be able to cure AIDs. We should be able to regrow missing appendages or failed body parts. Am I the only one that thinks about these things? I would love to get involved in this field one day. I know there have been great advancements in these areas, but it seems like there is so much more that we could be doing.
- chc 16y ago
  We ought to be able to design a perfect programming language and correspondingly flawless framework, but somehow reality always gets in the way.
- DennisP 16y ago
  You just described the SENS approach advocated by Aubrey de Grey. They're interested in getting help from engineers: http://www.sens.org/take-action/other-ways-to-help http://www.sens.org/take-action/other-ways-to-help De Grey published a book about their approach a couple years ago, and wikipedia has a basic overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negli...
- orangecat 16y ago
  Am I the only one that thinks about these things? No, but there's fewer of us than there should be. Which is sort of understandable; aging is terrible and until recently there wasn't much hope of doing anything about it, so not thinking about it may have been best. But today that strategy is counterproductive; we're spending trillions of dollars to slightly extend the lifespans of old people, but we won't spend even one percent of that investigating ways to prevent or repair the underlying damage done by aging. FWIW I've started making semi-regular donations to the SENS Foundation. I believe their work has the potential to be tremendously valuable in terms of both economics and quality of life.
stagas 16y ago
Who knows for sure that this isn't even a rare condition? In theory, there could be people living among us that are centuries old and might look like 20-30. If I was, I wasn't going to tell everybody. If you travel a lot people won't notice your condition. I believe this is just proof that the condition exists, not the magnitude of it.
- chc 16y ago
  If they're permanently toddlers, I doubt they're doing a lot of travel.
- aperiodic 16y ago
  There's no proof that she's going to live any longer than a normal human. She's just developing much more slowly than normal. She's also had many severe medical conditions which required intensive medical care. She still has to be fed via a gastric feeding tube. I doubt anyone with a similar condition would have survived the first 5 years of their life as short as 60 years ago.
  - donaq 16y ago
    Well, at the end of the article, there was mention of a 40 year old in the body of a 10 year old boy. We can probably observe him to see if such people can have abnormally long lifespans.
ugh 16y ago
It’s somewhat amusing and nice to see that Aubrey de Grey who is one of the few people on this planet seriously working on immortality and who always had to fight for acceptance is the skeptic in this article.
- Udo 16y ago
  No, it's should be an important clue for people who are not aging researchers.
TamDenholm 16y ago
I wish we could leave people like this alone, why does this kid have to endure a life of being a lab rat? Also, giving "mankind the gift of eternal life" is a flawed idea. Simply by improving our medical science which has given people a longer lifespan has caused a ridiculous amount of problems. There are too many people on this planet and by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet.
- lukev 16y ago
  Disagree strongly. At risk of sounding too metaphorical, death is the greatest enemy of the human race. It represents the loss of unique and worthwhile personalities, and places a strict upper bound on mortal human achievement. Of course we'll have to deal with the sociological and economic ramifications of that in the scope of limited resources. But it is entirely appropriate to rage against the dying of the light.
  - TamDenholm 16y ago
    I suppose i was taking a contrarian stance but i still believe that right now humans living longer is causing many problems that just arent being addressed at all. Taking social problems as an example, governments are scared to do anything about it because they'd have to do things like raising the retirement age, which is what France had major problems with recently. The people that dont want things to change for the older population are the older population and that is the demographic that is already huge and getting larger and larger and because their against it, nothing will get done. This is a very specific argument but my point applies to the broader problem.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- orangecat 16y ago
  The "problems" you mention are largely because we've pushed back death by a few decades without doing much about aging. by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet. Neither of those assertions are clear. Arguably the opposite is true; people may end up caring about the environment a lot more if they can expect to live for centuries rather than decades.
grellas 16y ago
The human race has a problem or two to solve before it can lay claim to "immortality." For example: 1. The 20th century brought us the "war to end all wars," followed by a "lost generation" that essentially turned to boozing and high living as a way of escaping the loss of joy and the mass death of trench warfare; it brought us the mechanized warfare of WWII, by which devastation and death rained from the skies upon countless thousands of innocent people, the vision of a Third Reich and mass slaughter in ovens of an innocent religious group, from which thousands recoiled in horror but were powerless either to stop or to comprehend how such things were possible, and nuclear death that engulfed massive numbers of Japanese innocents, from which a mass stockpiling of such devastating weapons by the world's superpowers ensued, with follow-on proliferation now having reached into the hands of megalomaniacal dictators whose main claim to previously unthinkable levels of power will lie mainly in having developed such weapons and in being prepared potentially to use them, all followed by a "beat generation" that turned to drugs and other forms of escapism, and by a "hip generation" that did the same and by subsequent generations that are still groping in the dark, so to speak, to make sense of it all while somehow hoping that mankind will improve dramatically in its quest to achieve peace and tranquility notwithstanding all the sorry history to the contrary in ages past. As technology enables us to develop ever-greater forms of lethality, does anyone see "immortality" in his future even if one could live appreciably beyond the limit of 100 years that serves today as a pretty good measure of when the very few remaining representatives of a generation will in themselves be on the verge of dying. Yes, we all hope for solutions but let us see evidence of such solutions in action before laying claim to immortality. 2. The obvious problem that, when one reaches much beyond the age of 90, he begins to "fall apart." I know that is not a scientific phrase, but it accurately describes what happens when senility, dementia, and other mental problems attack the mind, when the body shrinks and most muscle mass is lost, when the skin deteriorates, and when cancer, congestive heart failure (or other heart disease), strokes, arterial, vascular, and blood problems, or any one of countless other illnesses attack and eventually overwhelm the body. And when there is no obvious illness, there is a winding down, a dying in one's sleep, a passing away owing to "natural causes." It would be one thing if some or most of these illnesses has been cured and scientists were able to say, "we are close and in a short while we will solve the remaining problems." It is quite another when science has not the slightest idea, based on today's knowledge, of how to solve even some of this onslaught of lethal conditions that affects us all at life's end. 3. The pure force of random accidents. This may not mean much if a lifespan is measured by a century. Multiply that by several centuries (assuming the other problems could be solved) and, in time, the odds will catch up with most people. Thus, solving the aging problem still leaves unsolved the cases of accidental, traumatic death, etc. that has never been a trivial problem at any point in history. This piece, to my mind, projects fairly extreme forms of wish fulfillment in assuming that modern science is anywhere close to holding the "key" to solving any of this, much less in speculating that the answers lie in analyzing the genes of the little girl featured in this piece. I understand the fascination of believing that potentially vast amounts of human betterment might result from the careful study of genetic conditions, and I have no doubt that much genuine progress can come from such studies. But science has to be tied to reality, above all things, and it does no service to its cause to deny the obvious (such as the items noted above), or to engage in what I believe are unsubstantiated speculations about "immortality," in hoping for the best from any given avenue of research. Apart from speculating about immortality, this piece is interesting, and even fascinating, in highlighting the study of this young girl's unusual condition.
adrianwaj 16y ago
rewrite: "Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to (Aging) Developing" If they can find someone's who's telomeres haven't shortened or aren't shortening (and they haven't contracted any cancers) then there might be a chance.
malkia 16y ago
I've had distant cousin, and she was exactly like that - older than me, she was still baby at 18. I'm not sure whether she's still alive.
koeselitz 16y ago
That poor kid.
alokm 16y ago
We are not ready for immortality yet. Just think of the strain it would put on the already overpopulated earth. Resources are already scarce and we are searching for more efficient ways of using energy. Moral, Economic and Social Consequences would be disastrous.
- knieveltech 16y ago
  Nonsense. Human beings have turned thinning our own population when resources are contested into a science and that's before you factor in the odds of any true immortal being torn to shreds by the masses of have-nots doomed to a "normal" human lifespan.
chadp 16y ago
Amazing story. As stated in the article, assuming we do figure out how to make people live forever (or a very long time), Who is allowed to use it? The rich? The fastest? Strongest? Smartest? Everyone can't live forever, there would be too many people. Unless we move to colonize space of course.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Global 2-child policy + colonize space. When people like Einstein can continue building on their knowledge and understanding for ~1000 years instead of ~60, I imagine we'd develop the science and technology required to colonize space at faster rate.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Global 2-child policy for the 'immortals' + colonize space. When people like Einstein can continue building on their knowledge and understanding for ~1000 years instead of ~60, I imagine we'd develop the science and technology required to colonize space at faster rate.
corin_ 16y ago
Not related to the purpose of the article, but the subject: Are there legal precedents regarding situations like this? If she developed into a body/mind of a child who understands how to buy something, could she buy alcohol/cigarettes? If someone had sex with her (again, not now, but say she developed to the equivilent of a 13-15 year old) then presumably it wouldn't count as sex with a minor? (If someone were to have sex with her right now then it might be proven to be non-consensual, but not legally paedophilia?) Sorry, latter part of that is not exactly a nice subject, but pretty interesting from a legal point of view I think.
- andrenotgiant 16y ago
  Yes of course there are laws against rape of someone who is mentally incapacitated. Ususally something along the lines of: "[It's rape if] the actor knows or has reason to know that the victim is mentally incapable, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless"
  - corin_ 16y ago
    But what about if she becomes mentally/physically ten, and consents?

108 points by charlief 16y ago

Jun8 16y ago

Amazing story! Two minor details piqued my attention: * How the journalistic storytelling style is different from the US one. I guess I have grown accustomed to reading NYT and other newspapers here. For example, I don't think the sentence "Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends" would have been used for a story like this. * And more importantly this: "Pakula [her doctor] practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs' house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper -- Brooke's file -- sits on his desk. "This can't be lost," says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents." It's outrageous that they are using paper records to track this girl. At this age of iPads and other amazing handhelds, doctors' offices are still operating in the 1960s.

britta 16y ago
To my eyes, this journalistic storytelling style is "feature" writing -- different from "news" style, but US newspapers have both. You'll see a form of it in NYT Magazine profile articles (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/ http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/).
- ugh 16y ago
  Der Spiegel was modeled after British and American news magazines when it was founded in 1947 in post-war Germany (with allied approval as was necessary for all press at that time). The magazine is really very similar to Time, Newsweek or The Atlantic.

carbocation 16y ago

"Brooke holds the key to everything," says Walker. He's anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He's even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke's genome. It saddens me that the state of human genetics in the United States (perhaps elsewhere, but I've only done genetics here) is such that Mr. Greenberg would even have to consider such things.

anigbrowl 16y ago
You're probably familiar with the case of Henrietta Lacks. Do you happen to know how these things are handled abroad? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
- carbocation 16y ago
  Yes, very much so; her story took place at my hospital. The way that her story is presented to us varies with who does the presenting, but no matter the spin, it's hard not to feel terribly for her and her family. I'm not familiar with how this works abroad, which is why I tried to qualify my statement.
  - tensor 16y ago
    How do you feel her family is being hard done by? This girl is certainly not the model of immortality that the article makes her out to be. She's likely to have a very hard life. If anything, I think it's sad that the father sees his daughter as some sort of valuable item, rather than working with researchers to help figure out why this developmental problem came about. Even if the genetic information is an important piece of the puzzle of immortality, is keeping this information from the public, and himself, in anyone's best interest?
    - carbocation 16y ago
      There might be a bit of confusion here. In the post that you replied to directly, I am referring to Henrietta Lacks, not the Greenbergs.
  - possibilistic 16y ago
    What spin do you refer to? Shouldn't society be able to benefit from a novel cell line, regardless of the origin? If it were you or me, wouldn't we gladly donate the knowledge and utility of our cells if they can serve mankind? So what if we are not reimbursed or attributed? That's a minor misfortune that pales in contrast to the ultimate societal impact. Haven't several things been done for her family retroactively? If not, then we should honor them/her because we can. Lastly in respect to her cell line, I do object to all the patents that have been made in relation. All of this should be public knowledge.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

cullenking 16y ago

I am surprised this hasn't had more attention than the couple articles I've read about Brooke over the last 1-2 years. One of the worst parts about this (from a scientific standpoint) is probably the waiting game - will this person's DNA eventually mutate, forming cancer or other age related diseases? Are there tests, other than appearance of age related diseases, to determine if she is aging? [EDIT] VladRussian pointed out that they talked about the length of her telomeres corresponding to her actual age. Hence, she isn't "immortal", but there is something else going on.

VladRussian 16y ago

"The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. " how come "immortality" comes to play here?

sliverstorm 16y ago
+1 million. She's still aging, she's just not developing (by aging I mean the kind that kills you. Being an adult does not kill you; being old does.)
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > being old does. Actually, being old does not suffice. You need a combination of short telomeres and cell damage.
cullenking 16y ago
I must have read the article a bit too quick, I missed that part :( In that case, then this isn't really immortality. I wonder what it does imply then.
sukuriant 16y ago
I am so glad someone else caught this.
pjscott 16y ago
As a quick rule of thumb, any time a mainstream science article mentions the word "immortality", it should become suspect. People say silly things when they view age extension through the highly mythologized lens of "mortality versus immortality", rather than seeing it as a difficult set of scientific and engineering challenges, each of which merely extends your life expectancy. For example, suppose that we had medical treatments to prevent cancer, almost all infectious diseases, and aging. Your life expectancy goes up, but sooner or later you're going to be hit by a bus or something -- not exactly eternal life. But still a darn sight better than having a mere 8 years as your life expectancy.

runningdogx 16y ago

I think they are obsessing unnecessarily on the semantics of what "development genes" are. I strongly doubt there is a bright line separating developmental genes from normal steady-state genes. A multicellular organism is one hugely complicated, parallel, state machine. If certain states become unreachable, that doesn't necessarily mean all the genes responsible for those states are no longer doing anything.

DjDarkman 16y ago

Interesting. I always thought that living beings age just because they were programmed to do so, because that's how the genetic algorithm works I guess.

tensor 16y ago
Programmed isn't quit the right word. It is true that aging is in our genetic code, but it has arising via random mutation combined with selection. This case is hypothesized to be a result of yet another random mutation that has tampered with the aging mechanics. Thus, it's interest to scientists.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Death supposedly helps evolution by removing previous iterations of the genome from the gene pool, leaving newer, allegedly better adapted, "models" with less competition. It works cross-species - if your species does not provide better adapted generations for some time, it will be outcompeted into extinction.
  - possibilistic 16y ago
    A really ineresting way to look at aging is this: if longer life was evolutionarily advantageous, we would have evolved additional molecular mechanisms to support it. It's not that by dying earlier we keep the gene pool fitter, because that's not how evolution works. (We'd otherwise have a much more complicated algorithm on our hands.) Rather, we die simply because there is no advantage in having us persist--we only gained and conserved what was optimal for our species' lifecycle. Anything else requires extra energy and support machinery and is not likely to be amplified since occasional breakdowns are likely to be serious or fatal (and more common with the increased complexity!) Compare gymnosperms (conifers) and certain angiosperms (flowering plants). The former persist for long periods under drought and stress conditions and only bear seeds after a two-year long development. Some desert angiosperms sprout, pollinate, spread seeds, then die in the span of a week. -- Different evolutionary strategies evolved under different environments and selection pressures. (Concession: evolution isn't "optimal", but it has found good enough solutions that I often call it such.)

lukev 16y ago

Interesting, and I hope that we can learn from her condition. However, I wouldn't call it "immortality" until she's 70 and has the body and development of a teenager. Unfortunately, unless that happens, it's just a rather sad medical condition. Even if we can learn from it.

joevandyk 16y ago
I don't think anyone's making the claim that she will live forever (or even more than normally).
- chc 16y ago
  The article doesn't outright say "she will live forever," but it refers to her as "Brooke the Immortal," says her DNA is the "key to immortality" through which humans can live "at least 1000 years." If they're not trying to claim she's immortal, they're being pretty deceptive.

oconnor0 16y ago

"Biological immortality is possible," says Walker. "If you don't get hit by a car or by lightning, you could live at least 1,000 years." Interesting that the definition of immortality is living 1000 years.

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sliverstorm 16y ago
The reasons his idea of immortality has an end time may be for other reasons. For example, perhaps you aren't going to die of old age but over the course of time your joints wear and can't repair themselves fully, so you wind up alive and healthy but broken. Or perhaps you inevitably accumulate CO or some other trace toxin in your bloodstream and can't get rid of it. Immortality in his sense I believe simply means you don't die of age, but there are a lot of other ways to die.
rbanffy 16y ago
I'll be surprised if there are still meat-based humans in zoos by the time I get to a 100... This one is to be a very interesting century, if we don't ruin it completely.

reasonattlm 16y ago

This case has no application in aging research, and is of no interest to the biogerontology community. It's an interesting developmental abnormality, but nothing more. Aging is caused by accumulated biochemical damage, and this person is apparently aging normally at the level of cells and macromolecules.

astine 16y ago
Exactly. Failing to go through puberty is a developmental problem and it is doubtful that this child will live any longer than an ordinary human being, assuming her condition doesn't present complications that kill her long before that. I don't know anything about this Walker fellow, but from what I get from this article, he strikes me as a charlitan.
- rdzah 16y ago
  He's extremely lucky, but certainly no charlatan. He's stumbled across the human equivalent of a master developmental control gene knockout mouse. Someday you may get a replacement organ in time due to r&d stemming from this girl's DNA.
lionheart 16y ago
Even though I agree with you, I have to point out: You don't know that. Nobody does. We don't know exactly how aging works and this theory needs to be tested as well. If we stop research because we just know something, we'll never get anywhere.
- gte910h 16y ago
  We know a lot about how a lot of different mechanisms of aging works. Although I agree, he very likely doesn't know which ones are and aren't in play in this case either.
seanalltogether 16y ago
From the article "Her teeth, including her baby teeth, are like those of an eight-year-old. The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit "The Hayflick limit was discovered by Leonard Hayflick in 1961,[1] at the Wistar Institute (Philadelphia), when Hayflick demonstrated that a population of normal human fetal cells in a cell culture divide between 40 and 60 times. It then enters a senescence phase (refuting the contention by Alexis Carrel that normal cells are immortal). Each mitosis shortens the telomeres on the DNA of the cell. Telomere shortening in humans eventually blocks cell division and correlates with aging. This mechanism appears to prevent genomic instability and the development of cancer." So basically she's gonna die from cancer after the average number of years.

danielnicollet 16y ago

Why the journalists and PR folks probably figured out calling her condition "immortality" would attract more attention just like it did here on HN, it appears obvious that there are many possible explanations for her condition, other than retro-aging. She could simply be suffering from a combination of genetic or non-genetic disease creating her very small stature and mental disabilities. See a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbG2tSDfOo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbG2tSDfOo

guynamedloren 16y ago

I've always wondered about the human body. Right now I am studying engineering, but eventually I would like to delve deep into anatomy and biology. An automobile can theoretically run forever as long as it is properly maintained, even if that means replacing major parts - engine, transmission, even frame (but at a certain point the repairs are no longer financially feasible). Why then, can't the human body last forever? As long as we are able to make repairs and replace parts when they fail, I don't understand why people have to die. With all of the knowledge and advanced technology of today, something tells me we should be able to figure out how to stop aging - or at least slow it. We should be able to cure cancer. We should be able to cure AIDs. We should be able to regrow missing appendages or failed body parts. Am I the only one that thinks about these things? I would love to get involved in this field one day. I know there have been great advancements in these areas, but it seems like there is so much more that we could be doing.

chc 16y ago
We ought to be able to design a perfect programming language and correspondingly flawless framework, but somehow reality always gets in the way.
DennisP 16y ago
You just described the SENS approach advocated by Aubrey de Grey. They're interested in getting help from engineers: http://www.sens.org/take-action/other-ways-to-help http://www.sens.org/take-action/other-ways-to-help De Grey published a book about their approach a couple years ago, and wikipedia has a basic overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negli...
orangecat 16y ago
Am I the only one that thinks about these things? No, but there's fewer of us than there should be. Which is sort of understandable; aging is terrible and until recently there wasn't much hope of doing anything about it, so not thinking about it may have been best. But today that strategy is counterproductive; we're spending trillions of dollars to slightly extend the lifespans of old people, but we won't spend even one percent of that investigating ways to prevent or repair the underlying damage done by aging. FWIW I've started making semi-regular donations to the SENS Foundation. I believe their work has the potential to be tremendously valuable in terms of both economics and quality of life.

stagas 16y ago

Who knows for sure that this isn't even a rare condition? In theory, there could be people living among us that are centuries old and might look like 20-30. If I was, I wasn't going to tell everybody. If you travel a lot people won't notice your condition. I believe this is just proof that the condition exists, not the magnitude of it.

chc 16y ago
If they're permanently toddlers, I doubt they're doing a lot of travel.
aperiodic 16y ago
There's no proof that she's going to live any longer than a normal human. She's just developing much more slowly than normal. She's also had many severe medical conditions which required intensive medical care. She still has to be fed via a gastric feeding tube. I doubt anyone with a similar condition would have survived the first 5 years of their life as short as 60 years ago.
- donaq 16y ago
  Well, at the end of the article, there was mention of a 40 year old in the body of a 10 year old boy. We can probably observe him to see if such people can have abnormally long lifespans.

ugh 16y ago

It’s somewhat amusing and nice to see that Aubrey de Grey who is one of the few people on this planet seriously working on immortality and who always had to fight for acceptance is the skeptic in this article.

Udo 16y ago
No, it's should be an important clue for people who are not aging researchers.

TamDenholm 16y ago

I wish we could leave people like this alone, why does this kid have to endure a life of being a lab rat? Also, giving "mankind the gift of eternal life" is a flawed idea. Simply by improving our medical science which has given people a longer lifespan has caused a ridiculous amount of problems. There are too many people on this planet and by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet.

lukev 16y ago
Disagree strongly. At risk of sounding too metaphorical, death is the greatest enemy of the human race. It represents the loss of unique and worthwhile personalities, and places a strict upper bound on mortal human achievement. Of course we'll have to deal with the sociological and economic ramifications of that in the scope of limited resources. But it is entirely appropriate to rage against the dying of the light.
- TamDenholm 16y ago
  I suppose i was taking a contrarian stance but i still believe that right now humans living longer is causing many problems that just arent being addressed at all. Taking social problems as an example, governments are scared to do anything about it because they'd have to do things like raising the retirement age, which is what France had major problems with recently. The people that dont want things to change for the older population are the older population and that is the demographic that is already huge and getting larger and larger and because their against it, nothing will get done. This is a very specific argument but my point applies to the broader problem.
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orangecat 16y ago
The "problems" you mention are largely because we've pushed back death by a few decades without doing much about aging. by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet. Neither of those assertions are clear. Arguably the opposite is true; people may end up caring about the environment a lot more if they can expect to live for centuries rather than decades.

grellas 16y ago

The human race has a problem or two to solve before it can lay claim to "immortality." For example: 1. The 20th century brought us the "war to end all wars," followed by a "lost generation" that essentially turned to boozing and high living as a way of escaping the loss of joy and the mass death of trench warfare; it brought us the mechanized warfare of WWII, by which devastation and death rained from the skies upon countless thousands of innocent people, the vision of a Third Reich and mass slaughter in ovens of an innocent religious group, from which thousands recoiled in horror but were powerless either to stop or to comprehend how such things were possible, and nuclear death that engulfed massive numbers of Japanese innocents, from which a mass stockpiling of such devastating weapons by the world's superpowers ensued, with follow-on proliferation now having reached into the hands of megalomaniacal dictators whose main claim to previously unthinkable levels of power will lie mainly in having developed such weapons and in being prepared potentially to use them, all followed by a "beat generation" that turned to drugs and other forms of escapism, and by a "hip generation" that did the same and by subsequent generations that are still groping in the dark, so to speak, to make sense of it all while somehow hoping that mankind will improve dramatically in its quest to achieve peace and tranquility notwithstanding all the sorry history to the contrary in ages past. As technology enables us to develop ever-greater forms of lethality, does anyone see "immortality" in his future even if one could live appreciably beyond the limit of 100 years that serves today as a pretty good measure of when the very few remaining representatives of a generation will in themselves be on the verge of dying. Yes, we all hope for solutions but let us see evidence of such solutions in action before laying claim to immortality. 2. The obvious problem that, when one reaches much beyond the age of 90, he begins to "fall apart." I know that is not a scientific phrase, but it accurately describes what happens when senility, dementia, and other mental problems attack the mind, when the body shrinks and most muscle mass is lost, when the skin deteriorates, and when cancer, congestive heart failure (or other heart disease), strokes, arterial, vascular, and blood problems, or any one of countless other illnesses attack and eventually overwhelm the body. And when there is no obvious illness, there is a winding down, a dying in one's sleep, a passing away owing to "natural causes." It would be one thing if some or most of these illnesses has been cured and scientists were able to say, "we are close and in a short while we will solve the remaining problems." It is quite another when science has not the slightest idea, based on today's knowledge, of how to solve even some of this onslaught of lethal conditions that affects us all at life's end. 3. The pure force of random accidents. This may not mean much if a lifespan is measured by a century. Multiply that by several centuries (assuming the other problems could be solved) and, in time, the odds will catch up with most people. Thus, solving the aging problem still leaves unsolved the cases of accidental, traumatic death, etc. that has never been a trivial problem at any point in history. This piece, to my mind, projects fairly extreme forms of wish fulfillment in assuming that modern science is anywhere close to holding the "key" to solving any of this, much less in speculating that the answers lie in analyzing the genes of the little girl featured in this piece. I understand the fascination of believing that potentially vast amounts of human betterment might result from the careful study of genetic conditions, and I have no doubt that much genuine progress can come from such studies. But science has to be tied to reality, above all things, and it does no service to its cause to deny the obvious (such as the items noted above), or to engage in what I believe are unsubstantiated speculations about "immortality," in hoping for the best from any given avenue of research. Apart from speculating about immortality, this piece is interesting, and even fascinating, in highlighting the study of this young girl's unusual condition.

adrianwaj 16y ago

rewrite: "Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to (Aging) Developing" If they can find someone's who's telomeres haven't shortened or aren't shortening (and they haven't contracted any cancers) then there might be a chance.

malkia 16y ago

I've had distant cousin, and she was exactly like that - older than me, she was still baby at 18. I'm not sure whether she's still alive.

koeselitz 16y ago

That poor kid.

alokm 16y ago

We are not ready for immortality yet. Just think of the strain it would put on the already overpopulated earth. Resources are already scarce and we are searching for more efficient ways of using energy. Moral, Economic and Social Consequences would be disastrous.

knieveltech 16y ago
Nonsense. Human beings have turned thinning our own population when resources are contested into a science and that's before you factor in the odds of any true immortal being torn to shreds by the masses of have-nots doomed to a "normal" human lifespan.

chadp 16y ago

Amazing story. As stated in the article, assuming we do figure out how to make people live forever (or a very long time), Who is allowed to use it? The rich? The fastest? Strongest? Smartest? Everyone can't live forever, there would be too many people. Unless we move to colonize space of course.

SkyMarshal 16y ago
Global 2-child policy + colonize space. When people like Einstein can continue building on their knowledge and understanding for ~1000 years instead of ~60, I imagine we'd develop the science and technology required to colonize space at faster rate.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
Global 2-child policy for the 'immortals' + colonize space. When people like Einstein can continue building on their knowledge and understanding for ~1000 years instead of ~60, I imagine we'd develop the science and technology required to colonize space at faster rate.

corin_ 16y ago

Not related to the purpose of the article, but the subject: Are there legal precedents regarding situations like this? If she developed into a body/mind of a child who understands how to buy something, could she buy alcohol/cigarettes? If someone had sex with her (again, not now, but say she developed to the equivilent of a 13-15 year old) then presumably it wouldn't count as sex with a minor? (If someone were to have sex with her right now then it might be proven to be non-consensual, but not legally paedophilia?) Sorry, latter part of that is not exactly a nice subject, but pretty interesting from a legal point of view I think.

andrenotgiant 16y ago
Yes of course there are laws against rape of someone who is mentally incapacitated. Ususally something along the lines of: "[It's rape if] the actor knows or has reason to know that the victim is mentally incapable, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless"
- corin_ 16y ago
  But what about if she becomes mentally/physically ten, and consents?