12 ms·
Scientists identify pathways that extend nematode worm lifespan fivefold
- djohnston 7y ago1. In c elegans 2. "Biological scientists" vs "Biologists". What's the distinction?
- nabla9 7y ago"Biological scientists" means probably scientists working in life sciences: biologists, biochemists, biomedical researchers.
- 0-_-0 7y ago"Biological scientists" as opposed to "artificial scientists". Perhaps in the AI craze of late the distinction became important.
- sampo 7y agoThere is a lot of cooperation in biology. People from diverse backgrounds – physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, mathematics, medicine – work in the same research group. They are scientists who research biology, but they are not biologists as in they don't have a degree in biology.
- djohnston 7y agothanks for clarification!
- chrisco255 7y agoHave they begun to apply these techniques to mice yet?
- kingkawn 7y agoAs opposed to scientists made of inorganic material
- dmix 7y agoI believe the odd headline name choice partly has to do with the org name “MDI Biological Laboratory”.
- tomrod 7y agoWhat are the pathways they are describing?
- djif 7y agoInsulin signaling (IIS) and TOR pathway (a central regulator of mammalian metabolism and physiology)
- tomrod 7y agoThat was my question -- what is IIS and TOR? What does it mean to modify them?
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoHave a read of these two regarding TOR - Target Of Rapamycin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTOR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTOR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus - particularly the research section
- tomrod 7y agoThank you!
- nabla9 7y agoAll longevity accomplishments work better with smaller animals. The increase of the lifespan decreases with the size of the animal. If the increase of healthy human lifespan is something like 5% that would be a huge accomplishment and nothing to sneer at.
- raxxorrax 7y agoMany orthopaedists in my circle tell me that with all the office work we probably should be glad if we die with 60. These approaches focus on cardiovascular system and general cell renewal, but I guess there are just a few more steps until immortality.
- est31 7y agoYeah, aging involves breakage of multiple things in people's bodies. There is no single switch to fix them all. Instead they have to be fixed one by one. To the joint problems you are mentioning: we are already replacing various joints and bone parts in the body. The solutions aren't perfect though, there are risks of infection, death by septic shock, people often have pains, etc.
- mrandish 7y agoAgreed. I try to explain it to my family by pointing out the most likely proximate causes of death in old age: A) cancer, Alzheimer's, B) heart disease, C) organ failure, etc. Solving "aging" means we don't just have to solve A, B or C but rather 'All of the above'. Much harder.
- Robotbeat 7y agoI think replacing parts is a good idea, but comes up against some harder limits... Surgery becomes harder to recover from as you get older. Cell division limits are a thing, build-up of scarring tissue, etc. So if we can address cellular aging mechanisms, I think we'll have the latitude to address some of the more macroscopic aging problems (like joints, etc) through surgery.
- 7y ago
- readhn 7y agoWhats interesting is that according to the Bible humans lived from several hundred years to ~1000 years. Now this article is saying "The increase in lifespan would be the equivalent of a human living for 400 or 500 years, according to one of the scientists." Mind blown! Ages of the Patriarchs from Adam to Noah: 1. Adam 930years Genesis 5:4; 2. Seth 912years Genesis 5:8; 3. Enosh 905years Genesis 5:11; 4. Cainan 910years Genesis 5:14; 5. Mahalalel 895years Genesis 5:17; 6. Jared 962years Genesis 5:20; 7. Enoch 365years (translated) Genesis 5:23; 8. Methuselah 969years Genesis 5:27; 9. Lamech 777years Genesis 5:31; 10. Noah 950years Genesis 9:29; https://assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/nab2/decline-ages-death.gif https://assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/nab2/declin... EDIT: Wow im mind blown how close minded and anti-bible people here are. Im not religious but this is too funny that im getting down voted so much!
- Numberwang 7y agoAlso, Donald Duck has not aged a day the last 60 years. Equally interesting.
- krapp 7y agoThat's not interesting, because the Bible is a work of fiction, and thus not relevant to any discussions of scientific merit.
- readhn 7y agoIts just an observation, fiction or not. i remember this fact from the bible and its funny how in this article they talk about 400-500years human lifespan.
- acollins1331 7y agoWhy even type this shit. So many religious books have bullshit in it like this. Youre just a religious shill, which is probably the worst kind of shill.
- meowface 7y ago
- ColanR 7y agoLink to the journal article: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(19)30858-7 https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(19)308...
- KasianFranks 7y agoStatistical modeling of biomedical corpora: mining the Caenorhabditis Genetic Center Bibliography for genes related to life span - Blei DM, Franks K, Jordan MI, Mian IS. - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533868 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533868
- buboard 7y agoLucky nematodes and mice, they live the future
- mrandish 7y agoI was at a holiday party and some guy was telling me all about the exciting life extension breakthroughs he was reading about in mass media. I tried to explain that, while exciting, what works in mice models is highly unlikely to directly scale into humans and that making progress against aging is very probably a "wicked" problem. I pointed out how many headlines we saw in the 80s about a "cure" for cancer being just around the corner. Yet, cancer turned out to be a "wicked" problem. We've made exciting progress and reduced cancer mortality for nearly 30% in the last 25 years but there's been no "cure". Sadly, no one wants to hear that.
- phkahler 7y ago>> Sadly, no one wants to hear that. There are also people who dont want to hear that change may be possible.
- seer 7y agoThere's some really exciting research going on around ageing (and cancer as they are quite related) recently. I'm someone very far outside the field, but as far as I can tell we're starting to understand cancer (and ageing) on a much deeper molecular machinery kind of level. Combined with epigenetics it really does look quite doable to extend lifespans of humans as well. I mean there have been techniques known for millennia - fasting, exercise, saunas etc. What's changing now is that we're starting to understand _how_ those things are actually working under the hood, not just spraying chemicals and hoping something changes. At least that's what I've gathered reading through https://lifespanbook.com/faq/ https://lifespanbook.com/faq/
- evo_9 7y agoGreat read. The combination of metformin, revaratrol and NMN is quite something. Add fasting and an intense workouts and it’s amazing how much you can impact your wellness. I recently unretired from the over 40 hockey league i’ve played in the past 8 years and rejoined the top A league playing against 20 year olds... anecdotal sure... but then again so are those sets of 30-40 pull-ups I do in my workout multiple times a week... incidentally in my 30s I could only do 15 pull-ups... been steadily increasing the last few years much to the surprise of my 20 year old teammates I workout with. I’m currently 52 and look mid 30s and have taken supplements for nearly 10 years to affect aging.
- patcon 7y agoSurprise, a counter-argument on hacker news! :) Why does it seem no one worries about what we might break in humanity by disrupting the evolved pattern of death. It's a network characteristic selected for in living system, and very few creatures have survived into our epoch without developing the capacity to die. It's literally an evolved feature of our lifecycle and our existence within this web, and it terrifies me (esp everything going wrong already in our world) that we're not being more critical and cautionary toward life-extension.... Every time I read about life extension, I have almost zero positive thoughts about its effect on our common good, and it's just "oh shit, this is going to have bad outcomes for us all" :/ It's pursuit feels like peak selfishness in our individualistic society, one that really need collectivist thinking.
- nickthemagicman 7y agoEvolution is not always correct. Evolution is correct only for a certain set of circumstances at a certain point in time. Appendixes are an example of legacy evolutionary artifacts. Evolution keeps...evolving. So one could argue that mortality is a legacy evolutionary process and by overcoming it humans are evolving as a species. Think of all one could accomplish if dedicated 1000 years of learning and research to developing fusion for example or space travel.
- excursionist 7y agoI'm not sure our brains are capable of continuously learning for 1000 years without becoming useless. Also, there is a dystopian version of immortality - a tiny fraction of elites becoming immortal super-tyrants.
- nickthemagicman 7y agoIf we solve aging we may solve brain aging as well as one is a subset of the other.
- smolder 7y agoAppendixes have recently started to be regarded as something functional, a sort of incubator for healthy gut bacteria, but I'm sure there are other examples in nature that could support your point, too.
- greg7mdp 7y agoDang, my retirement savings will have to last much longer than I had expected.
- Tactic 7y agoWhile stated in what I interpret is a joking way, it is a very real concern. As the average life expectancy increases we either have to plan for a longer period of non-productivity (in the private sector) or work longer. A blend of the two seems to be what is occurring, but over my life time I have seen my expected retirement age continue to push slightly further away.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoI expect it to be non-existent for a huge chunk of the economy. Well paid programmer types can FIRE, but honestly they can keep working until they can't sit upright or think clearly. Folks like welders have their eyes and knees go in their 40s.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pazimzadeh 7y agoI would like to know if this changed the incidence or predisposition to cancer. No such thing as free lunch..
- aruggirello 7y agoWait - did we actually start by extending the lifespans of our parasites??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nematode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nematode "The roughly 2,271 genera are placed in 256 families. The many parasitic forms include pathogens in most plants and animals. A third of the genera occur as parasites of vertebrates; about 35 nematode species occur in humans."
- blaser-waffle 7y agoWhen we started living longer, and in greater numbers, so did they. Only fair that this trend continues...