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Analysis of blood markers predicts human lifespan limit
- mthwsjc_ 5y agoI haven't read the complete paper, only the abstract, but it's fascinating to me that the authors find a limit of 120 to 150 years. I remember reading in Genesis (first book of the bible) that the maximum age was limited to 120 years (chapter 6, verse 3).
- tomrod 5y agoWhile very old, Genesis' stories were told by bronze age folks to each other and by an area's local priests for a variety of reasons, much like stories of Odin, Thor, Ea, Zu, Zeus, and Neptune. A broken clock may be correct twice a day, but I wouldn't take it a proof that the clock is predictive sometimes. Indeed, the stories of Enoch and Methuselah show that any hard bound was clearly violated within a tiny group of humans it claims are originators.
- arbitrage 5y ago> the stories of Enoch and Methuselah show that any hard bound was clearly violated you're taking things a little literally here; that's perfectly explainable, and is also paralleled in the other mythos you mentioned: a group of people would raise their own status by claiming to be descended from gods or demi-gods or something else extraordinary. Probably the most approachable example of this in western literature is the figure of Herakles/Hercules. it is not a stretch to imagine that the people responsible for writing certain books of the hebrew bible raised their own status by claiming to be descended from extremely long-lived ancestors. Additionally, methusaleh's obtained age was recorded as 969 years; this should be understood not literally, but figuratively: 969 is a looooooong time, and a mystical number. It means "this is important, pay attention to this. this person is special". It helps the narrative in an oral tradition.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoAlternatively, you could notice that the abnormally-long lifespans match a pattern of exponential decay towards a new equilibrium. This would be consistent with a hypothesis that there was a lifespan-extending factor involved, which effects grew weaker from generation to generation. The factor could perhaps have been environmental, or genetic. I don't subscribe to this view, because I no longer believe the stuff described in the Bible actually happened as described - but if I were trying to treat the Genesis stories as real, this would be the approach I'd take to reconcile them with scientific knowledge.
- raducu 5y agoOr some decaying that reduced lifespan and made marrying your close relatives not ok :) But I don't think there's any point trying to reconcile the naratives.
- tomrod 5y agoYeah... we're getting to angels on a head of a pin dancing here. My fundamental point is that a broken clock isn't predictive, even when it happens to be right.
- neither_color 5y agoIs it also not possible that they were counting lunar cycles, seasons, or something else as years? In the case of lunar cycles 969 would be about 80.
- vmception 5y agoWere years even the same kind of years? 2000 years ago but even the King James Version wouldn’t have been using a gregorian calendar yet And usually when talking about the Bible there has some greek or hebrew translation liberty Before we all decide it’s open to interpretation anyway Well I had your whole conversation for you, let me know
- kaikai 5y agoA different calendar doesn’t necessitate mean a different year length. We still measure a year as a complete solar cycle, and that hasn’t changed.
- vmception 5y agoThere are many nuances in how a year is and was determined
- _ZeD_ 5y ago"nuances" as in ... seconds? minutes? days?
- vmception 5y agoThe Roman calendar was just a lunar month times ten until being fixed to a solar year around like 500 BC I don't know if there are retroactive fixes to what years were which and if that coincides with the Bible or universal acceptance of their solar calendar Let me know
- rootusrootus 5y ago> Roman calendar was just a lunar month times ten Plus the winter, which was unassigned until it eventually became January and February. I don't see anything about it counting the entire year as anything other than a solar year.
- _ZeD_ 5y ago
- teach 5y ago> Methuselah show[s] that any hard bound was clearly violated... Not quite. Methuselah died in the Flood, and it was only _after_ the flood when God decreed that humans' lifespan would be limited to 120 years.
- tomrod 5y agoFine. Abram.
- teach 5y agoLook, I absolutely encourage questioning religion and the Bible, but this particular hill is not one I suggest you die on. Genesis chapter 11 (allegedly) recounts the lineage of Abram. Shem (who was on the ark) lived to be 600. His son Arphaxad lived to be 438. HIS son (Shelah) died at 433. Et cetera. Abram is only eight or nine generations after the Flood, depending on how you count. To my eye, there's a clear dampening effect on ages after the Flood. Within a dozen or so generations, mostly everybody dies before age 120. Some of us have actually studied the Bible in depth. It has its contradictions, but IMO this isn't one of them. :)
- canadianfella 5y agoAnd Eve is a McRib.
- err4nt 5y agoI also had read this verse as capping human lifespan to 120 years, but someone pointed out to me that what may be referred to here is a duration of time before destruction of the earth, that might have been the countdown to the flood.
- huachimingo 5y agoWait, this is asuming that they have the same notion of a year as we have now. Unless some changes were made in modern translations.
- vmception 5y agoVery valid questions and I had asked the same
- prewett 5y agoWhat other notion of year would people use? There's clearly a repeating cycle of that takes approximately 360 days. The seasons cycle, the stars come back to their same spots. I don't think there is any evidence that ancient people used a different version of year. In fact, given that we still have Babylonian influences like 360 degrees in our circle, I'd argue that we have continued in their tradition.
- strken 5y agoSomeone on the equator might divide the orbit of the Earth around the sun into two halves, a north-sun "year" and a south-sun "year". I have absolutely no evidence that any group did so, of course, but it wouldn't be totally absurd.
- siculars 5y agoIn the Jewish culture when someone has a birthday you say "ad meyah esrim". Which basically translates as "until 120". 120 is considered to be the max lifespan if not literally then certainly figuratively.
- FiReaNG3L 5y agoThere's a lot of numerical symbolism in the bible, and 12 or powers of 12 (144, etc) really means 'a lot'
- timbit42 5y agoThe reason for the twelves is that the numbers were incorrectly translated from cuneiform into Hebrew. Sumerians used 12 and 60 (5x12) in their numbering systems, thus modern clocks have 24 hours and 60 minutes, and circles have 360 degrees. If you translate the numbers back into cuneiform and then correctly translate them again, the ages are all similar to the ages people live today. Source: Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth by Robert M. Best
- raducu 5y agoThe "comfortable" limit is set in Psalms to 70 years I think.
- melling 5y agoExcept people lived to be older than that in the Bible “Notice that Sarah lived to be 127 years (Gen. 23:1), Abraham lived to 175 years (Gen. 25:7), and Jacob lived 147 years before dying (Gen. 47:28).” https://www.neverthirsty.org/bible-qa/qa-archives/question/to-what-does-the-120-years-in-genesis-63-refer/ https://www.neverthirsty.org/bible-qa/qa-archives/question/t...
- ARandomerDude 5y agoAll of whom are clearly portrayed in Genesis as being supernaturally sustained in their old age as exceptions to the rule (similarly, Moses and Joshua).
- melling 5y agoThe Dragon in My Garage http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Sagan.pdf http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Sagan.pdf
- tomcatfish 5y agoThis isn't so much of someone trying to explain away bad data, it's just you doing a misreading of the story, which people have explained. This isn't a debate about the object level "is this story true", this is people saying "that's not what the story is".
- timbit42 5y agoGenesis doesn't say people's lives are limited to 120 years. What it says is that the flood would occur in 120 years time. That said the numbers in Genesis were incorrectly translated from cuneiform into Hebrew. If you translate them back into cuneiform and then forward again correctly, you get smaller numbers that match up with the ages people have children or die today. Source: Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth by Robert M. Best
- megablast 5y agoI wonder what Harry Potter says about the maximum age?
- laborat 5y agoNot sure I understand the paper (not my field); are they saying that extrapolating from a mortality measure predicts that mortality is inevitable? If so... isn't that just a way of confirming the obvious, viz. that higher quantiles of a logistic distribution are closer to 1? Finding a cutoff age at a - quite large, it seems - number of 120-150 years is cool and all, but I don't see how this informs us about anything other than mortality measures predicting eventual mortality?
- toss1 5y agoIt seems while the initial reading is that this is an inevitable process, the more sapient technological perspective would be that they've discovered a key mechanism that can now be investigated and adjusted for improved results. The key factor of humans getting to where we are (both good and bad), is our ability to see something that is, then figure out why it is how it is, and then change that structure/process/sequence to rearrange it to meet our goals.
- scarby2 5y ago> It seems while the initial reading is that this is an inevitable process, the more sapient technological perspective would be that they've discovered a key mechanism that can now be investigated and adjusted for improved results. I think this research is as much about to estimating the maximum age of an organism if all causes of premature death are removed. i.e. to get longer than that you need to fix aging itself not disease
- grishka 5y agoThis assumes that the organism will age naturally and that no interventions will be done to influence that process.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agowhat interventions would lengthen the lifespan given these markers?
- grishka 5y agoAfter reading some research papers, especially the ones about heterochronic parabiosis (when they connect the circulatory systems of a young and an old animal), it feels to me like "markers" is a kind of misnomer. They aren't markers, they aren't just signifying something — they're what drives the aging process in the first place, in a feedback loop. You can't explain those experiments otherwise. These, and also that when you transplant an organ from an old animal into a younger one, the organ adopts the age of its new host. There has to be something in the blood that tells the cells the age of the organism, and the cells then adjust their behavior accordingly. So, the question becomes: what if instead of merely observing those markers, we actively remove them, or block the receptors they interact with?
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoThat part is easy, the hard part is not causing cancer when doing so. For example, cancer cell lines often have lots of telomerase activity. The creation of immortal human cell lines through site-directed mutagenesis is easy, since we know most of the genes that promote cellular immortality from studying cancer.
- jyu 5y agoIf you're new to this area of biomarkers and longevity, there are several people to follow with different approaches: - David Sinclair Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To. Mostly focused on NAD+, sirtuins, use of yamanaka factors to reset epigenetic clock - Horvath for horvath clock using dna methylation to measure aging in organisms. - Michael Lustgarten a good curator for biomarker related research for longevity - Rhonda Patrick has insightful scientific interviews and dietary and behavioral interventions There's a spreadsheet with 9 biomarkers (with correlations) and age for Levine's Phenotypic Age floating around, based off this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940111/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940111/
- Bellamy 5y agoI read Sinclair's new book Lifespan and saw Patrick in a podcast. I got really excited and installed the Habinator app, because it's all about the lifestyle and habits until we get a breakthrough how to fix our bodies using pills or whatever.
- PudgePacket 5y agoThere's a lot of interesting people in this space Many I've discovered through this podcast, which features a number of people on the above list as guests: https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/ https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/
- aantix 5y agoHow does Horvath measure DNA methylation?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zemvpferreira 5y agoBy running your blood through a specific DNA methylation test - Illumina I believe. Not cheap stuff.
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- legostormtroopr 5y agoNow if only they could convert this into some sort of death clock, that would put those young whippersnappers in their place.
- inglor_cz 5y agoGrimAge to your service: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366976/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366976/
- highenergystar 5y agoI can't vouch for it's accuracy, but here is a 'phenoage' calculator I came across while chasing down this rabbithole (after reading the paper) a couple of days ago https://www.oliverzolman.com/phenoage-calculator https://www.oliverzolman.com/phenoage-calculator
- byproxy 5y agoCells G41 and G42 show as empty for me. G42 is referenced in the F42 equation, so it not being there seems to break things.
- johndoe42377 5y agoOh, really? And how exactly they tested their predictions?
- arisAlexis 5y agoThere is no known limit. Just the notion of knowing the limit while we don't know how our body works 100% and while some other animals don't age is just silly and not scientific at all.
- apalmer 5y agoI don't understand this statement? No human we are aware of in the history of the world has lived to 130. That's a pretty scientific known limit.
- cracker_jacks 5y agoThat is not how limits work. No human we are aware of in the history of the world has been to Mars. Does that mean Mars is above a limit? Limits are not defined by history, they are defined by our current understanding of science (and they are often wrong).
- sbehlasp 5y agoThere is lesser known Hunza tribe which is believed to have some exceptional longer life span [https://www.tribes.world/hunza https://www.tribes.world/hunza] There have been articles about secrete of their longevity [https://www.nomadictribe.com/discover/items/36 https://www.nomadictribe.com/discover/items/36] and [https://www.verywellhealth.com/the-hunza-valley-the-original-shangri-la-2224049 https://www.verywellhealth.com/the-hunza-valley-the-original...] Last but not least happiness is one of the key factor [https://zeenews.india.com/photos/world/happiest-healthiest-people-on-this-planet-curious-case-of-hunza-tribe-2357101 https://zeenews.india.com/photos/world/happiest-healthiest-p...]