4 ms·

Just to be finicky, cancer is not in fact worthy of being called the "inevitable killer of mammals," through might be accurate in calling it the inevitable kill

Just to be finicky, cancer is not in fact worthy of being called the "inevitable killer of mammals," through might be accurate in calling it the inevitable killer of mice, as said beasts are little cancer factories. In humans, supercentenarians (110+) don't tend to die of cancer - in fact your odds of dying from cancer appear to decline precipitously past the 80s and 90s. I'd wager we won't know definitively why this is the case before there are good general cancer therapies in circulation, though. The condition that presently acts as a final full stop to catch everyone lucky enough to miss out on all of the other fun little fatal surprises at the decaying end of life is called senile cardiac TTR amyloidosis. Some description: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/12/an-interview-with-the-supercentenarian-research-foundation-chairman.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/12/an-interview-with... The short of it is "gunk clogs the tubes" but the long of it is much more involved - and like many things found in aging it has a rare youthful variant probably caused by unlucky genes. I note that the SENS Foundation puts some funding towards work on the narrow range of promising therapies for this condition: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/09/sens-foundation-funds-research-into-a-therapy-for-ttr-amyloidosis.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/09/sens-foundation-f...

klenwell 15y ago
I read Long For This World and both gunk and cancer were on Aubrey De Grey's list of 7 Deadly Killers (or whatever it was). The impression I came away with from that book was gunk was a plausible target for future technological remedy but cancer presented a much more difficult problem (for reasons explained in the book.) The careful qualifications to your case above seem to catch this objection, but based on my reading that book, I would gather that supercenternarians dying of gunk not cancer aren't necessarily immune from cancer. They may just be lucky in that gunk, at this period in history, got to them first. If it isn't luck but something else, there's also the problem of extrapolating a therapy from that. De Vere's solution to cancer was replacing every cell in the body every 7 or 8 years to circumvent the effects of telemerase ( or something like that, I'm not a gerontologist obviously.) It would be interesting if these supercenternarians's bodies were doing something like this, but it would be more interesting if it led to a more practical therapy.

klenwell 15y ago

I read Long For This World and both gunk and cancer were on Aubrey De Grey's list of 7 Deadly Killers (or whatever it was). The impression I came away with from that book was gunk was a plausible target for future technological remedy but cancer presented a much more difficult problem (for reasons explained in the book.) The careful qualifications to your case above seem to catch this objection, but based on my reading that book, I would gather that supercenternarians dying of gunk not cancer aren't necessarily immune from cancer. They may just be lucky in that gunk, at this period in history, got to them first. If it isn't luck but something else, there's also the problem of extrapolating a therapy from that. De Vere's solution to cancer was replacing every cell in the body every 7 or 8 years to circumvent the effects of telemerase ( or something like that, I'm not a gerontologist obviously.) It would be interesting if these supercenternarians's bodies were doing something like this, but it would be more interesting if it led to a more practical therapy.