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So a question to the experts here: What's the catch?
by choeger 1y ago
So a question to the experts here: What's the catch?
- piker 1y agogotta be cancer
- tomhowsalterego 1y agoPersonally I’m holding out for something a bit more interesting like some even more macabre Picture of Dorian Gray type thing.
- PUSH_AX 1y agoWhen you extend human lifespan long enough, cancer becomes close to inevitable anyway.
- inglor_cz 1y agoOr maybe not. Some species are very resistant to cancer. For example, bats basically never get it, even though they live up to 40 years. Would they get cancer if they lived for 400 years? Maybe not either. Their immune systems are very good, better than ours. (We humans don't really want to acknowledge that some other animals may have better immune systems, or any other systems, at their disposal.) On the other end of the scale, mice die of cancer while not even three years old, because their immune systems are really bad at fighting cancer cells. Cancer in mammals seems to be a function of failing immune systems rather than raw age in numbers. In some species, including us humans, weakening of the immune system goes hand in hand with aging. But in others it does not.
- echelon 1y agoThe correct way to phrase this is that humans have a level of cancer that does not greatly impede the fitness of the species in having offspring. We didn't hill climb into other evolutionary protective mechanisms because they either were not discovered or did not convey appropriate fitness benefits. Our evolutionary biology doesn't "care" if we get cancer. Just that we have healthy children and can rear them for one or two generations. That was a (locally) optimal algorithm. We have plenty of in-built checks and protections in our molecular biology, and they are sufficient to expand the species.
- modius2025 1y ago[flagged]
- slater 1y agothanks for the a.i. slop?
- andrewl 1y agoSee Peto's Paradox for discussion of different cancer rates among species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox
- ACCount37 1y agoPeto's paradox - and the existence of whales in particular. If cancer really is an inevitability, then whales, who have both livespan limits longer than that of humans, and enormous bodies with a staggering amount of living cells, would be full of cancer. They aren't. Clearly, humans must have better innate cancer suppression than mice, and whales must have better innate cancer suppression than humans. There are some hints that this may come down to programmed cell death and DNA repair mechanisms (i.e. the p53 pathway) more than the immune system tweaks - with immune response being the "last resort" of cancer suppression. But we also don't know enough about the immune system to be able to examine it the same detail we can examine the DNA repair pathways.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> gotta be cancer "Notably, none of the cell transplant recipients developed tumors (n = 16)." https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867425005719%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
- mullingitover 1y agoIf a subset of the population stops dying, and that group grows, you've just invented cancer again on a different scale.
- fragmede 1y agoOkay Agent Smith.
- bitwize 1y agoSo the best way to get induced pluripotent stem cells is through the Yamanaka factors, which are proteins coded for by genes which are not expressed in mature cells. Using all four Yamanaka factors is a one-way ticket to tumor town. But, as it turns out, using three of the four still gets you IPSCs without the elevated cancer risk.
- paulpauper 1y agoMonkeys are not humans, anti-aging is imprecise and does not necessarily translate into longer life expectancies for people, and promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Monkeys are not humans The implanted stem cells, however, were human. (The fact that that the treatments did not cause "fever or substantial changes in immune cell levels (lymphocytes, neutrophils, and monocytes), which are commonly monitored for xenograft-related immune responses," is itself surprising.) > promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too Correct, though I'd say because this is early-stage medical research. Not because it's targeting longevity. I'd be similarly sceptical of an N = 16 early-stage drug trial for the flu.
- SubiculumCode 1y ago16 primates is not small when it comes to primate studies. In any case, knowing how expensive and rare primate research is to conduct, I doubt this is the first animal model used on this approach. In terms of replicatability, it is also not always the sample size, it is the effect size. Small samples do affect ability to generalize, but the point is that sample size isn't everything.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> its the effect size Which effect size do you find lacking?
- SubiculumCode 1y agoI was responding to the idea that listing a small sample size automatically means its shit science.
- 1y ago
- SubiculumCode 1y agoExamine your assumptions. There is no inherent reason that there has to be a catch. We are all from a long line of cellular reproduction that has lasted billions of years. There is no inherent reasons why cellular mechanisms can't keep maintaining/replacing a collection of those cell lineages...our relatively short lifespans are probably the products of evolutionary fitness functions acting on more fruitful strategies for reproductive success than staying off aging.
- lukan 1y agoMy assumption is, there are lots of rich people who want to live forever and lots of people who want their wealth and breakthroughs with anti ageing were quite rare or rather non existent as far as I know.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoMy assumption is that I'd feel more certain if this science had been conducted in the U.S. or Europe, but your assumptions is a little too conspiratorial for me.
- lukan 1y agoHow many breakthroughs have there been so far in anti-aging research that turned out to be real?
- jl6 1y agoWhen the upside is extraordinary, it’s very reasonable to expect some downside, just based on experience of, like, everything ever. As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
- somesortofthing 1y agoBiology is one of very few areas of science where you do just find free lunches sometimes. Human bodies are adapted to environments with harsh constraints about injuries, pathogens, temperature, energy usage, etc. The only catch to counteracting those adaptations is that it makes you worse at being a hunter-gatherer.
- onionisafruit 1y agoIt delays that sweet eternal rest
- SirFatty 1y agoIt's really adrenochrome.
- chrisco255 1y agoThe title is overblown. This just improves certain biomarkers that are associated with aging. This might improve healthspan but there is no indication that these monkeys will live any longer than the natural range.
- nikkwong 1y agoThat might not be true, if you look at the paper: "The super stem cells prevent age-related bone loss while rejuvenating over 50% of the 61 tissues analyzed." (including the brain). What do people die of when they die of 'old age'? There's the 3 pillars: cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative. These are often (but not always) metabolic diseases; i.e. cardiovascular death often arises from kidney insufficiency. If you can regenerate the liver, kidney, etc. indefinitely, a large vector of metabolic disease is probably diminished or disappears. In the paper, monkeys restored brain volume. They reduced the levels of senescent cells to youthful levels. They increased bone mass. This reduces or eliminates many of the threats that inflict casualties among the centenarian population. Sure, something else could come up that the monkeys start dying from instead. But, given the way humans and monkeys die of old age—by reducing or eliminating all known threats—it's hard to see how this wouldn't extend lifespan.
- chrisco255 1y agoThis paper doesn't prove that it extends lifespan. So to speculate on that extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence to back it up is useless. It would be far easier to prove this out on a species with a much smaller lifespan like mice, not to mention cheaper, but so far we're unable to make a mouse live longer than 5 years.
- nikkwong 1y agoYes, I'm certainly speculating. It certainly seems that this could be a path to extending lifespan. I think the claim is less than "extraordinary" though. Many teams are working to figure out how to extend lifespan in many species—it seems likely that there will be meaningful progress in the coming years or decades.
- ikrenji 1y agoI skimmed the article looking for a lifespan plot. Didn't see one. Instead it is replaced by a "proprietary multidimensional primate aging clock measurement". Take it as you will...
- disambiguation 1y agoAging is related to shortening of telomeres - the speculated evolutionary advantage is that it's a mechanism to protect against cancer. Unclear from the study what the stem cells are doing to address either problem.
- pas 1y agothat's one small part of aging