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Studies: Blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice
- scelerat 13y agoThis has been well-known in the vampire community for centuries. [edit] More seriously, wow time to start talking about the ethics of immortality.
- dang 13y agoPlease don't post substanceless one-liners here. The second one sounds more serious, but "wow time to start talking about the ethics of immortality" doesn't engage with anything in this article; it's simply an immediate leap to something generic and obvious. That is not what HN discussions need.
- riggins 13y agoPlease don't post substanceless one-liners here. i.e. don't make jokes. I've wondered about this because I've done the same thing and gotten downvoted. There's nothing about not making jokes in the guidelines. Personally I like a little humor mixed with my HN. Is there some unspoken guideline that HN is supposed to be humorless? And on a semi-serious note, isn't mildly interesting that one of the most common cultural myths (vampires) may have some scientific validity?
- dang 13y agoscott_s made an insightful comment about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289. HN isn't against humor per se. Personally, when I read Reddit, I'm in awe of how good the best jokes are. The problem is that you can't have everything; with a culture of humor comes a flood of lame humor. HN's tradeoff is to optimize for signal-noise ratio, so that stuff tends to get hammered. There are other places to get lots of internet humor. HN is never going to be one of those, not because people don't like to laugh, but because the signal/noise problem is hard.
- Retric 13y agoI do occasionally up vote posts that I find funny. I just down vote several times that. The real issue is HN has an older audience which does not find obvious one liners interesting.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- danieltillett 13y agoSometimes a really clever one-can contain an amazing amount of information (laconic humour is a good example of this[0]). The signal-to-noise ratio can be very high here. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
- jfoster 13y agoWould it be that bad if one of the best places for intelligent tech discussion online didn't include humour? There's an abundance of humour everywhere else.
- scelerat 13y ago> isn't mildly interesting that one of the most common cultural myths (vampires) may have some scientific validity? That's really all I was commenting on. I could have spelled it out like you did, but clearly my tone was not to some people's liking.
- gjjhjjjhhh 13y agoIsn't there a way to store your own bone marrow( or the cells that could make blood ) when you're young, and then generate your own blood in a laboratory.
- phaer 13y agoOnly tangential to the ethics of immortality, more about possible consequences of immortality for a given individual is "All Men Are Mortal" by Simone de Beauvoir, highly recommended.
- User9821 13y agoHow long would effects like this last? I mean, let's say a bunch of children donated blood for the cause, and we used it to replace the blood of a senior citizen. I don't know how to phrase this properly, but how long does the blood maintain the youthful qualities? Do you constantly need new blood coming in from a young donor? Do you receive it once and you're good for a week? A year?
- JetSpiegel 13y agoOnly one way to find out...
- User9821 13y agoIt seems like it would be relatively easy to test out. People donate blood all the time. I'm sure the effects are known of how much blood you can replace at once without causing issues. Without a doubt some elderly people would volunteer. Why can't we start giving them new blood once a week from donors, and see the results on their health or illnesses? I'm all for testing, but this seems like one of those things you could quickly move to human trials.
- tormeh 13y agoShould be done outside the normal blood donor system. There's not that much donor blood around, so it would be unethical to use it. Not a practical problem, but it would look and feel bad. Anyway, yes, why not try this on humans? Sounds perfectly reasonable.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tormeh 13y agoScientists do a lot of grotesque things to mice, rats and insects all the time. We have to test stuff on someone, and humans are not really acceptable, even with consent.
- kiallmacinnes 13y agoI agree with you.. but.. going to argue the other way anyway ;) Isn't a consenting subject better than a forced subject? The mice had no say, but a human does..
- Rizz 13y agoChoice is an interesting question for the ethicists, but there are also many more reasons to use mice, rats, fruit flies and other animals: you can easily get thousands of genetically similar ones, you can get ones bred with specific properties, they have shorter life cycles, so you can test what happens during life time, you can test to destruction/death, you can test before consent be given, you can test multiple generations, you can keep them in controlled conditions. All of those are things that are either impossible to get consent for or prohibitively time consuming or expensive with humans. There are other reasons why test animals are not that useful, mostly because they aren't human, and what works in them might not work on people, and what doesn't work in them won't be tested on people. Over time animal testing has been decreasing and will continue to decrease while cell cultures become easier to create and closer to the cell structures that need to be tested, but for now they are needed in many fields of science.
- trendoid 13y agoIf thats your concern, hope you stop having drugs when sick. Almost all allopathic drugs are tested on animals first and the conditions in which they live in arent great.
- exratione 13y ago
- exratione 13y agoYou have to be very careful when you say "reverses aging." That is a very different thing from "reverses a couple of measurable aspects associated with aging." In the former case you are making an assertion that will immediately lead you to having to define the cause and mechanisms of aging and defend your point that it is, as a process, reversed - and the definition of aging is a contentious topic at the present time. But the press is lazy and in search of clicks, etc, etc. The mainstream of the aging research community theorizes on the basis of mountainous evidence that aging is accumulated damage. What that damage consists of is pretty much settled, but there is a lot of argumentation over how it all hooks together, what is important, what is primary versus secondary, and how in detail it connects to visible pathologies of aging. Outside that mainstream, the present day accepted heresy, in the sense that the minority population of heretics are engaged with rather than cast out of the cathedral, is that aging is an evolved genetic program. It is a selected adaptation and where there is damage that damage is a consequence of epigenetic changes, not the cause of them. There are factions within this heresy too, and a lot of argumentation. If you want to learn more, look for the hyperfunction theory of aging and related thoughts as representative of the field. [1] The damage view of epigenetic and signaling changes in tissues that occur with aging is that these changes are reactions to damage. Altering them may lead to short term benefits and be worthy of use as treatments but that doesn't do anything about the underlying damage - which will grow and kill you. In the case of stem cell decline with aging, this process is thought to be a cancer suppression mechanism, and thus forcing all the dormant stem cells back to work is going to mean cancer everywhere. Equally it may turn out that evolution has produced an overcompensation and some of the benefits of doing this might be effectively free. The fastest way to find out is to conduct animal studies in something other than mice (which are little cancer factories and have telomere dynamics that are very dissimilar to that of humans). In contrast the programmed aging view is that reversing signaling and epigenetic changes is exactly reversal of aging, and is thus a great thing to be doing and we should be making full steam ahead on this front. I think they are wrong, and that the balance of evidence clearly points in the other direction, but as I said this is a heresy with enough advocates that they are not just ignored. (Bizarrely, most of that portion of the mainstream who work towards enhancing longevity and slowing aging actually spend their time on potential treatments that make much more sense as goals for programmed aging enthusiasts. Look at sirtuin or calorie restriction mimetic work - all about altering protein levels and signals. All too few researchers take the sensible approach of looking for means of damage repair. But that's a whole different topic. I blame regulation of medicine as a force steering research into marginal channels). Anyway, on to the heterochronic parabiosis, which is what you call the linking of circulatory systems in two individuals, one old, one young. This has been used for some years as a way of studying what might be going on in old tissues, especially in connection with the decline in stem cell tissue maintenance activity that leads to organ dysfunction and death. The end goal is to figure out the differences and use that knowledge to produce the part of the complete map of the molecular biology of the progression of aging that covers tissue signaling - most researchers in the field have no declared interest in doing anything other than looking at what is going on. Along the way, however, someone will produce prospective treatments based on identifying signals to stem cells involved in the choice between activity and quiescence. No-one is going to be shifting blood around as a basis for treatments between young and old when you can instead figure out what exactly it is in the blood that is causing changes - this is a change likely to occur in the stem cell transplant field also, in which much of the benefits seem to depend on the alteration of signals caused by the transplanted cells rather than any cell maintenance they are doing directly. Why sling cells around if you can just manufacture proteins that have the same beneficial effects? One of the signals is apparently GDF11, which has been explored for a couple of years now. [2] It is interesting to see that it is more general than simply localized to heart tissue. Given the large number of quite different stem cell populations in the body it would be unexpected to find much in the way of commonality between the signaling systems that they use. Apparently there is some commonality after all. Though I wouldn't hold out for much more. In general I'm expecting the exploration of cell signaling to be every bit as complicated as the hunt-and-peck approach taken to finding ways to interfere with cancer: a lot of proteins, different in most tissues. [1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3455862/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3455862/ [2]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.04.015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.04.015
- cpdean 13y agoDetails of the procedure: "To do so, they joined rats in pairs by stitching together the skin on their flanks. After this procedure, called parabiosis, blood vessels grew and joined the rats’ circulatory systems. " So the old and new rats were basically sewn together. If you want to see what this looks like, here's a picture: http://www.viewzone.com/regen.miceduo.png http://www.viewzone.com/regen.miceduo.png
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- doxology 13y agoYet another example of bad science (and it's cruel)... but it makes a great headline, so let's run with it.
- adlpz 13y agoHow is this bad science? I cannot argue about the cruelty part, as that is a completely subjective qualification (on which I don't agree at all), but if this ends providing results that improve our scientific knowledge and the lives of future generations, I don't believe it can be called bad science.
- hbbio 13y agoIt's been known for centuries that drinking blood of young... Oh wait, that was a movie :)
- vajorie 13y agoNope it wasn't. Cute political commentary on experiments on animals though.
- bioinformatics 13y agoThere is a Brazilian book for teens that has the story of a group of criminals kidnapping children between 12-14 in order to harvest their blood. Of course, it's more a satirical and comedic book, with the usual gang of boys and girls solving the problem.
- Tloewald 13y agoSo... Elizabeth Bathory might have been on the right track? (Howard Hughes for that matter.)
- swayvil 13y agoIt's long been known that replacing the blood of an elderly person with that of a youth will make the codger feel like a million bucks. It really does work and, if I were a wealthy old guy, I would definitely have a stable of donors on hand and get weekly treatments.
- danieltillett 13y agoDo you have any links for this effect?
- jdougan 13y agoAs foreshadowed by Heinlein in Methuselah's Children...in 1958 "Yes, yes," agreed Hardy. "Naturally---but what is the basic process?" "It consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with new, young blood..."
- pistle 13y agoTonight, we hunt. Tomorrow we bath in our re-found youth. It's a good time to be past your prime.