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from the "who-wants-to-live-forever?" dept.
Biologists identify pathways that extend lifespan by 500%:
Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif., and Nanjing University in China, have identified synergistic cellular pathways for longevity that amplify lifespan fivefold in C. elegans, a nematode worm used as a model in aging research.
The increase in lifespan would be the equivalent of a human living for 400 or 500 years, according to one of the scientists.
The research draws on the discovery of two major pathways governing aging in C. elegans, which is a popular model in aging research because it shares many of its genes with humans and because its short lifespan of only three to four weeks allows scientists to quickly assess the effects of genetic and environmental interventions to extend healthy lifespan. Because these pathways are "conserved," meaning that they have been passed down to humans through evolution, they have been the subject of intensive research. A number of drugs that extend healthy lifespan by altering these pathways are now under development. The discovery of the synergistic effect opens the door to even more effective anti-aging therapies.
The new research uses a double mutant in which the insulin signaling (IIS) and TOR pathways have been genetically altered. Because alteration of the IIS pathways yields a 100 percent increase in lifespan and alteration of the TOR pathway yields a 30 percent increase, the double mutant would be expected to live 130 percent longer. But instead, its lifespan was amplified by 500 percent.
"Despite the discovery in C. elegans of cellular pathways that govern aging, it hasn't been clear how these pathways interact," said Hermann Haller, M.D., president of the MDI Biological Laboratory. "By helping to characterize these interactions, our scientists are paving the way for much-needed therapies to increase healthy lifespan for a rapidly aging population."
The elucidation of the cellular mechanisms controlling the synergistic response is the subject of a recent paper in the online journal Cell Reports entitled "Translational Regulation of Non-autonomous Mitochondrial Stress Response Promotes Longevity." The authors include Jarod A. Rollins, Ph.D., and Aric N. Rogers, Ph.D., of the MDI Biological Laboratory.
[...] The paper focuses on how longevity is regulated in the mitochondria, which are the organelles in the cell responsible for energy homeostasis. Over the last decade, accumulating evidence has suggested a causative link between mitochondrial dysregulation and aging. Rollins' future research will focus on the further elucidation of the role of mitochondria in aging, he said.
More information:
Jianfeng Lan et al. Translational Regulation of Non-autonomous Mitochondrial Stress Response Promotes Longevity, Cell Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.06.078
Journal information: Cell Reports
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:54AM (10 children)
I don't believe for a minute that extending our lives that much will be that easy. But if it can be done, what a massive change in human societies that would be If everyone could live 4 or 5 centuries. Would it get people to think longer term? Age discrimination in IT is well known by the age of merely 40.
Think what it would be like to have most people who were born in the 17th and later centuries still with us. Would they be critical of the massive move to automobile transportation, advocating for a return to horseback and horse drawn carriages? And these newfangled things known as indoor plumbing, electricity, and refrigeration, would they reject those too? Would you have not just your grandparents telling you that your generation is going to hell and to get off their lawns, but also your great grandparents, great great grandparents, and so on, going back at least 10 generations?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday January 11 2020, @12:36PM (6 children)
A 500% boost in C. elegans lifespan makes a great headline, but there is likely a lot more room for disproportionate increases at the low end than the high end. You can also get incredibly invasive with what you can do with a worm, whereas germline edits in humans do nothing for the billions already living and billions more who will be born in the coming decades before any treatment would become approved. The ultimate solution will probably involve continuous/active/repeated repair of aging-related damage.
The pace of technological and social change is now incomparably fast to what was experienced centuries or millennia ago. You can now feel like you've lived since the 17th century within your own normal lifespan, falling completely out of touch with people just a decade or two younger than you (whereas people born in the years 800 and 1100 could lead substantially similar lives). Perhaps this effect will decline after we hit an AI Singularity and all of technology and science is pushed as far as it can possibly go. We would reach a plateau of "enlightenment" with the year 2100 looking similar to 2525, etc. The only thing left would be exploration of the universe, which really is the final frontier.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 11 2020, @07:01PM (5 children)
Far as I know, caloric restriction is still the only method known that demonstrably works to extend life. It is of course not fun. Though, there's work ongoing to try to get the same slowing of aging through other means than restricting calories.
Many years ago I read a criticism that for studying aging, we're looking at the wrong animals. The animal in question was the lab rat. Said we should instead be looking at long lived animals such as crocs, tortoises, and whales. There also seems a tradeoff between longevity and fecundity. Rats, like most small herbivorous animals, are on the fecund end.
Yes, the Technological Singularity. It's a favorite of futurology. One thing about that is how notoriously hard the future is to predict. Yet a lot of futurology is fanciful rather than serious. SF such as Star Trek is a case in point. Rather than accept that we're extremely impatient (perhaps because we have such short lives?), we breezily conjure up various means of faster than light travel so we can get about the vast distances of space in human career timescales. Fearful stuff is more serious, but is often overblown. Gray Goo, for example.
Not much difference between 800 and 1100? By today's extremely fast standards, perhaps so. But tech was moving ahead. It's fairly well appreciated that the political fragmentation of Europe lead to an arms race. If you had picked the period from 400 to 800, when Europe went into a huge decline in the aftermath of the fall of Rome, then yes. And yet, though that era was known as the "Dark Ages" (of Europe-- other parts of the world were not backsliding at that time), I think the term "Early Middle Ages" has become preferred, because even though a lot of Roman tech was lost, and literacy and record keeping hit a nadir, technology was being advanced even then.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:14PM (1 child)
FWIW, caloric restriction isn't proven to work on humans, it's proven to work on rats, and I think mice. You can't really compare those results to the "16 hours without eating" results or the intermediate fasting results. There was also another result that, IIRC, wasn't proven for humans where there was a restriction in only one amino acid (tryptophane, IIRC), that yielded rats that lived twice as long...with side effects that they lost all their hair and went crazy.
That said, being only marginally obese, or not quite that, is probably the healthiest weight. But, IIRC, that comes from a balance between ability to fight off infections, and skeletal wear.
You'll notice a lot if "IIRC"s in this post, because a lot of the articles were things I read decades ago, when I was following that stuff more closely. I'm definitely *not* an expert in the field.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @06:53AM
How are you going to "prove it " in humans?
Here is a tip, most "side effects" of chemo drugs are probably life extending. Nausea and loss of appetite -> Caloric Restriction. Anemia -> Less iron toxicity. Etc. There has never been a single clinical trial that controlled for these effects, everyone just buys whatever byzantine mechanism they came up with via a chain of NHST results and call the real mechanism a "side effect".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 12 2020, @12:53AM (1 child)
And yet, though that era was known as the "Dark Ages" (of Europe-- other parts of the world were not backsliding at that time), I think the term "Early Middle Ages" has become preferred, because even though a lot of Roman tech was lost, and literacy and record keeping hit a nadir, technology was being advanced even then.
"Dark Ages" is the better term, because it describes exactly what happened then: literacy and record-keeping hit a nadir, as you said. That's the entire reason the time was called the "Dark Ages": we just don't know that much about it because people didn't bother writing stuff down the way they did in Roman times, or later after the Renaissance. It didn't help that a lot of information was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. And while some technology was being advanced then, slowly, it was nothing like the society and technology that the Romans enjoyed. It really was a huge backwards step.
The Christians, and particularly the Catholics, object the most to the "Dark Ages" term, because that's the time when the Catholic Church really had a huge amount of power, and "people had faith" (as I've seen Catholics write), as if that's somehow more useful than having running water, sanitation, specialization of labor, a functional judicial system, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12 2020, @01:30PM
Or it was just made up by Catholic monks to make the facts fit their dogma. They took historical accounts of the same events from different perspectives and placed them sequentially to fill it in until they got the "right" year. Also politics seems to play a role, every noble lineage in Europe traces its family history back to Charlemagne. None go any further back to ancient Rome. In fact, there are zero lineages that trace back to ancient Rome and Charlemagne may have been a mythical figure. Seems like a politically convenient myth that was agreeable to all parties.
Then there is the fact that most of what we know about ancient Rome came from documents "discovered" by Poggio Broccilioni that somehow survived neglected in damp out of the way monasteries for 1500 years, yet zero originals survived until today. Then there is that Joseph Scaliger used those and the bible to come up with our consensus chronology that served as the calibration for carbon dating.
Joseph Scaliger's father was a famous man named Julius Caesar with a good friend Marc Antony who trained his son in making up elaborate accounts of fake historical events every day as a child (declamations). Oh, and he was also accused of fabrication his own family history.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday January 12 2020, @03:12AM
Life extension (slowing aging) is not exactly the same as anti-aging. One time boosts using genomic and lifestyle changes is not the end goal, repair of aging-related damage is the goal. Like repairing and maintaining a car. Put enough work in and replace parts as needed, and it could last for centuries.
One approach that could work as a stopgap would be to grow organs in the lab (some are trying to grow them in pigs instead) and periodically replace the heart, kidneys, liver, etc. This approach does not address the underlying causes of aging damage, is likely to be expensive, and introduces surgical risks such as infection.
I doubt that there will be a single magic drug that will cause uniform reversal of aging with no side effects. I think that ingestible/injected nanobots are the way forward, if they can be made to clear out inter/intracellular junk, attack cancer cells, swap out damaged DNA for fresh or repair errors, etc. If a mechanical nanobot solution is unrealistic or can't handle all tasks, some kind of stem cell therapy might be required.
I just picked two dates. Even if there are some changes, they are not as massive as what has been experienced in the past century. Compare Joe Serf's life to his great-great-grandfather's. It was substantially similar. In today's world each generation and even fraction of a generation is experiencing huge and rapid technological and social changes. The children being born in 2020 are going to live a roller coaster of a life.
Everyone is going to want faster than light travel if it is physically possible, even if people have long or indefinite lifespans. It would make exploration of the universe much more convenient. With anti-aging and without faster than light travel, interstellar travel would still be possible, and generation ships would be unnecessary. Anti-aging adds realism to interstellar travel since you can do away with the cruelty of the generation ship concept and just send people who want to go. If there is no need to travel at a significant fraction of light speed, that avoids kinetic damage from hydrogen atoms. Bonus points if you can put the traveler into a cryosleep or use VR to entertain them.
A "Singularity" event seems likely at this point, broadly defined as "strong AI" meeting or exceeding human intelligence. In the rush to doomsay the death of Moore's law, many advancements are being overlooked. Single-threaded and multi-threaded classical computing will become faster by orders of magnitude. The performance increase will be shocking given that many people have assumed we are near the end of the road. Separately, 3D neuromorphic architectures will be used to mimic the human brain. Room-sized hardware may not be required for "strong AI", and it may become possible to fit a human-level "strong AI" in a volume smaller than the actual human brain (about 1.0-1.5 liters). The "Singularity" hocus pocus after that is just the upheaval caused by having this technology available and using it to rapidly improve itself.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @01:10PM (1 child)
> carriages, ... electricity ...
Talk to the Amish, they seem to do OK without many recent developments.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:17PM
The traditional Amish require a low population density to be successful. Even then they depend on slow communications.
From what I was told, many of the modern Amish depend on jobs building refrigerators and freezers to remain solvent.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 12 2020, @06:48AM
I think it would. Sure, you'll have a bunch of short termers who keep having the same problems over and over for centuries instead of decades. But I think most people would grow out of that stage after a while. And actually seeing the change over centuries would make longer term change more real than the cloud building exercise it is now.