Partial cell reprogramming to cure aging

[Mihle]

I would want to live forver, as long as I arent like a 90 years old for most of it.

[HughMungusCynicalAnarch]

I will be sure to be rich enough when this is perfected in the coming decades.

Only money matters in the days leading to the cure for aging.

[overload1]

9 hours ago, HughMungusCynicalAnarch said:

I will be sure to be rich enough when this is perfected in the coming decades.

Only money matters in the days leading to the cure for aging.

Or mad hacking skills to bypass the systems in place and do it hobo hacker style

[silencerbob]

Interesting journal article for sure.  These researchers find specific epigenetic factors that are responsible for cell aging.  Do we all remember Dolly the sheep?  Well Dolly lived for 6 years.  Dolly's identical "donor parent" was 6 years old when Dolly was born.  Sheep usually live to 12.  Coincidence?  No.. Dolly's DNA was already 6 when she was born, so naturally occurring DNA degradation would occur in parallel with its "donor parent".  The next step to fight aging would be extend telomeres, the end segments of our chromosomes used by our cells to protect against aging and cancer.  The ethics boards supporting research like this is very limiting, especially in live humans.  China seems to be the most aggressively researching countries in terms of genetic engineering today.

[Energycore]

I can't be the only one who thinks immortality is a really bad idea

[MoonSpot]

7 hours ago, silencerbob said:

...extend telomeres...

Not really, in old age they're already quite short.  Extending would yield little benefit and increase the risk of having the "end caps" fail and things unravel.  The real trick would be to get them to duplicate in their entirety, or not get shortened as much during cell division by altering the processes involved themselves.  But I'm no bio expert, been ages since I studied it and telemeres were well know to be a problem of sorts then.

[silencerbob]

11 hours ago, MoonSpot said:

Not really, in old age they're already quite short.  Extending would yield little benefit and increase the risk of having the "end caps" fail and things unravel.  The real trick would be to get them to duplicate in their entirety, or not get shortened as much during cell division by altering the processes involved themselves.  But I'm no bio expert, been ages since I studied it and telemeres were well know to be a problem of sorts then.

There's a new gene therapy technique called CRISPR, which uses a modified mechanism a virus uses to add itself to your genome within a living cell.  If someone has their genome sequenced when they are born then we have a complete "undegraded" code seuqnce to refer to when using CRISPR to add/delete/ modify the nucleotides of your telomeres.

 

Studies have been done on worms and mice which have had their lifespans increased using this technique : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23956466

 

Synthetic DNA is a thing too.. small chromosomes are more easily synthesized than larger human ones.. not sure if an entire human chromosome has been synthesized yet since splicing lengths together is tricky to make stable, but will eventually be doable.

[overload1]

21 hours ago, silencerbob said:

stuff

 

So since you seem to know things about this kind of stuff.. think they're on to something or not worth to put in too much hope into this just yet?

[Kamina]

Last thing we need is crazy elites not dying anytime soon.

[silencerbob]

6 hours ago, overload1 said:

 

So since you seem to know things about this kind of stuff.. think they're on to something or not worth to put in too much hope into this just yet?

An easier and simpler way of extending your lifespan is to pass it on to the next generation the old fashioned way

[bigneo]

On 12/25/2016 at 2:06 AM, malon said:

why would you want to ''cure aging'' in the first place, we are already living way longer than even 100 years ago(life extension and improved medicine) and making humans live even longer is only going to create more problems, both populationwise but more important resource and food wise, the earth isn't an ball of earth and water that can keep producing food abd fresh water for more living creatures that can survive for hundrets of years who might be able to ''breed'' for several generations each for ever, and as long that we have no other earthlike empty planet (that we as the human species that we are for sure going to conquere if we find one since we will never learn from history) where we can safely can dump a large part of the population who can live for hundrets of years there also isn't much use in way longer lives exept why not.

 

Longest sentence ever. It broke my brain while reading it. Still not sure what you said. Not reading it again!

[malon]

8 hours ago, bigneo said:

Longest sentence ever. It broke my brain while reading it. Still not sure what you said. Not reading it again!

Now i read it again myself it indeed isn't a good structured sentence, i think i might have had a few drink when i wrote that seeing the date.

I was trying to say that living way longer would not be beneficial for humankind in the long run.

[overload1]

On 1/4/2017 at 7:05 AM, silencerbob said:

An easier and simpler way of extending your lifespan is to pass it on to the next generation the old fashioned way

But you dont expand your lifespan that way, you only pass on the building materials for another human but you seize existing still and the building blocks used in your kid hardly does any good to solve that problem imo

[corrado33]

On 12/26/2016 at 0:47 PM, SurvivorNVL said:

Telomeric manipulation in mice yielded something like a quadrupled life-span, but two things occurred in the subjects:  Half died of extremely aggressive cancer.  Half died after they reached the quadrupled end, their bodies began to age normally and a biological kill switch happened - causing organ shut down. 

This is what would probably happen. Turning off the telomere shortening proteins would indeed lengthen cell life, but in the end, if you live long enough, you die from cancer. This does nothing to combat cancer, and in fact could make it quite worse. 

 

So yes, in reality we'd probably see a few years of extended life, but everyone would die from cancer eventually.

[corrado33]

Here is a badly sourced chart for a woman's chance of getting breast cancer throughout her life.

 

As you can see, the risk is increasing significantly when the woman reaches 80 years old. Here is an extended list I made in excel using the same data.

 

 

As you can see, by the time a woman would reach 140, she has a 50% chance of having breast cancer.

 

This isn't even taking into account ANY of the other NUMEROUS cancers a person can have, this is a single one. When you begin to take into account the most common cancers, living beyond 110 - 120 does not seem likely. 

 

Not to mention that telomeres are one of our body's defenses against cancer (at least the type that grow tumors.) If a cell divides widely enough, it'll die because its telomeres run out and the proteins (telomerase I think?) start cutting into the good information, and the cell will never survive mitosis. 

 

EDIT: Not telomerase, that does the opposite, it adds to the telomeres. I'm not a biologist... 

[goodtofufriday]

On 12/29/2016 at 11:04 AM, overload1 said:

Or mad hacking skills to bypass the systems in place and do it hobo hacker style

Someone watches Incorporated.