If I want to activate more of my telomerases, I'll take up smoking.
Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, telomeres are largely an anti-cancer defence mechanism, like a surprisingly large number of other things that your cells do all day. When a person 'gets cancer', this just means that one of the many, many potential cancers they've had, slipped through all the defences and got out of hand. At a cellular level, the opposite of ageing isn't longevity, it's cancer.
However, our ability to fight cancer is also getting better and better, and likely will not be a serious issue in the long term. I, for one, would be happy to trade longer life for a higher risk of cancer. As a reasonably healthy person today, I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by oth…
> I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means.
What makes you so sure it will be 'easily treatable' by then ?
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#23What about cancer? Does this increase the risk? It does seem like it would.
They say it didn't in their test subjects over one year, but to me as a layman this is very weak evidence still: cancer takes time to develop (and framing their result as "260 person-years" as they do is a case of the mythical man-month), and I don't trust drug developers to design and report their trials in an unbiased way.
I'd expect increased risk, too.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, our ability to fight cancer is also getting better and better, and likely will not be a serious issue in the long term. I, for one, would be happy to trade longer life for a higher risk of cancer. As a reasonably healthy person today, I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by oth…
> I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means. What makes you so sure it will be 'easily treatable' by then ?
It's just kind of hard to believe that there is some kind of "magic" about cancer that will make it impervious to treatment using mid-21st century medical technology. Just in the past 5 years there have been some pretty amazing breakthroughs related to targeting cancer cells with new drug delivery mechanisms, etc. Even with 20th century tech cancer survival rates have continued to rise. See, for example, pg 29 of this report: http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2004/results_merged/sect_01_...
Am I reading you wrong in understanding that you think that cancer will not be treatable in the mid 21st century, to at least a far greater extent than it is today? That seems the much harder case to make...
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are free to produce the substance. If you produce it, it is your property. You own it. You may choose to keep it, or you may choose to trade it for someone else's property. You may ask a billion dollars per gram if you like. No one may force you to trade your property for anything specific, or even to trade it at all, or even to continue producing it. I am free to produce the substance. If I produce it, it is my…
This ignores patents, which is the prevention of the creation of something useful by force which is wrong. (Note: Some people disagree with my stance, they are wrong.) IMO, there is no absolute morality, there are system of morality that are self consistent, but you cant transplant individual ideas between them to get an absolute truth.
That was a good parody. You got my position on patents exactly right. You also accurately mocked my tendency to state my views point blank without including disclaimers that they are my views. So excuse me: morally wrong in my book.
You say there is no absolute morality. I don't know. The more interesting question is whether you disagree specifically with the moral principles I invoked, and how and why. I can't tell from your post.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, telomeres are largely an anti-cancer defence mechanism, like a surprisingly large number of other things that your cells do all day. When a person 'gets cancer', this just means that one of the many, many potential cancers they've had, slipped through all the defences and got out of hand. At a cellular level, the opposite of ageing isn't longevity, it's cancer.
However, our ability to fight cancer is also getting better and better, and likely will not be a serious issue in the long term. I, for one, would be happy to trade longer life for a higher risk of cancer. As a reasonably healthy person today, I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by oth…
You've never had cancer, have you?
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#27[deleted]
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#28Layperson's explanation - this is a pretty important step to stopping aging in human beings. Telomerase lengthens telomeres, which are end-caps on DNA strands that are slowly whittled away as cells divide; without functioning telomerase human cells can only divide a finite amount of times before dying.
[deleted]
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#29there's also a pretty significant protein aggregation component to aging. Adding telomeres back on assumes that the problem is just one of genetic decay and we're finding increasingly that that's simply not the whole story.
Re: Scientists successfully activate human telomerase
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm pretty sure that by the time cancer as a result of longer life became an issue (say, around the year 2040-50 in my case), the cancer itself would be easily treatable by other means. What makes you so sure it will be 'easily treatable' by then ?
It's just kind of hard to believe that there is some kind of "magic" about cancer that will make it impervious to treatment using mid-21st century medical technology. Just in the past 5 years there have been some pretty amazing breakthroughs related to targeting cancer cells with new drug delivery mechanisms, etc. Even with 20th century tech cancer survival rates have continued to rise. See, for example, pg 29 of thi…
Cancer is not much better treatable today than it was in the 70's of the previous century, when the 'war on cancer' was launched, it's a 5% change in the 'death' rate over 40 years.
Newsflash, we've lost that war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer
We are hoping but we do not know for sure that new directions and avenues researched for treatments will give us new tools to help in finding a real cure.
But for the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future there is no indication that we will actually find this cure. At the moment - as crude as it may sound - if you could choose between being HIV positive or having a malignant tumor I'd pick HIV, we have a much better handle on arresting HIV than we have on stopping a cancer once started, other than by surgery, radiation and chemo therapy and a lot of good will.
Once a cancer has metastasized you are living on borrowed time.
Just like cancer isn't treatable by a much greater extent than it was 40 years ago I would not bet on seeing that change in the next 40 years.
That does not mean we should stop researching or that we will 'just have to live with it' but I think it is a bit early to start putting dates on when a solution will be found.
One of the bigger problems is that the differences between healthy cells and cancerous cells are minute, in some way you could say that the cancerous cells are the stronger ones. This makes going after cancer cells and not killing the cells around them (or even the whole organism) very difficult.