Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

cell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 57 posts

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#31

Post by DennisP »

peteradio wrote: post #7
contravariant wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but "ageing is a result of increasing entropy" is pretty much the same as saying that ageing is caused by the passage of time. The interesting part here is that they narrow down which loss of information is important.

Inevitable entropy increasing is a red-herring in the presence of free-energy, no? What you point out though is very interesting, what would it take to inject energy into conserving this information? And what would its effects actually be? Could you pause aging, reverse it? Now this gets hairy, what happens to society? I dare say not everyone can live forever. What are the consequences of having a select few continui…

Since urbanized populations have fewer kids, the world is facing a huge demographic crash that will probably last through the rest of the century. So there's plenty of room to apply this technology broadly.

Also plenty of incentive: stock markets won't do well with shrinking populations, and governments will save a lot of money if they don't have to spend as much on treating the expensive diseases of the aged.

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#32

Post by fallingfrog »

nodemaker wrote: post #6

I think its a cool theory and seems the most reasonable from all the other theories of aging. However I am a bit disappointed when I only see David's name on every paper published on this topic. Why dont other institutions start similar studies to verify this claim?

This is exactly the technology Altos labs is working on, and they have 4 nobel laureates on their staff. There are other companies too. There's going to be an explosion of progress in the next few years.

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#33

Post by molotovh »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #25
oneoff786 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming soon, on-demand aging.

YC 2043: Aging as a service. AaaS.

I mean ... they literally talk about the potential ability to force the aging process backward or forward in the abstract, so... haha.

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#34

Post by rafaelero »

carbocation wrote: post #13
nodemaker wrote: post #6

I think its a cool theory and seems the most reasonable from all the other theories of aging. However I am a bit disappointed when I only see David's name on every paper published on this topic. Why dont other institutions start similar studies to verify this claim?

Some say that there are issues with this and related works. https://twitter.com/charlesmbrenner/status/16135817576344576...

I always see this guy antagonizing everyone (David Sinclair, Aubrey de Grey, etc.). Is he the Gary Marcus of longevity?

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#36

Post by DennisP »

carbocation wrote: post #13
nodemaker wrote: post #6

I think its a cool theory and seems the most reasonable from all the other theories of aging. However I am a bit disappointed when I only see David's name on every paper published on this topic. Why dont other institutions start similar studies to verify this claim?

Some say that there are issues with this and related works. https://twitter.com/charlesmbrenner/status/16135817576344576...

So he's saying they didn't fix aging, they just fixed some simpler damage they did themselves. But in a previous experiment, the same treatment improved aging damage to the vision of actually old mice:

> Sinclair and colleagues injected the reprogramming-factor genes into the eyes of 1-year-old healthy mice, roughly the mouse equivalent of middle-age. By this stage, the animals had visual acuity scores about 15% lower than their 5-month-old counterparts. Four weeks after treatment, older mice had similar acuity scores to younger ones.

https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-restore-...

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#37

Post by contravariant »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #28
contravariant wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what you need is more like an easily accessible source of low entropy. You can substitute a big concentration of energy (the concentration part is important) to some extent. However the energy usage of a computer (the simplest example of a device that lowers entropy in a flexible way) is many orders of magnitude higher than the theoretical limit. So I'm not entirely sure how many bits of entropy it takes to reve…

Aging is reversed each time a zygote is made. No need for terajoules of energy.

Fair point, children seem to get rid of the entropy by causing absolute chaos instead.

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#39

Post by nanna »

adrianN wrote: post #27
contravariant wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but "ageing is a result of increasing entropy" is pretty much the same as saying that ageing is caused by the passage of time. The interesting part here is that they narrow down which loss of information is important.

Since humans eat food, they are not subject to entropy necessarily increasing over time (as long as food is available).

That implies Schrödinger's thermodynamic theory of negative entropy, which involves the holding off of death by means of a metabolic burning of food.

At stake in this paper is the cybernetic theory of negative entropy, whereby it is information that is negative entropy (Wieners rather than Shannons definition). Information that sustains life, it's lack which means death.

Re: Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

#40

Post by edgyquant »

jcims wrote: post #24

It seems like it should be possible to build a drop-in replacement system for DNA that adds a more robust error detection/correction capability. Each gene gets a checksum at the end and the transcription/translation processes are amended to validate these prior to progressing to building proteins. Obviously it would be more complex than just that but it would be interesting to see how it affects biology. Evolution wo…

Who says you want more robust DNA transfer? I can imagine there was a time before the LUCA where life was a competition between these gene transfer mechanisms. DNA exists for a reason imo, gene mutation is a feature not a bug
Post reply on HN