Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lobsters too. But they urinate from their eyes so it's a trade off.
otoh they have a shell so...
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Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#52Must be why Mr. Bezos is bald.
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#53I would really like to see the end of aging and by that I mean the end of age related disease, dying from ALS or Alzheimer's disease (which both are by and large age related diseases) is not nice. My mom has ALS and it is tough.
I don't see much other hope in curing these diseases tbh, it feels like the research is going nowhere so I am somewhat excited about longevity research and glad that someone is pursuing it. If I didn't become a software developer, I would like to work in that field
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#54I would really like to see the end of aging and by that I mean the end of age related disease, dying from ALS or Alzheimer's disease (which both are by and large age related diseases) is not nice. My mom has ALS and it is tough. I don't see much other hope in curing these diseases tbh, it feels like the research is going nowhere so I am somewhat excited about longevity research and glad that someone is pursuing it. I…
Alzheimer's just had two drugs approved by the FDA for treating the disease. They're certainly not a cure, they only slow the onset of symptoms by removing plaques from the brain. The underlying factors that cause the buildup of plaques still aren't well understood.
That said, I would still put much more hope in the research into well-defined, specific diseases such as Alzheimer's than I would into aging or longevity research.
There are several reasons for this. First, the absolute bedrock foundation of all of medicine is human trials. There is no substitute for actually trying drugs in humans and seeing what happens. These human trials are possible (albeit extremely expensive and difficult) to run for drugs targeting specific diseases. They are functionally impossible to run for "aging". What would the trial test? Just all-cause mortality? That would be an impossibly noisy target, and almost guaranteed to fail. Not to mention that the trial would have to last an incredibly long time to test any benefit for younger people. No funding agency and certainly no drug company is going to take that bet.
The second reason is that aging is a property of the entire organism. Like, every gene and every cell is affected by aging. It's simply impossible that any one gene or one drug is going to have a significant effect on aging. Drug development is currently entirely oriented towards targeting individual genes and proteins. The reason for this is that targeting even one protein with a drug stretches the limit of our technological abilities. Two drug combinations are relatively rare and are typically limited to diseases like cancer that have well characterized causes at the molecular level. This is not the case for aging. Again, aging isn't well enough defined to even pick a specific gene that "causes" it.
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#55Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would there be? In the end we're just biological machines, albeit very complex ones. We're made of physical matter arranged in a specific way, physical matter can be manipulated. This means that if a biological machine is damaged or wears out, there is nothing that fundamentally prevent us from repairing it. The only thing that is needed is a proper understanding of how things are supposed to work, i.e. the desir…
Sure, nothing fundamentally prevents us from repairing it from a physical standpoint. The practicality of it is the key question. While the machine analogy is partially useful, genes/proteins/cells are dynamic, adaptive, and can exhibit stochastic traits. This fundamentally contrasts them from traditional machines, and is the reason (imo) we suck at making effective therapies to even treat diseases where we think we…
But practicality is just a technological problem. And not to make a fine point of it, the chips of the machine where you are writing or reading this receive far more “technological attention” than any human being. That fact in itself is not a technological problem, but a social one. In my opinion, at our point of technological development, aging is about 80% a technological problem and 20% a social problem. The speed of research and development in technologies to combat aging, i.e., the derivatives of the numbers above, are probably in an opposite proportion: 95% of the slowness in research can be attributed to social problems, 5% to technological.
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#57[dead]
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#58By 4% which may as well be experimental error, right? The mice could have very well just lived longer due to increased interest/handling/measurement of their welfare. This seems insignificant when compared with other selector genes such as H63D and C282Y, which could potentially double or halve subjects life span depending on environmental factors.
Doubling lifespan is definitely a bigger impact than 4%, but let's explore what the hypothetical "perfect application" of this study to a human life.
A fairly average lifespan is 80 years, so a 4% increase would be about 3.2 years. If I were offered a "wonder drug" that would give me 1,168 more days with a loved one, I would take it.
Obviously that is not how science like this works, but stacking small victories over time is a way to achieve "significant" impact.
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#59I would really like to see the end of aging and by that I mean the end of age related disease, dying from ALS or Alzheimer's disease (which both are by and large age related diseases) is not nice. My mom has ALS and it is tough. I don't see much other hope in curing these diseases tbh, it feels like the research is going nowhere so I am somewhat excited about longevity research and glad that someone is pursuing it. I…
I dont think you will whilst inflammation is seen as something bad. If you look at what causes inflammation, like zinc, inflammation not only destroys the pathogen, but also destroys surrounding host "healthy" tissue.
Now if elevated levels of zinc cause this inflammation, the new tissue that replaces the destroyed host healthy tissue will have elevated levels of zinc in the cells compared to the previously destroyed "healthy" tissue.
Ergo, is this the body's way of using minerals to increase the anti bacterial nature of the cells in that part of the body, and why all inflammation should not be seen as a default bad thing?
Re: Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
otoh they have a shell so...
rejct monke, return to crab
In other words, immortal or not, it’s cancer[1] either way.
(Also relevant: Carcinogenesis[2])