I’ve been thinking for some time that epigenetics may be the key towards rejuvenation. As you age, your DNA doesn’t really change much, or at least not that significantly (well, modulo getting cancer), but the epigenome does change. Some of that is part of maturation (I’m sure there’s some involved in the changes for puberty, for example), but a lot is caused by stress and various environmental factors. And it seems the genes for a group of proteins called splicing factors are progressively turned off as we age.
OK, this by itself will not be a rejuvenation. Perhaps there are other epigenes that need to be undone and likely other aging changes as well. But it’s a good first step.
It’s not like people are going to live forever, even if this leads to a rejuvenation treatment. For many, it may only produce a fairly limited increase in lifespan. There will still be lots of things that people will die from, including lots of medical things. Very unlikely to help cure cancer, for example. For heart disease, it may help with recovery from a heart attack (depends on whether this works on heart muscles), but even then, for most it will do nothing for the underying cause. Not likely to help with Alzheimers and other neurodegenerative diseases, either.
ETA: It may even lead to an increase in cancer, now that I think about it. The mechanism this changes may help prevent it.
dtilque : I think this can be done, but I think we need a massively improved scientific infrastructure to actually do it in a reliable way.
The current model is that a bunch of scientists come up with hypotheses, secure funding, and do their basic bioscience research inside separate individual labs mostly by hand using grad student labor on living cell cultures usually.
And then they publish whatever they found in a paper, making sure to use nice big words in highbrow language and lots of jargon, and it goes into a mouldering heap of tens of thousands of papers published every year.
But only if the p value is over 0.95. Less than that, and we learned nothing, clean the lab, time to start over.
This is terrible, unreliable, and causes the yo-yoing kind of theories you hear about. “Eggs found to have enough cholesterol to kill a rhinoceros! Never mind, they are safe to eat!”
In order to actually do what you are describing, you need AI. Lots and lots of AI. Not necessarily a machine you can talk philosophy with, but a machine that can read every scientific paper ever written and control robotic systems to create new research on an industrial scale. All those individual scientists need to be working at more centralized laboratories, and all the experiments need to be performed using machine waldos that are more consistent and fully reproducible since each action they take is saved to a database. We then need to build up a reliable model of biology so that we can then actually make these kind of epigenetic or genetic changes to patients to fix what is wrong with them.
With inhuman, self improving technology making your theories and interventions ever better and more accurate, actually I am pretty sure you could keep people alive forever. You would have thousands of deaths in the early days of patient interventions probably, but as the model and machine infrastructure gets better and learns to avoid the conditions that lead to death, this would slow to a trickle. And eventually, zero. And the dead patients could be frozen so you can give it another shot later. And eventually your model would be good enough and your interventions good enough that you could tear down and rebuild humans, replacing and upgrading all their organs to prevent future failure.
“Epigenetics” is the latest buzzword used by woo-flingers, much like “quantum.”
As for “as you age, your DNA doesn’t really change much”, every single time a cell divides, there are copying errors. Those errors accumulate over time. Cancer is one of the effects of that damage. Also, you might want to read up on the Hayflick limit.
Pretty much this. Epigenetics is a somewhat interesting phenomenon, but like so many new discoveries before it, people are tacking all sorts of magical effects onto it that far outstrip the actual science. It’s simply a method of gene regulation that is noteworthy only because it can be inherited.
It’s possible that this sort of thing might turn out to be a valid therapy way down the line, but it’s still far, FAR too early to start planning your three hundredth birthday celebration. Well, I mean, at least two hundred years too early, yes, but you get the point.
Yes, it’s based on the length of telomeres. When telomeres get too short, cells no longer undergo mitosis. Did you even read the article I linked to? Where it says the lengths of the telomeres of the cells were increased?
I read the actual paper, although admittedly it was a tough slog due to too many technical terms I didn’t understand. But an important result was the increased expression of splicing factors, which are chemicals involved in modifying RNA after transcription (removing introns). Some of the splicing factors have the non-canonical function of activating telomerase, an enzyme that increases telomere length. The exact mechanism of how these resverastol analogues work isn’t clear (more research needed, of course), so it was a bit of a guess on my part that they modified the epigenetics of the genes (perhaps removing methyl groups on DNA that block the gene from being transcribed) so as to increase expression.
Again, I will play my role of splashing water on the party. Telomeres are another subject that, in my opinion, is way too heavily overemphasized in the public press. They’re not the be all and end all of aging that they’re often presented as. There is one type of cell that often has unusually high levels of telomerase expression. We call it “cancer”.
That’s probably exactly what someone in Rome thought in the 1st century…and almost certainly what some great thinkers in the 17th-18th century thought as well. It’s funny how this sort of thing just keeps coming back up.
As to the OP, I don’t know enough about epigenetics to give an informed opinion. One thing I was very impressed with is a recent test with stroke victims using stem cells modified with CRISPR-Cas9. The results seemed almost miraculous, with something like 12 of the 18 patients having full or partial recoveries. That means that the formerly dead brain cells were able to be regenerated and brought back to functionality. Another thing I’ve seen is the ability to print body parts. The tech is not there yet, but ISTM that even if we don’t crack the ability to turn off aging, a brute force approach is a potential possibility, though obviously, that would only be something someone very rich is going to be able to take advantage of for the foreseeable future.
So you’re basically saying that because I use a term that’s overused in the press or used by woo-istas, that I’m automatically wrong?
And there’s a type of cell that normally has the telomerase gene activated: stem cells[sup]1[/sup]. Those are found in virtually every type of tissue in the human body. They repair damage and replenish cells. However, as you age, they become less effective, quite possibly due to the effects these resverastol analogues seem to be reversing.
[sup]1[/sup] Spare me the claim that the term “stem cell” is overused in the press and by woo-istas. I’ll take it as given.
Today people grow older and remain near useless to society for extended periods. If medicine improves, people will grow older and keep living productive lives for longer, thus not being a burden but a significant source of wisdom.
The number of people in the planet doesn’t have to constantly increase. If people live longer, that doesn’t mean they have all got to reproduce. The reproductive rate is about to take a nose dive as the world matures and that has already started at some very developed countries like Germany and Japan.
Longevity does not occur in a vacuum. It is one of the evolving components of our species presence on the planet. Man has become a self-governing species, and collectively, humans forge their own future, rightly or wrongly. The species will live or die, flourish or stumble, according to the choices it makes for itself and any corrective adjustments.
Just to follow up with this, just because people don’t age as quickly (or at all) doesn’t mean people still won’t die. Even if we solve the host of related issues with radical life extension (such as disease, cancer and the like), people are still going to die in accidents and by other means. I think people have this idea that if there is radical life extension the world is going to suddenly fill up to bursting with humans, but the reality is that it probably won’t happen. As you and others have said, living longer probably is going to mean people have fewer kids. That’s the actual trend in much of Europe, Japan and a lot of other modern industrial countries. The US is only in the positive wrt population because of immigration and the impact of immigrants wrt number of children.
