Does it seem like we can actually slow or reverse aging? How far away are we from a breakthrough?
I’m going to say “yes”, but not to the point where we achieve immortality, or anything close, more like we’ll maintain our health and well being into our 100s…
Me personally I’ve noticed that once upon a time (say when I was a teenager) someone in their 40s was completely passed it, but now I’m in my 40s I’m noticing I’m not ready for the scrap heap by a long shot.
Better nutrition, better health care - particularly testing for conditions*, taking better care of yourself all help.
*I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes a few years ago via a blood test, I wasn’t showing any symptoms of the condition whatsoever, had it not been discovered and I subsequently went on meds, who knows what might have happened?
It’s pretty clear that even the average person can delay some of the effects of aging by proper diet, exercise, and avoidance of excessive drink/drugs/other destructive habits. It’s not dramatic, and you’ll still get grey hair and wrinkles and stuff, but you can keep your body working well, which I think is really at the heart of what most people want.
Reversing the effects of aging is a bit more invasive. There’s been hair dye for ages, and dentures for lost teeth, but it’s only recently we’ve had cosmetic surgery for wrinkles and sagging, routine cataract removal that didn’t leave you blind, and some pharmaceutical treatments for things like osteoporosis (with some icky side effects on occasions).
So yes, we already have slowing/reversal of aging, but it’s not flashy or dramatic and it’s not a cup from the fountain of youth you drink once and >poof!< you’re physically 20 again. Mostly, what we have is the potential for a more comfortable old age.
Living well is the no-brainer way to slow aging. Stay out of the sun, stay active, don’t smoke, don’t drink or drug to excess, eat well.
Years and years ago I read an article in a magazine, can’t recall which one. Researchers followed identical twins separated at birth or when very young. In several cases, the separated twins lived very different lives and the photos were pretty convincing. The smoking twin v the non-smoker, the twin raised in a cool non-sunny climate v the twin who spent a lot of time out in the sun without sunscreen, and so on.
I believe it’s possible to reverse some non-cosmetic effects of aging non-medically. Older people can rebuild muscle mass and increase flexibility with the right excercise, and build new neural pathways (correct term ?) by learning a new language or skill.
I’m going to say no. That is, I think the OP in effect asks whether there is an “aging process” that is an integral thing that can be redirected, perhaps like consciousness or pregnancy. But I gather that what we call the aging process is really all the many genetic diseases that practically all of us share, and that it might as well be an endless list. Reversing the aging process is like fixing a city.
Particular aspects of it may be more or less amenable to change, just like you can fix all the potholes in a city. This isn’t a firm “no”. But it’s “no” to what I think is the spirit behind the wish.
There have already been some breakthroughs in aging research. One of the biggest is with telomeres. These are like the little caps at the end of your shoelaces that keep them from splitting and unraveling introducing small new errors each time they get copied. DNA slowly gets damaged as we get older and this causes many of the effects of aging. There appears to be a way to work around this. An enzyme called telomerase may be able to prevent or even reverse DNA copying errors. Lab work is already well underway but there are no true commercial products based on the science but some people really want them enough spend big bucks on self-experiments. You can google ‘temomere’ or ‘telomerase’ and ‘aging’ and see a number a recent articles on this for more info.
Aging isn’t just a product of time. It is built into cells to happen at a certain rate. It probably is possible to alter that rate and possible get passed the hard limit of human lifespan of about 120 years. I saw an interesting prediction a few days ago. It said that the first people that will ever reach their 150th birthdays are probably already born.
Of course, one assumes that the people who live the longest will be the people who least deserve it. Can you imagine another 70 years of Rupert Murdoch? Gads, the mind reels.
Unless this increased life span is designed to be a punishment. You want to live until you’re 120? I don’t. I certainly don’t want to work until I’m 95 or older, but will most likely have to work at some sort of job well past what people think of as retirement age.
The real concern should be increasing quality of life, not quantity.
But quality of life HAS increased even more than the quantity. I am 34. In my lifetime, a broken hip on an elderly person was a death sentence: you’d never get much mobility back, if any, you’d have to spend the rest of your life in a nursing home, and once you are on your back all day every day, it’s just a matter of time. People were commonly effective shut-ins by 60 simply from arthritis. Seventy year old people were often elderly: frail, paranoid of that single life-ending fall, in chronic pain. Lots of people in their 40s and 50s were half-crippled because of bad knees, bad backs, bad shoulders.
Now, joint surgeries alone–from simple laproscopic cartilage clean-outs all the way to total joint replacements–have changed all that. Half the people I know over 60 have had some sort of joint surgery at some point, and in each case it’s contributed tremendously to their long-term quality of life. And pain relief! Better NSAIDs, like naproxen have tremendously improved quality of life over the last 30 years.
Life expectancy hasn’t actually improved all that much in my lifetime, but a “normal” quality of life has easily been pushed out ten years, maybe more.
Increasing human lifespan substantially would be an environmental and economic disaster of unprecedented proportions.
Telomeres are important and nifty and all that, but they’re only one factor that influences aging. Even if you could come up with some way to magically preserve telomere length in a human, cells would still age and die due to all sorts of accumulated damage. DNA and proteins are inevitably damaged over time, which leads to all sorts of cellular degeneration. Mitochondria degrade, so the cell doesn’t get enough energy. Cellular recycling processes gradually fail, “backing up” the cell with all sorts of garbage. Misfolded and damaged proteins eventually accumulate into toxic aggregates. With damaged DNA, the cell cannot produce new proteins and organelles to replace the old degraded stuff.
Of course the damage responses that slow down aging are controlled by genetics – which is why there are microscopic animals that only live for a few weeks, and some larger long-lived creatures like humans. The difference is ultimately genetic. In the lab we can manipulate some of the genetic controls that determine life span. There are “master regulators” that control many of the responses that slow aging. Turn them up, and lab animals live longer. But there are always trade-offs: one long-lived mutant might be very susceptible to a particular stress. There’s also a reproductive cost, long-lived animals are now spending more of their resources on cellular maintenance rather than making offspring.
Humans also have the misfortune of living long enough to face inevitable neurodegeneration. Telomeres are most important for protecting the DNA of actively dividing cells, and (for the most part) the cells in your brains stopped dividing early in development, and when they die they cannot be replaced. Longer telomeres don’t help neurons very much, since they’re no longer dividing. So a magical telomere-protecting treatment would help preserve the body of a human, and at the end of life dementia patients would be in great physical shape.
Also, we study unusually short-lived creatures in the lab, since that makes experiments easier. But that means we’re almost exclusively studying creatures who have made the evolutionary tradoff between fast reproduction and longevity. To grow so fast and reproduce so quickly, they have “turned off” many of the longevity-promoting pathways. Thus, the results of doubling the life span of a worm or fly are not directly applicable to humans. There are easily thousands of papers with results like that. Perhaps some will eventually lead to treatments of the diseases of aging, but I doubt we’ll ever see big increases in human life span. At best I think we’ll see some new treatments that hold off diabetes and cardiovascular disease and cancer a bit, so people would be healthier in their 60s and 70s. But eventually the ravages of time (and neurodegeneration!) and while we might increase “health span” we probably won’t increase “life span”.
I do aging research on the nematode C. elegans, and there’s a bit of a dirty secret. There are really two developmental cycles, one with a longer life span, and one with a shorter life span which is what most researchers focus on. If a nematode has plenty of food available, it grows directly into an “adult” egg factory with a two week life span. If it does not have resources, however, it switches into an extremely long-lived developmental cycle (called “dauer”) where it lives for many months until it finds food and switches back to the reproductive life cycle. So it’s not much of a surprise to find genetic mechanisms that switch on the “dauer” pathways and extend the “adult” life span a bit. Those mechanisms probably have very little relevance to human longevity, though they do teach us a lot about basic biology. For instance, the insulin pathway is one of the master regulators of nematode life span.
Just a general point, it’s never a meaningful question to ask “how close are we to a breakthrough”, since the definition of a breakthrough is an advance that couldn’t have been anticipated. Most work in the sciences and technology is incremental, and for those, you can at least estimate how far we are from some milestone or another by extrapolating the current rate of progress. But for something for which that incremental progress isn’t occurring, like fighting aging, that won’t work, and we need an unpredictable breakthrough (which could happen at any time at all).
I actually think that eventually our society will have some form of biological immortality. I think people are often very uninformed about where we are in regards to biology, a lot of people think we’ve discovered everything we could possibly do in that field and all that is left is fine tuning things and figuring out ways to create new disease treatments and things of that nature.
There is now work being done to create a partially synthetic bacterium, it’s entirely possible that 5,000 years from now our society will no longer be made up of homo sapiens but instead will be our synthetic successors who are impervious to regular aging.
Man, you scientists are stupid. All you have to do is start planning your breakthroughs. There’s software for that. Just use Microsoft Project or your favorite non-satanic product. You’ll have your breakthroughs staked out in large letters and pretty colors. And you’ll have all the pre-conditions necessary for the breakthrough lined up point by point, in chronological order, and you’ll see who has to invent what first to get there.
Businesses do this all the time. That’s why we’ve seen such major breakthroughs in breakfast cereal variations. I mean, Special K, with chocolate? Who saw that coming? :eek:
Popular Science had an article just this month on it. I only skimmed it, so I will not try to speak knowledgeably, but you may try and research telomerase.
Is it that back in the day people were in worse condition by 40? Or that you just thought 40 felt old but now that you are 40, it doesn’t seem so old? Because I’m sure a lot of 40 year olds back when you were a teen weren’t thinking of themselves as old. I don’t think anyone ever really does–your parameters for what “old” means just change…
whut?
When I was a kid my mother was in her 40s and she was an old woman, as were all her friends, they wore “sensible” shoes, had their hair permed, and wore “old lady” clothes, had lace doilies all over the place, their houses were like mausoleums, and they grumbled about “kids today” and keeping your feet off the furniture
I am in my 40s now and I don’t dress like an old lady, I don’t have a perm, I don’t and wouldn’t want a lace doily, all right I grumble about kids, but I don’t care about people putting their feet on the furniture.
No, it’s really not the same. See my earlier post: we are much, much better at managing what used to be very common chronically painful conditions. And chronic pain ages a person more than anything.
Look at the clothes you’re wearing now. Those are the clothes that your children (or other members of that generation, if you don’t have kids yourself) consider “old lady clothes”. It’s not like everyone changes their clothing style at some age to the one style which is perpetually “old people clothes”; rather, each person wears the same clothes they always have, and at any given moment, the current generation regards what’s worn by previous generations as “old”.
The 40 year olds you knew when you were a teen didn’t think of themselves as ready for the scrap heap. Kids today may think you and other adults are really old. All that changes is perspective. When you get older, you realize that 40 (or 50, or 30) isn’t as old and decrepit as you thought it was.
Although it is true that telomeres do get progressively shorter with replication, the actual causal link with the aging effects on an organism are not well established. Telomeres may be one of the factors that contributes to aging but simply lengthening telomeres by manipulating telomerase to repair the ends of the genome may not inhibit aging, and in fact may create other issues, such as increased incidence of cancers.
Apoptosis, the programmed and normal termination of cells, happens due to dysfunction of mitochondria, the organelles that provide the cell energy via the respiration process. Mitochondria carries its own set of genes that are separate from the nuclear genome, which split and replicate during cell division. Though they do not propagate between organisms directly via sexual reproduction (it is transmitted down the female line, transmitted directly in the gamate) it may undergo homologous recombination via horizontal transfer between retroviruses. Programmed death may be (from a gene-centric point of view) a way for mitochondria to assure the continuation of their lineage versus competition with other genes. We’re still in our infancy in terms of understanding what the role of mitochondria is in cellular function and how it came to occupy this position, and our ability to control or treat mitochondrial diseases, or indeed, even isolate mitochondria as the causative element, is rudimentary at this point.
We are about the same place in biology today as physics was in about 1860; that is, we know a few general principles and are starting to tease out the underlying mechanics in a systematic manner, but we are still far, far away from modeling any real scale biological system in toto. The difference, of course, is that it is possible to categorize physics into just a few areas of essentially disconnected levels of phenomena, like astronomy, plasma physics, solid state behavior, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, et cetera, and divide and conquer at different levels to come up with some underlying fundamental mechanics by modeling, observation, and experiment.
By comparison, every species is a galaxy onto itself, and within it thousands or tens of thousands of proteins that perform different (often multiple) functions that are very poorly understood, and yet all working together to make the organism function both on its own and in the context of a larger environment upon which it is utterly dependent. It is nearly impossible to break biology into neat layers without losing some essential interactions, e.g. we cannot consider genes as separate from organisms, or species as distinct from the biosphere, and still understand how and why it functions. Every photon behaves in a way that can be precisely (in statistical terms) by quantum electrodynamics, but a protein or virus can perform a wide array of mechanics via its interactions with other proteins or enzymes which it has evolved to interact with.
We are probably decades away from truly being able to create useful synthetic genomes or simple viruses, and centuries from really understanding or controlling the human genome and intracellular function on a first principles basis. (Modifying existing genomes and viruses is kind of like “found art”; it may be interesting and perhaps even worthwhile, but it doesn’t indicate any particular creative genius in the finder.)
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde;14031612There is now work being done to create a partially synthetic bacterium, it’s entirely possible that 5,000 years from now our society will no longer be made up of homo sapiens but instead will be our synthetic successors who are impervious to regular aging.[/QUOTE]
Yes, but will we be food for the brutish Morlocks? I like laying around and eating lotus leaves, but not being dinner for some kind of troll-like creature.
Although to be fair, with the current obsession on youth, the older folk are trying to emulate their youngers in dress and manner rather than the other way around. This doesn’t make them look younger, of course; a fifty year old guy in a TapouT t-shirt and True Religion jeans hanging off his hips making his best suburban-yuppie version of gang signs and calling everyone “Dog” and “Bro” while downing tequila shooters looks like even more of a ditch-bag than someone half his age. I think the mentality is that if you can’t actually be young, if you act like enough of a dipshit that people will assume that you are terminally immature.
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