

Scientists Find Way to Partially Reverse Aging in Mice - cwan
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/646565.html

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reasonattlm
This isn't anything interesting. They took gene-engineered mice that lacked
telomerase, and rescued them by giving them telomerase.

It's not life extension to fix a problem that you created that shortens life.
Fixing premature aging != enhancing longevity in mice without premature aging.

"At Harvard, they bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme
called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter. Without the enzyme,
the mice aged prematurely and suffered ailments, including a poor sense of
smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. But
when DePinho gave the mice injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired
the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of ageing."

There is a therapy that extends non-genetically-crippled mouse life span by
50% that involves p53 and telomerase, but this thing above is not it.

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/01/50-maximum-
life-e...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/01/50-maximum-life-
extension-in-mice-via-p53-and-telomerase.php)

The good rule of thumb is to never, never get excited about a therapy that
rescues mice from an artificially introduced condition of accelerated aging.
These things are almost never applicable to normal aging.

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geuis
You have excellent points here. I wouldn't call it not interesting though. One
interesting version of this experiment would be to take these same telomerase-
deficient mice and see if they live longer than normal mouse while receiving
the enzyme they fail to produce on their own. What this experiment shows is
that telomerase is essential to the function of normal body tissues, and that
its absence causes severe problems. The next step would be to see if their
life-spans are lengthened with continued treatment, if they live as long as a
normal mouse, or if their lifespans are indeed shortened even with continued
treatment.

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stcredzero
Human beings and other large mammals suppress their telomerase. Why? Because
it can save them from cancer. If the cancer cells never mutate to activate
their telomerase or the alternative pathway for fixing telomeres, they start
to malfunction and die off before the tumor gets larger than about an inch
across. Often, this isn't such a big deal for a human. For a mouse, it's a
really big deal and they'll probably die. Hence, there's no anti-cancer
benefit for a mouse to suppress telomerase, so they're designed to have it
"on" all the time.

Whales almost never die of cancer. By the time a cancer gets as large as a
human's head, the cancer cells have mutated into dysfunction or parasitism of
other tumor cells. Tumors that have been around long enough to get that big
tend to die off. For a whale, a tumor the size of a human head is no big deal.
The folks that still kill whales (for "research") find tumor scars in whales
all the time. They just seem to shrug it off.

Activating a human being's telomerase in the fashion discussed in the article
would likely bring about an early death of cancer.

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Vivtek
Now _that's_ the twenty-first century I signed up for.

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rcfox
It's a good day to be a mouse.

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DanielBMarkham
This sounds like a ludicrously silly joke, but dang, have you noticed how good
mice have it? They've cured cancer in them dozens of times over, they've cured
aging, and they've even given them magic pills to make fat mice skinny.

Douglas Adams was right. Damn mice really are the smartest animals on the
planet.

(Seriously, I imagine this is because scientists can kill, breed, and
experiment on mice without any ethical qualms. If you'd killed a billion
people in science experiments over the last hundred years, you'd probably see
similar results)

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jcro41
This is kind of related to an article I read awhile ago that I found very
interesting. It talked about how the more people ran, the longer telomeres in
their cells were:

"When the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, however,
the situation was quite different. The sedentary older subjects had telomeres
that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects,
suggesting that the older subjects’ cells were, like them, aging. The runners,
on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those
in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss
was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it
more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ‘‘at the molecular level has an
anti-aging effect.’’"

from [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-
exercis...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-exercising-
keeps-your-cells-young/)

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younata
So, can this discovery help the still-living?

Meaning, can this be adapted to reverse the aging of, for example, my parents?

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troels
More importantly - Can it reanimate the no-longer living?

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sp332
I think you mean the no-shorter living :-)

