
Scientists identify pathways that extend nematode worm lifespan fivefold - lelf
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-biological-scientists-pathways-lifespan.html
======
ColanR
Link to the journal article: [https://www.cell.com/cell-
reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(19)308...](https://www.cell.com/cell-
reports/fulltext/S2211-1247\(19\)30858-7)

------
mrandish
I was at a holiday party and some guy was telling me all about the exciting
life extension breakthroughs he was reading about in mass media. I tried to
explain that, while exciting, what works in mice models is highly unlikely to
directly scale into humans and that making progress against aging is very
probably a "wicked" problem.

I pointed out how many headlines we saw in the 80s about a "cure" for cancer
being just around the corner. Yet, cancer turned out to be a "wicked" problem.
We've made exciting progress and reduced cancer mortality for nearly 30% in
the last 25 years but there's been no "cure".

Sadly, no one wants to hear that.

~~~
jerf
When you see an article on HN about how someone took some code, profiled it,
and increased its speed by 10 times, I think it's tempting to credit virtue to
the person who sped the code up. But I think you also have to remember that
the only reason you could speed up the code by 10 times in the first place is
that the original code left that much on the table. It isn't just that there
is a person who was skilled enough to speed the code up, it is that somebody
else left the opportunity behind in the first place.

For similar reasons, I find it quite likely to be engineering-meaningless [1]
when someone takes a life form that lives for a 2-3 weeks and extends that by
a factor of 5. We humans have the "live for fifteen weeks" problem solved.
Optimization being what it is, it is very likely that whatever that
improvement is already effectively exists in us. (Possibly not directly,
possibly through some other mechanism that doesn't completely match, but it's
probably done.) It is, unfortunately, much less impressive to "optimize" an
organism that has left that much on the table.

Improve an elephant's lifespan by 50% with an intervention when they're
already fully-grown and I'll really take notice. Unfortunately, there's all
kinds of reasons why that's hard....

[1]: Contrast with meaningful to science. There's nothing wrong with studying
this sort of thing as steps to both eventually treating aging, and just plain
scientific understanding of the world, in the mean time. But something can be
scientifically useful, and even perhaps someday eventually be useful to
engineering through its contribution to a dozen other discoveries, while being
"engineering-useless" _today_. Remember the context we're speaking in is in
being excited about all the longevity news in the media and to hope that maybe
it'll be ready by the time we personally need it.

~~~
HSO
By the same token, there are animals who have the „live for 400 years“ problem
solved so there must be sth left on the table yes?

Other animals have the „regenerate this body part“ problem solved, same.

~~~
jerf
"By the same token, there are animals who have the „live for 400 years“
problem solved so there must be sth left on the table yes?"

Note my claim wasn't that optimization isn't possible, just that the
impressiveness of the optimization is inversely proportional to the amount of
performance left on the table.

In terms of that being a promising avenue, I'd observe all the animals with
long lifespans I'm aware of seem to achieve that with a quality of life that
would in humans be considered very elderly behavior, due to low energy
consumption. People generally want eternal youth, rather than eternal
elderliness. I don't know of any 200-year-old animal leaping about from tree
to tree or anything like that.

Body part regeneration seems a lot more like a solvable problem to me than
generalized "fix aging". While we know we're lacking spontaneous body part
regeneration, we also know the "programs" for growing parts are in there,
since we used them once.

(As I've observed before on HN, "solving aging" would be a lot easier if we
just had to produce organs with the same DNA or something. It's a bit body-
horror-esque, but if we could just grow clone bodies and transplant things in
we'd probably be pretty close. But there's that whole problem where we'd be
happy with a new heart, we'd be happy with a new liver, we'd be happy with a
new left arm, but we stubbornly want our _old_ brain....)

~~~
1996
I don't want my old brain - just the information stored inside.

~~~
shi314
Then would it still be you?

~~~
1996
If not, how could I care anymore?

------
nabla9
All longevity accomplishments work better with smaller animals. The increase
of the lifespan decreases with the size of the animal.

If the increase of healthy human lifespan is something like 5% that would be a
huge accomplishment and nothing to sneer at.

~~~
raxxorrax
Many orthopaedists in my circle tell me that with all the office work we
probably should be glad if we die with 60.

These approaches focus on cardiovascular system and general cell renewal, but
I guess there are just a few more steps until immortality.

~~~
est31
Yeah, aging involves breakage of multiple things in people's bodies. There is
no single switch to fix them all. Instead they have to be fixed one by one.

To the joint problems you are mentioning: we are already replacing various
joints and bone parts in the body. The solutions aren't perfect though, there
are risks of infection, death by septic shock, people often have pains, etc.

~~~
Robotbeat
I think replacing parts is a good idea, but comes up against some harder
limits... Surgery becomes harder to recover from as you get older. Cell
division limits are a thing, build-up of scarring tissue, etc.

So if we can address cellular aging mechanisms, I think we'll have the
latitude to address some of the more macroscopic aging problems (like joints,
etc) through surgery.

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greg7mdp
Dang, my retirement savings will have to last much longer than I had expected.

~~~
Tactic
While stated in what I interpret is a joking way, it is a very real concern.
As the average life expectancy increases we either have to plan for a longer
period of non-productivity (in the private sector) or work longer. A blend of
the two seems to be what is occurring, but over my life time I have seen my
expected retirement age continue to push slightly further away.

~~~
blaser-waffle
I expect it to be non-existent for a huge chunk of the economy. Well paid
programmer types can FIRE, but honestly they can keep working until they can't
sit upright or think clearly. Folks like welders have their eyes and knees go
in their 40s.

------
KasianFranks
Statistical modeling of biomedical corpora: mining the Caenorhabditis Genetic
Center Bibliography for genes related to life span - Blei DM, Franks K, Jordan
MI, Mian IS. -
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533868](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1533868)

------
buboard
Lucky nematodes and mice, they live the future

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aruggirello
Wait - did we actually start by extending the lifespans of our parasites???

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nematode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nematode)

"The roughly 2,271 genera are placed in 256 families. The many parasitic forms
include pathogens in most plants and animals. A third of the genera occur as
parasites of vertebrates; about 35 nematode species occur in humans."

~~~
blaser-waffle
When we started living longer, and in greater numbers, so did they. Only fair
that this trend continues...

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tomrod
What are the pathways they are describing?

~~~
djif
Insulin signaling (IIS) and TOR pathway (a central regulator of mammalian
metabolism and physiology)

~~~
tomrod
That was my question -- what is IIS and TOR? What does it mean to modify them?

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Have a read of these two regarding TOR - Target Of Rapamycin:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTOR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTOR)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirolimus)
\- particularly the research section

~~~
tomrod
Thank you!

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pazimzadeh
I would like to know if this changed the incidence or predisposition to
cancer. No such thing as free lunch..

------
djohnston
1\. In c elegans 2\. "Biological scientists" vs "Biologists". What's the
distinction?

~~~
sampo
There is a lot of cooperation in biology. People from diverse backgrounds –
physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, mathematics, medicine –
work in the same research group. They are scientists who research biology, but
they are not biologists as in they don't have a degree in biology.

~~~
djohnston
thanks for clarification!

------
chrisco255
Have they begun to apply these techniques to mice yet?

------
kingkawn
As opposed to scientists made of inorganic material

~~~
dmix
I believe the odd headline name choice partly has to do with the org name “MDI
Biological Laboratory”.

------
patcon
Surprise, a counter-argument on hacker news! :)

Why does it seem no one worries about what we might break in humanity by
disrupting the evolved pattern of death. It's a network characteristic
selected for in living system, and very few creatures have survived into our
epoch without developing the capacity to die.

It's literally an evolved feature of our lifecycle and our existence within
this web, and it terrifies me (esp everything going wrong already in our
world) that we're not being more critical and cautionary toward life-
extension....

Every time I read about life extension, I have almost zero positive thoughts
about its effect on our common good, and it's just "oh shit, this is going to
have bad outcomes for us all" :/ It's pursuit feels like peak selfishness in
our individualistic society, one that really need collectivist thinking.

~~~
melling
You’re kidding, right?

These conversations frequently tend to devolve into a long discussion about
the negative on hacker news.

In fact, 3 years ago I wrote that this story should be banned from HN:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-
should-...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-be-
banned-from-hacker-news-immortality/)

“Death gives life meaning”

“It’ll only be for rich people”

“The money should be spent on something better.”

If we spent as much time trying to solve the problem, rather than having
philosophical discussions, we’d all probably be living to 200 by now.

~~~
saiya-jin
So you wrote your opinion on some blog... doesn't make it any more relevant
than any other opinion, here, there, anywhere. This is a public forum.

Death is an interesting topic, plenty of people are scared shitless of it,
regardless of their beliefs. Many wish that they would be that special spark
that will live almost forever, ideally young, but god forbids that everybody
else with them gets the same chance (simple math indicates that would be a bit
of catastrophe for whole ecosystem and ultimately mankind too these days).

Research should be definitely done, results might help in places like space
travel and probably some diseases, but I don't see it as something super
important currently. Maybe because I am at peace with my inevitable death, so
other things are considered as higher priority (say pollution, global climate
change, inequality, f@cking wars).

~~~
melling
I wrote it in a blog so I don’t have to keep repeating myself. The
conversation is basically the same every time.

I also addressed your common complaint that there are more important things to
work on.

Having the same conversation over and over again with the same result probably
qualifies under the “definition of insanity”

------
readhn
Whats interesting is that according to the Bible humans lived from several
hundred years to ~1000 years.

Now this article is saying "The increase in lifespan would be the equivalent
of a human living for 400 or 500 years, according to one of the scientists."

Mind blown!

Ages of the Patriarchs from Adam to Noah:

1\. Adam 930years Genesis 5:4;

2\. Seth 912years Genesis 5:8;

3\. Enosh 905years Genesis 5:11;

4\. Cainan 910years Genesis 5:14;

5\. Mahalalel 895years Genesis 5:17;

6\. Jared 962years Genesis 5:20;

7\. Enoch 365years (translated) Genesis 5:23;

8\. Methuselah 969years Genesis 5:27;

9\. Lamech 777years Genesis 5:31;

10\. Noah 950years Genesis 9:29;

[https://assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/nab2/declin...](https://assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/nab2/decline-
ages-death.gif)

EDIT: Wow im mind blown how close minded and anti-bible people here are. Im
not religious but this is too funny that im getting down voted so much!

~~~
krapp
That's not interesting, because the Bible is a work of fiction, and thus not
relevant to any discussions of scientific merit.

~~~
readhn
Its just an observation, fiction or not. i remember this fact from the bible
and its funny how in this article they talk about 400-500years human lifespan.

~~~
meowface
Could you explain the exact connection, though? I don't understand what's
funny about it. It'd be like a book written 100 years ago saying "humans can
fly", and then in 2200 someone invents a cheap portable jetpack. If you lived
in 2200, would you say "it's funny" that that old book mentioned flying and
look, here we are, flying?

Plenty of other old texts depict long-lived humans as well. It's probably been
a fantasy among humans for many thousands of years.

