
Resetting the Clock of Life - dnetesn
http://alliance.nautil.us/article/241/resetting-the-clock-of-life
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reasonattlm
A great example of the way in which researchers leap to try to alter
downstream consequences of aging. This impulse is why 99% of all efforts to
treat aging as a medical condition are doomed to failure.

The research community has an institutional problem in that all the short-term
incentives have them studying the biochemistry of the system in a broken
(aged) state, and then working backwards towards causes. Each link in the
chain takes years of work. The first place they stop is thus a long way
removed from any root cause, but then the incentives work to say "prove your
work is valuable" and someone tries to commercialize it.

All medicine for age-related disease (so far) is marginal precisely because it
attempts to compensate for or tries to improve downstream consequences that
are a long way removed from fundamental damage that causes aging.

You can change the oil as much as you like in a car that is failing for
mechanical reasons, but the degree to which you gain benefit from that action
is much what you'd expect. You can press the accelerator to try to drive a
faltering engine faster. Same story. You fix problems by fixing the root
causes, not by ignoring those root causes in favor of things that happen to be
what is right in front of you.

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jostmey
How many people periodically restart their computer just because they think it
might run better afterwards? Maybe it was easier for natural selection to
periodically restart the clock than to debug all the molecular pathways so
that they remain stable over an organism's lifetime.

~~~
jacquesm
> debug all the molecular pathways so that they remain stable over an
> organism's lifetime.

It did just that. Hence the lifetime being what it is...

You now want to debug the molecular pathways to remain stable longer than the
present lifetime, which will merely move that point a bit into the future, and
will then be the new lifetime.

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MichailP
I wonder what occasional socially accepted sleep deprivation (staying out
late, working long hours, making love all night ^^ ) does to a body. The day
after does typically feel like part of you died, and that dead part has to go
to work anyway.

~~~
ams6110
I used to make the effort to go to work after a long night out. Now I just
call in sick and sleep. Work will be there the next day.

~~~
imron
> Work will be there the next day.

Not if you regularly call in sick to sleep off long nights out.

~~~
cannonpr
Well if he has a lot of nights out, neither will his liver, but developer
employers, like our livers, are fairly tolerant.

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lngnmn
Life has no clocks. It, as a set of processes, has phases, which happen follow
the phases of the environment and use these phases to maintenance and repair.

There is no such thing as time, so Nature and evolution does not have any
clock or counters. Life does not work the way we conditioned to think as
observers. It cannot use abstract mental concerts which does not exist at
molecular or cellular level. Cells do message passing and explicit pattern
matching. No clocks or counters.

~~~
candiodari
Cells have an entire range of clocks for tons of purposes. Including a number
of "death clocks" tracking a number of things, from passage of time since last
cell division (including the famous telomeres), to amount of energy passing
through the cell and a lot of more specialized clocks as well. (death clock
meaning the cell will self-terminate if the clock runs down)

Just listen to your heartbeat and think again whether your cells don't track
the passage of time.

~~~
lngnmn
And which exactly protein acts as a counter? What unit it uses? What is
representation of the current value if the counter? How it deals with
overflows?

Again. There is no counting inside a cell in principle. Only pattern matching
of phisical molecular structures and "mechanical" triggers. No counters, no
clocks, no notion of a number.

Do not confuse oscillations or rotation with time. Processes do exist. Time
does not.

~~~
candiodari
> And which exactly protein acts as a counter?

DNA

> What unit it uses?

That's defined, if rather complex. Essentially it's a basepair sequence.

> What is representation of the current value if the counter?

It's unary.

> How it deals with overflows?

It doesn't.

