
Scientists reverse aging in human cell lines and give theory of aging a new life - sergeant3
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150526085138.htm
======
SCHiM
I know my words are probably going to sound quite harsh, and I realize that
there will be people who will take offense, still this is my opinion on the
matter, and this being the Internet you're obliged to read and then ignore it
;p

To me it seems that choosing whether or not to live is a very personal choice,
arguably the most personal choice you can make. Not wanting to contribute to a
goal another might have is fine, nobody should be forcing you to contribute to
anti-aging research or experimentation. However I don't think you should have
a say in whether or not another ends/extends his or her life. It follows that
you aren't allowed to forbid research into this area either, you might think
it immoral, dangerous or distasteful, but it's not your choice to make.

There are a lot of arguments against changing what people think of as the
'natural order'. Various people are concerned that it will lead to
overpopulation, perhaps it will. Perhaps when it gets really bad wars and/or
famine will break out. Nature doing its 'job'.

Perhaps it's selfish of me, but given the choice between inventing a 'cure'
for aging (that I can then subsequently use) and dying when 'my time has
come'. I'll pick the cure for sure. I do care about the consequences, just not
enough to stop me from producing and using said cure.

And I think that goes for many people. Only they're afraid to make that point
and/or follow through with what they are actually advocating. Why else would
you prefer dying of old age, to not dying at all?

If you truly think it's better to die of aging, and thereby preventing <insert
horrible future> why don't you just decide to end yourself, and leave others
be?

~~~
pekk
Whether I should have a say depends on what the costs are, who pays them and
who benefits.

Given that there are so many causes of death, and each one is so hard to
avoid, we could spend unlimited resources trying in vain to stamp out death
for good, at the opportunity cost of much better returns on other things we
could do to make life better for humans other than just the wealthiest people
who have so few problems that mortality is their highest priority. Right now
and in any plausible future scenario there is simply not a choice "whether or
not to live." Everyone dies eventually, merely making modern healthcare
available is too hard for us to do worldwide and people (poor brown people
"somewhere else") are still being crippled by polio, for example.

Rather than telling people you disagree with to commit suicide, it would help
if you understood that what you are asking for is a fantasy and that it is
problematic to accept literally any cost to other humans in its pursuit.

~~~
M8
In that case the ethical problem is already there: most 1-st world countries
subsidise own poor people (including single mothers) to have extra children
that they cannot afford. France is even legally prosecuting casual paternity
tests - raising someone else's child is just another form of wellfare. I guess
I can spend whatever is left of my post tax money on making myself live
longer.

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fapjacks
Whenever this kind of thing makes it to human trials, I will be the first in
line. Injections, blood treatment therapy, uploading my consciousness to the
internet... Whatever. More time to learn all those JavaScript frameworks. ;)

~~~
wnevets
I'll let you alpha test, I'll sign up for the beta.

~~~
lamuerteflaca
If at all possible I'll wait version 2

~~~
jrometty
Theres already 7 new frameworks to learn by the time 1.0 is released.

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b_emery
The thought has recently occurred to me that we should all be working on the
"aging problem", until it's solved, and then spending all our extra time on
other pursuits.

~~~
duaneb
Maybe we need to work on how humans tend to prioritize longevity over things
like whether your neighbor can eat. I don't think that the "aging problem" is
even in the top 100 of "problems humanity needs to solve." Reproduction has
been working great for keeping population up, and "defeating death" has always
been seen as somewhat quixotic of a quest.

~~~
hueving
For an individual, why should he/she care about keeping the population up? If
that's the only point to our existence, we sure waste a lot of time with arts
and sciences. We should be training everyone to just grow food and mate as
soon as possible.

~~~
duaneb
> For an individual, why should he/she care about keeping the population up?

They shouldn't.

> If that's the only point to our existence, we sure waste a lot of time with
> arts and sciences

There is no point to our existence. Extending your existence will not change
the quality.

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stephengillie
I've been excitedly keeping up on telomere therapy - based on the observation
that telomeres (tiny hairs on our DNA) get shorter as we age, and this
internal clock causes our cells to shut off and auto-die.

This research has been in a different area of aging - preventing mitochondria
damage. This is also an important part of keeping cells operating correctly.

~~~
throwaway12357
Maybe you already know this and in that case a FYI to anyone else.

According to [1] telomere-lengthening treatments _may_ (the author points out
that this conclusion may be incorrect since the data measurement may need some
changes) only give you an extra 5 years.

So research in other directions is definitely interesting.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9456792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9456792)

~~~
stephengillie
I'd heard speculation of 10 years, and further speculation that it would be a
repeatable treatment. Essentially it would be a vaccine that we'd take like a
tetanus shot.

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reasonattlm
Open access paper:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep10434](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep10434)

Read the paper, not the publicity materials in this case - they are more than
usually misleading.

In the past researchers have shown that reprogramming adult cells to create
induced pluripotent stem cells sweeps away some specific forms of damage
observed in old cells. In particular it seems to clean up damaged
mitochondria, which is of considerable interest given the role of
mitochondrial DNA damage in aging. It is possible that this has some
connection to the aggressive cleanup that takes place in early stage embryos,
stripping out damage inherited from parental cells. There may be the basis for
a future therapy somewhere in here, but is also possible that finding out how
to apply this sort of process in isolation to adult cells safely is going to
be very hard, and the end result impractical in comparison to other
technologies: if induced pluripotency as it currently stands somehow happened
to many of your cells, you would certainly die.

I've linked to the open access paper above rather than the publicity materials
because I think that the latter are misleading as to what was accomplished and
the significance of the research. The researchers theorize that the ability to
restore mitochondrial function, and then break it again when you take the
induced pluripotent stem cells and redifferentiate them back into ordinary
cells, means that mitochondrial DNA damage is not a primary source of harm,
but rather something under the influence of the state of nuclear DNA and thus
some other cell process. For example, perhaps epigenetic changes in nuclear
DNA are mediating the pace of replication-induced DNA damage in mitochondria.

All in all it is interesting work, and programmed aging supporters, who
theorize that aging is largely caused by epigenetic changes, will no doubt
find it encouraging, though I think that at this stage there are other
possible interpretations of what is taking place here. For example, in how
reprogramming restores function and how that function is lost again: one could
proposed clearance and damage mechanisms rather than direct regulation
mechanisms. The researchers are in most circumstances looking at mitochondrial
function (via oxygen consumption rates) rather than at mitochondrial DNA
damage, which greatly muddies the water. The two do not have a straightforward
relationship, and there are any number of simple drug treatments that can
tinker with the results of measures of mitochondrial function without touching
the issue of damage. I'd like to see the same work done again with
mitochondrial DNA damage assessments at each stage and each intervention, and
also animal studies rather than just cell line studies in the case of the
interventions in ordinary aged cells - which seems to be where this research
group is heading in any case.

Aubrey de Grey commented to me that:

It has long been very obvious that mito dysfunction in the elderly is hardly
at all caused by mutations (since they are too rare) and rather, by
elimination, almost entirely by “deliberate” (i.e. regulated) nuclear gene
expression changes, occurring as an adaptation to other things that are going
wrong. That’s not to say that mito mutations are harmless though, not at all -
but that their harm is via other means, such as my “reductive hotspot
hypothesis” from 1998. There is one interesting result in the paper, namely
that glycine supplementation partly rejuvenates mito function - but I don’t
think the authors believe that the result is robust, because they have
relegated it to one sentence at the end of the results and one supplementary
figure.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Great post, modded up.

I have a question, since you seem to be rather conversant with aging research.
I am a physicist, and I'm interested in how mitochondrial function is measured
and the efficiency is defined. I know that it is measured via oxygen
consumption rates, but all the papers that I have read do not define precisely
how this is measured and defined. Would you kind enough to point me to some
resources on this? I am capable at reading the medical/biology literature, but
searching it can be a different matter.

~~~
reasonattlm
In all such matters PubMed is your friend:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=measure+mitochondri...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=measure+mitochondrial+oxygen)

------
Mitchhhs
Just published an article this week on this exact topic - feel free to peruse
for additional information on aging theory

[http://mitchkirby.com/2015/05/26/comprehensive-map-aging-
pro...](http://mitchkirby.com/2015/05/26/comprehensive-map-aging-process/)

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TheSisb2
Allowing people to live indefinitely/much longer than currently won't make the
world a better place. Children humble and ground adults. Younger brains are
more malleable and young people carry newer gene evolutions. Our species would
halt exactly where we are, ignorance would never vanish, our species would
stop adapting.

80 year old racists would be 200 year old racists.

~~~
wernercd
Or people would live long enough to grow wiser... realize the errors of their
ways.

People might start caring about their communities if they knew they had to
deal with it 200 years from now.

~~~
drcross
Imagine politicians being accountable for their decisions, or relaxing the
pressure that women are under to reproduce before they are 30. Mastering aging
would allow the human race to significantly rise about our natural apeish
behaviour that has to be unlearned through education during adolescents.

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oulipo
This has nothing to do with escaping death, aging is only one of the causes of
death, making life longer will just expose you to more risk of accident,
suicide, or illnesses, this is not what makes you immortal. There are other
more philosophical problems with the notion of an ever-expanding life length
-- your brain will probably not remember everything, so after a while it will
only remember a part of what you have been, so is it really you? and if it is
no longer "you", what is the point, you are not extending "your" life, you are
extending the life of the person you will become after you have forgotten who
you are. Same applies if you "upload your consciousness to the Internet"

Reversing aging will improve your quality of life, but will also force your
death to be brutal, since the only cause of death is now accidental or some
illness. So you'll die not wanting to peacefully go away as people aging in
good condition do, but you will die wanting to live, hurting badly. I'll stick
with buddhism.

~~~
Techowl
In contrast, I believe that reversing aging would likely also improve a
person's quality of death. Death by aging can be a horrifically prolonged and
painful process. In the case of Alzheimer's, you slowly watch your mind and
identity slip away. In the case of cancer, you may submit to vomit-inducing
therapies to prolong your life; whether or not you do, you may end up dying
slowly and painfully while bed-ridden and utterly exhausted. Spending years in
a nursing home while someone else wipes your bottom isn't exactly a glamorous,
graceful way to go. On the other hand, the "brutal" deaths you complain about
involve what -- something between a fraction of a second and a few hours of
physical pain? When my time comes, sign me up.

As an ancillary point, there is no such thing as "aging in good condition".
Aging is the process by which your body gradually fails to function until it
can't function at all. It can be better or worse, but not good.

~~~
oulipo
Reversing aging has nothing to do with cancer, on the contrary, by living
longer you expose yourself more to die from a painful illness than from a age
death

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rvalue
Any chance the project was called Lazarus? :D

