Tag: Immortality

Drug Extends Life Span in Mice

Technology Review has a story on the first drug demonstrated to expand the lifespan of a mammalian species. In this case, rapamycin was administered late in the life of mice and extend lifespan by an average of 9 percent in males and 13 percent in females.

According to TR, rapamycin is already approved in the United States for use as an immunosuppressive drug for organ transplant recipients and is being tested for its potential to treat cancer.

The drug may act as a chemical form of caloric restriction, the only other method known to significantly extend lifespan in mice,

Experts believe it’s possible that rapamycin may tap into one of the same biochemical pathways as calorie restriction, an intervention long known to make mice live longer. While the drug was not as effective as a limited diet initiated early in life, it was far more powerful than a limited diet begun at the same advanced age. In ongoing studies, the researchers are testing different doses across a range of starting ages; an optimal combination may ultimately prove more potent than calorie restriction.

That would certainly be nice.

Study of Children of Centenarians Suggest Genetic Link to Long Lifespans

Reuters reports on a four-year study of 600 U.S. adults whose average age was 72 when the study began. After four years, adults who had at least one parent who lived to be 100 had statistically signfiicant lower mortality rates as well as lower risk of diabetes, heart attack and stroke.

“These findings reinforce the notion that there may be physiological reasons that longevity runs in families and that centenarian offspring are more likely to age in better cardiovascular health and with a lower mortality than their peers,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

. . .

Over the next four years, Adams and her colleagues found, children of centenarians were 81 percent less likely to die and significantly less likely to develop cardiovascular problems or diabetes.

Only 0.7 percent suffered a heart attack during the study period, compared with 3.5 percent of the comparison group. Similarly, 1 percent of the centenarian group had a stroke, versus 6 percent of their peers.

Meanwhile, diabetes was newly diagnosed in just over 5 percent of the comparison group, but only 0.8 percent of the centenarian group.

People in my family tend to live very long (my great grandmother lived to 100) except for the folks who do themselves in with poor diet, lack of exercise, tobacco use, etc., so I’m hopeful I’ve inherited whatever genes helped them there.

Is Aging Just an Accident of Evolution?

DailyGalaxy.com highlights the work of Stanford researcher Stuart Kim who, along with colleagues, has been studying aging in the C. elegans worm.

Essentially, Kim claims that C. elegans does not age because it is exposed to environmental stressors that gradually wear its ability to maintain itself down, but rather that as it ages,

So it looked as though worm aging wasn’t a storm of chemical damage. Instead, Kim said, key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake. Kim’s team refers to this slide as “developmental drift.”

“We found a normal developmental program that works in young animals, but becomes unbalanced as the worm gets older,” he said. “It accounts for the lion’s share of molecular differences between young and old worms.”

Kim is quick to add that he cannot say whether human aging also occurs due to the same sort of issues, but the fact that it happens at all at least makes it a possibility to be explored in human aging research.

If humans do age due to this sort of process, it would mean that it would possible to forestall or stop altogether aging by correcting the regulatory pathways that go astray as we age (effectively treating the underlying causes rather than the symptoms of such changes).

Kevin Kelly on Counting Down Your Time Remaining

Kevin Kelly has a well-written article on the importance of taking seriously the limited amount of time he’s got left alive and using a countdown clock  of his days left to remind him just how important each day is.

There is a nice WordPress countdown plugin here.

PayPal Founder Pledges $3.5 Million for Life Extension Research

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, announced in September that he would donate $500,000 per year over the next three years to the Methuselah Foundation. The Methuselah Foundation is attempting to encourage research into anti-aging technologies by awarding prizes linked to specific goals, typically extending the lifespan of laboratory animals.

In addition, Thiel has promised matching funds of 50 cents for every dollar donated to the Methuselah Foundation from now through 2009.

The San Francisco Chronicle article on the donations includes a lot of background on the Methuselah Foundation’s Aubrey de Grey, who has become more controversial among researchers doing research on aging as his claims have become a bit more extravagant.

For example, here’s the SF Chronicle on de Grey critic S. Jay Olshansky, who 60 Minutes also used as its obligatory critic in their profile of de Grey,

S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois who confronted de Grey on CBS’s “60 Minutes” earlier this year, added: “Where I have vehemently disagreed with Aubrey is where he tries to convince people, especially reporters, that we are on the verge of immortality — that we have people alive today who will live for 1,000 or for 5,000 years.”

At present scientists don’t even know what causes aging, but “Aubrey seems to think that he does — that there are seven (causes for aging), that we have to reengineer the body to eliminate them, and that we’ll live forever.

“In the world of science,” Olshansky said, “you don’t make declarative statements (like that) without evidence to support them.”

Fine, 1,000 years is unrealistic — I’d be willing to settle for 300.

Sources:

Entrepreneur backs research on anti-aging. Keay Davidson, San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 2006.

PayPal Founder Pledges $3.5 Million to Antiaging Research. Press release, Methuselah Foundation, September 18, 2006.

What Has Longer Lifespan Done For Us Lately?

For obvious reasons, there is considerable interest in extending human lifespan — few of us, even those who believe in any of the numerous varieties of life-after-death, would voluntarily choose to depart our existence provided we are in good mental and physical health. Of course humans are from Mars and bioethicists are from Venus, so inevitably there is a small cottage industry of ethicists who, in fact, are not so sure extending human lifespan is such a good idea.

MSNBC covered this debate in a May article titled, appropriately enough, Longer life could have a downside.

On the one hand are bioethicistis like Daniel Callahan who laments that longer lifespans probably won’t solve all our social ills,

We have war, poverty, all sorts of issues around, and I don’t think any of them would be at all helped by having people live longer. The question is, ‘What will we get as a society?’ I suspect it won’t be a better society.

Hmm. Lets think about that for a moment. In 1900, the average lifespan in the United States was just 49 years. In 2002, the average lifespan in the United States was 77.3 years.

In just over a century, life expectancy in this country increased by almost 58 percent. But was our society 58 percent better? Were we 58 percent happier? Assume the answer is no — does that mean the huge increase in life expectancy was pointless because it didn’t necessarily result in a better society? Anyone want to give back those 28.3 years?

But Callahan and others have another objection — increases in human lifespan might have dramatic social changes. Callahan tells MSNBC,

If you have people staying in their jobs for 100 years, that is going to make it really tough for young people to move in and get ahead. If people like the idea of delayed gratification, this is going to be a wonderful chance to experience it.

That’s just plain silly — really, Callahan should take an economics course or even an economic history class. Just look at the past 100 years in the United States. That 58 percent increase in lifespan has not been accompanied by an attendant handicap on the young. In fact, just the opposite — the economy is ruthless in not caring about age or experience either at the individual or company level. Callahan’s concern might be valid if we lived in a country with highly rigid regulations and significant attempt by the state to plan the economy (Japan comes to mind as the closest capitalist economy where Callahan’s concerns might have a grain of truth), but not in a relatively open economy like the United States that reward entrepreneurship.

But Callahan is all about planning. MSNBC concludes his story by quoting Callahan as saying,

If this could ever happen, then we’d better ask what kind of society we want to get. We had better not go anywhere near it until we have figured those problems out.

Please, the last thing we should do is hold back medical progress while Callahan and others meticulously plan things. The most pervasive, society-changing medical advance in the last 100 years is easily oral contraception. The existence of oral contraception is largely due to the efforts of Margaret Sanger and Katherine McCormick who underwrote and pushed forward efforts by Gregory Pincus to create the birth control pill that was eventually released by Searle in 1960.

Sanger, McCormick, Pincus and Searle didn’t wait for some sort of society-wide consensus about the impact of convenient, effective birth control to emerge — in fact they were going against stringent anti-contraception laws that existed in many states.

And the birth control pill has brought tremendous changes to our society, most of them positive, but certainly some negative as well. Rather than have some master plan in place about how to handle those changes, as Callahan would want for a similar medical revolution in life expectancy, the United States coped as human beings have for thousands of years with constant changes in their physical and social environment. As a species, it turns out we’re actually pretty good at dealing with even fundamental social changes.

If, and when, medical technology exists to double current life spans, somehow we’ll cope with that change without bioethicist micromanagement. It’s what we do.

Source:

Longer life could have a downside. Ker Than, MSNBC, May 22, 2006.