Methuselah Mouse

Discuss life, the universe, and everything with other members of this site. Get to know your fellow polywell enthusiasts.

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JohnSmith
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Methuselah Mouse

Post by JohnSmith »

So I'm a bit of a bio-nut in addition to my physics interests. I'm part of my schools iGEM team, lots of good stuff. I've run across the Methuselah Mouse prize a couple times, and am interested in other people's views on it.
Is SENS a reasonable approach?

jmc
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Post by jmc »

I believe there is one fundamental reason why the body naturally ages...

Cancer

Natural selection has a way of only developing characteristics when they give a distinctive reproductive advantage to those that posses said characteristics.

People say if everyone lived forever the world would be over-populated, that's baloney, once you have six children or so in terms of reproductive advantage its rather a moot point whether you remain alive or not.

That's why animals which have long childhoods or low reproduction rates (in general) tend to live longest, because for them, in the eyes of natural selection they are still worth keeping as those extra few years could make a big different on how many offspring they churn out.


1)Basically, to replenish the body old cells must die and new cells must take their place.

2)Everytime this happens cells must divide and mutations build up.

3)Eventually, like an army falling into disarray the mutated somatic cells forget their proper function and turn feral, this leads to loss of vital functions and death.

4) Nature can and has developed mechanisms to slow the rate at which mutations accumulate and to weed out the malignant mutants, but no system is watertight, to prevent the accumulation of mutations organisms must evolve evermore sophisticated mechanisms to correct mutations.

5) If the number of offspring an organism has given birth to have reached adulthood far outnumber the parent, the advantage from the genes point of view is marginal. The benefit of suppressing mutations may even tip over into becoming disadvantageous as if the rate of mutation from parent to child grinds to a halt the rate at which said species can evolve and adapt to new circumstances will also slow down. In which case said group could be overtaken by other groups in the battle to adapt and take advantage of surrounding resources.

Ofcourse with genetic engineering humans will soon no longer need to evolve by random mutation.





In otherwords to win the battle against ageing we must win the battle against cancer.

But where to look? Perhaps we should look to species whose anatomy has fallen upon a robust, durable model for success, living fossils who have had plenty of time to evolve anti-cancer mechanisms, because remember, with every mutation that reduces you likelihood of having more mutations, your rate of evolution slows down. So we need to look at species that have not needed to evolve rapidly for a long time.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ancer.html

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

I am not a doctor. I don't even play one on TV. But in my humble opinion, the limitation of our life span is why we live as long as we do. (I hear you thinking ... duh!, but bear with me).

Please note I did not say "die as soon as we do", the obvious implication, but live as LONG as we do. Without the natural limit to the number of times our cells divide, we would die of cancer very early.

I hypothesize that "pre-cancers" (call them something else if you will) start repeatedly and often throughout the body. They grow rapidly in little tiny areas within which the cells multiply until they reach the regular limit,... and die. Meanwhile, the rest of the body goes on without bother. If there were no limt to our life span, no limit to the number of our cell divisions, there would be no limit on those little tiny cancers, which would grow and grow into big, bad cancers, and kill us early. So without the "3 score and 10" year limit to our life span we would die very early, perhaps before we can reproduce.

JohnP
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Location: Chicago

Post by JohnP »

I'm no biologist, but looking at the wide variety of lifespans for vertebrates, I think it's all up to the DNA. As long as the genes get passed along, the DNA does not care how long you live. Variations in lifespan are incidental and likely determined by genes as yet unknown. I think the methuselah mouse project is well worth it.

Aero
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Post by Aero »

For what its worth, and I don't know whether or not to believe it, but when I was going back to school a few years ago for refresher work, we were doing some statistical analysis of U.S. census data from Epidemiology. A very interesting correlation for the life expectancy of married men showed up in some reading material. As I recall, the life expectancy of a married man was said to be strongly correlated with the difference in age between the man and his wife. It was like a 0.9 correlation factor between the age difference and the man's life expectancy difference from the norm.
Maybe someone here has access to census data and can mine for this correlation. If it's true, then the answer to a long life for men is to rob the cradle.
Aero

Nanos
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Post by Nanos »

Its certainly an area which interests me and I can see that little nanite robots could be used to repair us.

The other option is to replace the brain with something a little more robust and allow the mind to be housed in a plug in unit that you can fit into any body you want.

Thats the route I intend to take, as I don't think I have time to see a solution to stopping by body dying, so I'll just save my mind for now ;-)

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

SENS makes sense.

Transcription error is the fundamental cause of aging (also of cancer).

Do you know why people live longer than mice? We encode intracellular anti-oxidant proteins that allow our mitochondria to copy itself more times before the accumulated errors result in failure.

Nature's unkind way of dealing with this is to start over with a single new cell and build a new model from scratch. Our biological purpose is only to make more copies.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

TallDave wrote: Our biological purpose is only to make more copies.
Quantity has a quality of its own.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

kurt9
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Location: Portland, Oregon, USA

Post by kurt9 »

I think SENS is definitely the way to go. SENS is the same thing to conventional medicine as the IEC polywell is to conventional fusion approaches. It is also criticized for the same reason. The conventional biomedical research community has failed to understand and deal with the aging process just like the Tokamak program has failed to develop commercial fusion power. Of course they are critical of SENS because, privately financed, it is likely to accomplish in the next 2 decades what the government-funded researchers have failed to do over the past 40 years. The government-funded researchers who criticize SENS are just as parasitical as the goverment-funded Tokamak researchers who criticize any of the "alternative" attempts to realize fusion, even thought they know full well that the Tokamak has no chance of being commercially successful.

The fact that the incidence of cancer increases with age should tell you that the notion of aging being an evolutionary adaptive mechanism for controlling cancer is horse-shit.

rj40
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Post by rj40 »

I think many of those ultra-skinny Hollywood movie star types are secretly on this diet.

http://www.walford.com/

The less you eat, the slower you age. Maybe.

I’ll bet someone is working on a pill to mimic the diet. Imagine if a safe and effective pill to do the same thing as this radical diet were developed. That would be interesting.

JohnP
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Post by JohnP »

I’ll bet someone is working on a pill to mimic the diet. Imagine if a safe and effective pill to do the same thing as this radical diet were developed. That would be interesting.
Dude:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratro ... _of_action
:wink:

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

Yeah, I've been taking resveratrol for years.

Life Extension Foundation has a couple mixes with most of the stuff that's supposed to slow down aging issues and promote general health.

www.lef.org
The less you eat, the slower you age. Maybe.
I think this works because it slows down the metabolism and therefore the transcription rate.

Aero
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Post by Aero »

Yes, and the life extension organization has some good detailed reports on clinical studies of the active ingredients in their products, for those who are interested.
Aero

MirariNefas
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Post by MirariNefas »

TallDave wrote:
The less you eat, the slower you age. Maybe.
I think this works because it slows down the metabolism and therefore the transcription rate.
Huh? Maybe you mean replication rate? What does transcription (creation of RNA) have to do with aging? I've studied several mechanisms of aging and I haven't heard of that one.

Are you thinking of mitochondrial transcription maybe? That could be related. Anyway, resveratrol would suggest there's other mechanisms at work.

rj40
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Location: Southern USA

Post by rj40 »

Wow. I have not visited all the sites yet, so I will ask here. Has the FDA double blind tested any of this and found any of it to be safe and effective?

Anyone here notice a life difference after taking any of this stuff?

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