August 04, 2008
Genetic defect causes aging?
What if the aging process itself is unnatural, evolution gone haywire, a mistake?
Rather than being an inevitable part of life itself, could it be that the Fountain of Youth is contained in our own DNA, hidden only because we've assumed the secret lay elsewhere, when all along it was hiding in plain sight, waiting for the technology necessary to reveal its answers?
Scientists point to animals that seemingly put the lie to our assumptions about aging -- and think they may have figured out how to slow the inexorable creeping decrepitude to which we all thought we were doomed.
“Everyone has assumed we age by rust,” [Stanford scientist Stuart] Kim said. “But then how do you explain animals that don’t age?”
Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, he points out. There are whales that live to be 200, and clams that make it past 400. Those species use the same building blocks for their DNA, proteins and fats as humans, mice and nematode worms. The chemistry of the wear-and-tear process, including damage from oxygen free-radicals, should be the same in all cells, which makes it hard to explain why species have dramatically different life spans.
“A free radical doesn’t care if it’s in a human cell or a worm cell,” Kim said.
If aging is not a cost of unavoidable chemistry but is instead driven by changes in regulatory genes, the aging process may not be inevitable. It is at least theoretically possible to slow down or stop developmental drift.
“The take-home message is that aging can be slowed and managed by manipulating signaling circuits within cells,” said Marc Tatar, PhD, a professor of biology and medicine at Brown University who was not involved in the research. “This is a new and potentially powerful circuit that has just been discovered for doing that.”
Kim added, “It’s a new way to think about how to slow the aging process.”
From parrots to tortoises, whales to elephants, it's clear that different species operate on vastly different timelines than homo sapiens. The genetic codebreakers may very well pinpoint where the bug in the code is hiding; the implications -- and costs -- for society are staggering.
In an ever-increasing nanny-state, what happens when retirees live for another hundred years? What about two hundred?
The absence of genetically-caused illnesses, coupled with the ability to essentially slow the aging process by a factor of just two or three will alter the very nature of every society with access to the technology.
I wonder if my HMO covers immortality/genetic therapy.
Posted by Mike Lief at August 4, 2008 01:25 AM
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