- Joined
- Jan 2, 2015
- Messages
- 16,988
- Reaction score
- 13,884
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...-cells-and-live-mice?utm_source=pocket-newtab
I recommend reading the whole article, but here's some excerpts:
Research suggests it is possible to slow or even reverse aging, at least in mice, by undoing changes in gene activity—the same kinds of changes that are caused by decades of life in humans.
By tweaking genes that turn adult cells back into embryoniclike ones, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies reversed the aging of mouse and human cells in vitro, extended the life of a mouse with an accelerated-aging condition and successfully promoted recovery from an injury in a middle-aged mouse, according to a 2016 study published in Cell.
Belmonte, like some other anti-aging researchers, says his initial goal is to increase the “health span”—the number of years that someone remains healthy. Extending life span, the number of years someone remains alive, will likely take longer to achieve. Most major killers, including heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s, are diseases of aging that become far more common past middle age. “This is not just a matter of how many years we can live but how well we can live the rest of our life,” Ocampo says.
Belmonte says his team is also trying to determine if aging is a process that occurs simultaneously throughout the body. Or, as he puts it, “Is there some tissue that regulates aging—and when that goes bad, the entire organism goes bad?” He says they currently think the brain’s hypothalamus—known as the seat of control for hormones, body temperature, mood, hunger and circadian rhythms—may also act as a regulator of aging.
Other approaches that have been discovered to have anti-aging benefits in animals include calorie restriction, the drug rapamycin and parabiosis—the practice of giving old mice a blood supply from younger ones. The fact that these diverse strategies all seem to work suggests there may be more than one way to age, and that multiple complementary therapies may be needed to significantly extend longevity, Kaeberlein says.
Some compounds such as resveratrol, a substance found in red wine that seems to have anti-aging properties in high concentrations, appear to delay epigenetic change and protect against damage from epigenetic deterioration, Sinclair says. These approaches can reverse some aspects of aging, such as muscle degeneration—but aging returns when the treatment stops, he adds. With an approach like the one Belmonte lays out in the new study, theoretically “you could have one treatment and go back 10 or 20 years,” he says. If aging starts to catch up to you again, you simply get another treatment.
“This work is the first glimmer that we could live for centuries,” Sinclair says, adding that he would happily do so himself: “Forty-seven years went by pretty quickly.”
AI, figuring out the aging process--this is an interesting time to be alive. It seems we'll be figuring out how to extend our life spans as AI & robotics takes away our entire working function in society, lol.
I recommend reading the whole article, but here's some excerpts:
Research suggests it is possible to slow or even reverse aging, at least in mice, by undoing changes in gene activity—the same kinds of changes that are caused by decades of life in humans.
By tweaking genes that turn adult cells back into embryoniclike ones, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies reversed the aging of mouse and human cells in vitro, extended the life of a mouse with an accelerated-aging condition and successfully promoted recovery from an injury in a middle-aged mouse, according to a 2016 study published in Cell.
Belmonte, like some other anti-aging researchers, says his initial goal is to increase the “health span”—the number of years that someone remains healthy. Extending life span, the number of years someone remains alive, will likely take longer to achieve. Most major killers, including heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s, are diseases of aging that become far more common past middle age. “This is not just a matter of how many years we can live but how well we can live the rest of our life,” Ocampo says.
Belmonte says his team is also trying to determine if aging is a process that occurs simultaneously throughout the body. Or, as he puts it, “Is there some tissue that regulates aging—and when that goes bad, the entire organism goes bad?” He says they currently think the brain’s hypothalamus—known as the seat of control for hormones, body temperature, mood, hunger and circadian rhythms—may also act as a regulator of aging.
Other approaches that have been discovered to have anti-aging benefits in animals include calorie restriction, the drug rapamycin and parabiosis—the practice of giving old mice a blood supply from younger ones. The fact that these diverse strategies all seem to work suggests there may be more than one way to age, and that multiple complementary therapies may be needed to significantly extend longevity, Kaeberlein says.
Some compounds such as resveratrol, a substance found in red wine that seems to have anti-aging properties in high concentrations, appear to delay epigenetic change and protect against damage from epigenetic deterioration, Sinclair says. These approaches can reverse some aspects of aging, such as muscle degeneration—but aging returns when the treatment stops, he adds. With an approach like the one Belmonte lays out in the new study, theoretically “you could have one treatment and go back 10 or 20 years,” he says. If aging starts to catch up to you again, you simply get another treatment.
“This work is the first glimmer that we could live for centuries,” Sinclair says, adding that he would happily do so himself: “Forty-seven years went by pretty quickly.”
AI, figuring out the aging process--this is an interesting time to be alive. It seems we'll be figuring out how to extend our life spans as AI & robotics takes away our entire working function in society, lol.
