9/27/2002:
Prolongevity Update Regarding the
Retardation, and Hopefully, the Reversal of Aging
My purpose is
to try to provide (as of 9/27/2002) a few links to legitimate sources of information concerning prolongevity, and the possible reversal of
aging, together with a brief overview of this subject. This is a
rapidly changing
document, so you might want to check back here from time to time
10/15/2002 Update:
Prolongevity Update Regarding the
Retardation, and Hopefully, the Reversal of Aging
A few links to
other websites
John
Furber - This site includes an overview of what is known
about some principal mechanisms of aging, together with possible
intervention strategies.
Longevity
Index - This is an index of "editorials" addressing the
subject of longevity research. (These "editorials" are subject to
revision as more is learned about anti-aging research.)
The American Academy of Anti-Aging
Medicine This is an organization of MDs and PhDs with a
peer-reviewed journal that is attempting to legitimize anti-aging research.
Strategies
for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) This website
presents the conclusions, and discusses the research plans of a group of
prominent research gerontologists who are trying to flag the media and the
general public that rejuvenation, as opposed to aging retardation, is
imminent. (SENS is an outgrowth of annual roundtable discussions held at UCLA
and kindred locations.)
Life Extension Foundation (LEF)
The Life Extension Foundation is a non-profit organization that is actively
funding anti-senescence research. Their website offers a wealth of information
concerning longevity research.
Maximum Life Foundation
The Maximum Life Foundation is a non-profit institution that presents background
information regarding the "war on aging", including The Owner's Manual for the Human Body
and an extensive set of links
to other aging related websites. The Maximum Life Foundation accepts donations
for anti-aging research.
Nature Must Have Some
Means for Completely Eliminating Aging, Or Life Couldn't Exist
Nature must have some mechanism for completely eliminating
aging when, or before, organisms reproduce. ( The idea that germ plasm is immortal was advanced by Weisman
in 1891.) Otherwise, if new organisms were the average age
of the germ cells that created them, it would only take a few generations before
they were too old to survive. But we know of no way to arrest or reverse aging.
For example, human sex cells can range from 15 to 70 years old when they combine
to create a baby, and yet, the resulting baby will be born brand, spanking new. How does Nature
produce 0-year-old babies from 15 to 70-year-old sex cells? (This is one of those situations that exist
under our very noses, and that we overlook because we've never seen it any other
way.) Nature must either keep germ cells and single-celled organisms in a state
of perfect repair, or must completely rejuvenate them at conception (or
conceivably, both).
But Nature can and does achieve this.
However:
In the spring of 1999, Advanced Cell Technology enucleated
six bovine ova, and then inserted a very old somatic cell from a very old cow
into each of the six ova. What happened next is extraordinary, and very
revealing. The ova, even though they lacked their own nuclei, rejuvenated
the nuclei of the six old somatic cells (and very possibly, the extra-nuclear
cytoplasm in those old cells), and then used them to begin the normal process of
mitosis and ontological development of six brand, spanking new calves. The six calves were born as new
and fresh as other newborn calves, and in fact, had slightly
longer telomeres than average calves.
Somehow, the ova had, at a minimum,
extended the telomeres on the chromosomes of the six somatic cells that replaced
the nuclei of the bovine egg cells. (Did the ova also repair all genetic
damage, and/or rectify other age-related cytological damage?)
This suggests to me that even if gametes are immortal, Nature
runs them through a rejuvenation cycle, perhaps as a backup, when reproduction
is imminent.
Later:
After thinking about what I just said, it seems to me that you could also
explain the rejuvenescence of the somatic cell by supposing that its immersion
in the cytoplasm of the presumably ageless ovum exposed it to the renewal agents
that keep the ovum from aging... e. g., telomerase.
But whether this flawless rejuvenation occurs continuously in ova
and unicellular organisms, or whether it happens at need when cells reproduce,
how does it happen? How do Nature's perfect mechanisms for eliminating, for
example, glycation, methylation, and DNA repair in immortal cells differ from
the imperfect repair mechanisms in our somatic cells?
Flawless
Rejuvenation Wouldn't Mean Immortality
I've been guilty of equating complete rejuvenation with
immortality, and that's wrong.
It's clear that those mortality factors that winnow the young
today would limit life spans even if everyone were physiologically 16.
Accidents, suicides, infectious diseases, wars, congenital infirmities, and
autoimmune diseases would continue to take their toll as they do today. Over the
coming decades, some of these threats to health and life may be overcome, but
new threats like HIV or the West Nile Virus may appear to take their place. I've
seen estimates that range from 400 to 800 years for an average life span
considering only death by accident, but actual life spans, given repeated,
perfect rejuvenations, might be less than that because of the risk factors cited
above.
We
might expect to live longer, but death would eventually claim us.
It also seems questionable to me whether rejuvenation would
eliminate existing cancer or vascular plaque. It, perhaps, wouldn't
dissolve bony processes that have developed in response to, e. g., tight shoes.
Would it eliminate baldness? Gray hair? It probably wouldn't re-grow teeth.
Even if we could completely rejuvenate an eighty-year-old,
they would presumably begin to age again immediately, and would be in the market
for repeated applications of our hypothetical rejuvenation treatments.
Where Would
Rejuvenation Stop? In the Cradle?
One of the noir science fiction fantasies about rejuvenation
is that the rejuvenated organism would continue to regress until the individual
became an infant. If this were the price of rejuvenation, no one would want to
pay it. But my own notion is that the cells of the body would remain
differentiated, and would simply be "rebuilt". The individual would
end up at the stage of ontological development of young adulthood.
Apart from the
Possibility of Age Reversal, There Is Life Extension, and, Perhaps, Aging
Retardation
Age reversal is an extreme case of the gradual extension of the life span and of the "health span" of the average
person that has occurred over the past few hundred years. Various forms of
additional extension of the average life span are
possible, ranging from better health habits, to caloric restriction, to,
possibly, some kinds of "prolongevity" interventions.
Anticipated
global increases in average life expectancies are prime sources of life
extension
I should think that one of the most likely sources of life extension
will be a rise in
average life expectancies over the coming decades for people in
less-industrialized nations.
Some people engage in
life-shortening practices ranging from dangerous pastimes to heavy smoking and
drinking. How much this will decline over coming decades might be problematical,
but the the potential for improvement may exist.
Some individuals die of inherited predispositions to certain
diseases such as muscular dystrophy or Huntington's chorea, and hopefully, these
might eventually be candidates for genetic intervention strategies.
Every time a physician performs an appendectomy or
administers antibiotics to cure a life-threatening infection, she is prolonging
someone's life in a serious way. And we certainly wouldn't have it any other
way. If we're sick, we don't want to depend upon Nature to take its course.
Improvements in medical technology may extend
average life expectancies somewhat.
Organ replacements and stem cell supplementation might lead to
increases in life span. Bringing the "youth span" of the average
person up to the "youth spans" of the longest-lived individuals might
be another way to extend the "health span". Genetics must surely
play a part in healthy aging. Still another approach might be through
methods of effecting the slower metabolisms of caloric restriction without
necessarily restricting calories. (There are a few
"longevinauts", led by Dr. Roy
Walford, who are experimenting with
caloric restriction at the present time.)
Beyond better health care in developing countries might lie
the diffusion of the improvements in health care technology that are occurring
in in industrialized countries.
I think that these and other techniques will slowly extend
the average life span. Whether or not more rapid changes occur depends upon the
safety and efficacy of products that are currently only in the laboratory stage.
By No Means Everyone
Wants the Population to Live Longer
Many people are
legitimately concerned over anything that threatens to boost population
There are many concerned people who are opposed to seeing
us live longer and better than we will without intervention. There are certainly
valid concerns regarding population restraint. ("It
will lead to a population explosion, and think what it will do to the
environment!" "It's unnatural. If God had wanted us to live longer,
he'd have made us that way." "We need to get the old fogies out of the
way, and let the younger generation kick the gong around for awhile.")
A recent ABC
telephone poll shows that two/thirds of U. S. citizens don't want to live
longer.
A recent ABC poll shows that 65% of U. S.' citizens wouldn't want
to live to be 120. "An overwhelming majority prefers to face those
so-called golden years naturally, rather than take artificial measures to help
roll back the clock." "Perhaps one reason people don't want to live so
long is that they think it would have a detrimental impact on society.
Sixty-five percent say that having many more people live past the age of 100
would negatively affect society." If we can take this to heart, then there
may not so great a population problem. No more than 35% of the population will
opt for "youth extension". My only concern is that when it comes down
to deciding whether you want that antibiotic or whether you'd rather die now so
that you alleviate the world's population problem, I don't foresee many people
choosing the latter option. When a pollster calls you on the phone and says,
"What do you think about... ", you're probably in a hurry, and you're
going to give off-the-top-of-the-head answers to questions that you might answer
very differently in real life.
Because these questions are, manifestly, legitimate causes for
concern, I'll address them first.
Wouldn't It Lead
to a Population Explosion?
Without any external influences, that would certainly be a possibility, but,
I think,
not a certainty. I think it's possible that the kind of voluntary restraint
that is causing population growth rates to decline around the world might be
sufficient to hold population in check, as discussed below.
Average
family size has dropped sharply over the past 100 years
Between 1900 and 2000, the average family size in the
developed countries voluntarily dropped from, perhaps, 5-to-7 children per family to
approximately 2 children per family. (Apparently, during the latter
part of the 19th century, this reduction in family size
had already occurred in England among the educated classes but not among the
lower classes, and was the basis for Sir Francis Galton's concern
that the less intelligent would outbreed the more intelligent.)
Presumably,
family size drops when:
(1) birth control technology enables it;
(2) children aren't likely to die in childhood;
(3) women are educated and empowered, and
(4) old age pension systems eliminate
the need for children to support their elders in their old age.
Life
expectancies have increased sharply over the past 100 years
Life expectancies have risen from 47 in 1900 to 78 in 2000. This
would presumably have engendered
a population increase by a factor of 1.65... as though today's average life span
were to rise to 129! So we've already dealt with an increase in life span by a
factor of 1.65.
The Western
world saw a sexual revolution over the past 30 years
During this period, the U. S. went through a sexual
revolution. Premarital sex and living outside of wedlock became common
practices. One might have expected a population explosion as a result of these
practices, but that seems not to have occurred.
However,
this didn't happen without some U. S. population growth
The U.
S. population grew from about 76,000,000 in 1900 to about 151,000,000
in 1950, and to about 281,000,000 in 2000. It virtually doubled from 1900 to
1950, and nearly doubled again between 1950 and 2000. Still, the U. S.
population hasn't exploded the way some of us, fifty years ago, feared that it
would. (The average growth rate has been about 1.4% per year between 1900 and
1950, and about 1.24% between 1950 and 2000.) We were forecasting 3% population
growth, leading to a U. S. population of about 675,000,000 by the year 2000.)
A portion of U. S. population growth occurred
because of immigration.
A portion
of U. S. population growth between 1900 and 2000 was the result of immigration. In 1900, about
one-third of all Americans derived from foreign-born stock. Of course, this
generation's foreign-born stock becomes the next generation's native-born stock.
Since U. S. population data is given as a running tally, it's hard to arrive at
an integrated value, but the fraction that was added by immigration between 1900
and 2000 must have been substantial.
The populations of some countries are stable or declining.
An excellent discussion of population growth and similar questions may be found
at the MaxLife website. For
recommendations from a non-profit organization regarding personal health,
MaxLife offers "The Owner's Manual for the Human Body".
What about
the Law of Malthus?
The Law of Malthus, postulated by the Reverend Thomas Malthus,
proposes that animal populations increase until environmental factors such as
starvation limit their size.
Malthasian dynamics appear to apply to animal populations,
but not to current human populations. Malthsian law predicts that the hungriest
populations should have the lowest survival rates. In fact, the opposite is
true. Those countries in which food is most plentiful and life
expectancies are greatest are the countries in which population growth rates are
the lowest.
Many leading gerontologists think that extending our life
spans by more than a few years is unfounded fantasy.
A paper, "Essay:
No Truth to the Fountain of Youth",
published by S. J. Olshansky, L. Hayflick,
and B. Carnes in Scientific American,
June, 2002, sets forth some of these conclusions. ( This article is available
upon payment of a fee.) Basically, what the article says is that there is nothing
available that has been proven to slow the progress of aging (other than
good health habits that don't accelerate the rate of aging)... no hormones, no
lifestyle changes, no genetic modifications, no replacement of body parts
have been demonstrated to slow the aging process or to influence the processes
of aging.
Considering the careful wording of the article, it's hard to
disagree with the statements the authors make, and they may be a welcome
counterpoint to the gush of nutrients, mail-order drugs,
nostrums, and potions that offer wellness and the retardation or partial
reversal of aging for a high price.
Of course, I think that it should also be noted that nothing was ever lofted into orbit before October 4, 1957, and when it happened,
it took the world by storm. No successful, heavier-than-air, self-propelled
flying machines existed before 1903. No animal was cloned before Dolly, the
sheep. No large-scale release of nuclear energy occurred before 1942. Nor were
these changes gradual. Practical thermonuclear power generation still isn't here
after fifty years of R&D, although it's getting close. Because
something hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done, or that we shouldn't keep trying.
It's hard to resist quoting some pundits of the past:
"The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances,
known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical
machine by which men shall fly along distances through the air, seems to the
writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration to be."
-- Simon
Newcomb, 1900
"The aeroplane will never fly."
-- Lord Haldane,
Minister of War, Britain, 1907 (four years after Kitty Hawk)
"Space
travel is bunk."
--
Sir Harold Spencer Jones,
Astronomer Royal of the UK, 1957
(two weeks later Sputnik orbited the Earth)
"To
place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling
gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific
observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth--all that constitutes
a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made
voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances."
--
Lee deForest,
American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1957
"Professor
Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to
have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the
basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
--
New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary
rocket work, 1921
(note that the day after Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, the New York
Times printed a short boxed item on page 2. It read in full:
"Errata: It has now been conclusively demonstrated that a rocket ship
can
travel through the vacuum of space. The Times sincerely regrets the error.")
A similar article, "The
Quest for Immortality", by Drs. Olshansky and Carnes, includes some of
the ideas incorporated in the Scientific American article. In their article,
Drs. Olshansky and Carnes state that:
"a caloric restricted diet will not make anyone live to 120 years who does
not already have the potential to live that long anyway." To my knowledge,
the jury is still out on that question, but I have the impression that the study
of calorie-restricted
primates
that is underway is suggesting
that aging is occurring slower
than it does in fully-fed primates. Of course, it will
take another 10 to 20 years to prove that caloric restriction lowers the rate of
aging in rhesus monkeys, and perhaps another century after that to unequivocally
determine whether caloric restriction works in humans, but many of us may be
unwilling to defer judgment that long.
Dr. Roy Walford observes that caloric restriction doesn't
need to be an all-or-none proposition. Even a 10%
reduction calories below what he calls "the setpoint" is said
to be beneficial, up to a caloric restriction of about 50%. Of course, this
requires careful attention to the quality of nutrition as the quantity is
lowered. (Personally, I wouldn't propose that one pursue a calorie-restricted diet, since I'm
hoping that other techniques for treating aging will soon be available. However,
staying lean and well-nourished is probably wise counsel for most of us.)
It's hard to separate medical
intervention from the prolongation of life.
One problem is that a poisonous snake bite or a case of
appendicitis could shorten someone's life. Should they seek medical treatment,
or would we say, "It's God's will. They should go ahead and die so that they can
reduce the world's population."? Medical treatments are inextricably
entangled with the prolongation of life. And over the coming decades, various
kinds of interventions are going to lead to greater and greater life spans.
You probably won't die of old age. You'll die of diseases
such as cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's Disease, or Parkinson's Disease that are
rare among the young. How you feel about cures for these diseases?
Population
management is going to be an issue into the future
We're going to face a continuing population management issue.
The improvement of world health is going to lead to extensions of the average
human life span quite independently of explicit improvements in medical
technology, and this is going to have to be considered in future global
planning. Present projections call for modest population growth to 9 billion
human beings by 2070, followed by a slow population decline.
Sometimes,
problems have to get worse before they become the squeaky wheel that gets the
grease
There are enough urgent problems at any given time that
problems sometimes have to become major before they receive major attention. A
sudden ability to rejuvenate might get attention more quickly than the type of
slow increases in life span that are occurring at the present time.
Ideally, one would like to see our population controlled
voluntarily by an enlightened and concerned citizenry. So far, this is what
we've had. The imposition of central control might tend to lead to rebellion,
black markets, and the peddling of influence. Also, each individual needs to
reproduce himself/herself. On that basis, each couple could have two children.
However:
It seems to me that there are a couple of sticking points
with my rosy scenario.
First, if every person had a child in her or his twenties,
and those children had one child when they were in their twenties, we would
experience a population explosion, since the parents, the grandparents, the
great-grandparents, etc, would also be alive and kicking. The only way this could
work would be if the rates of births and deaths were balanced. That would mean
that most people would have to wait a long time before they had a child. It
would also require a central agency that could keep track of births and deaths.
Second, given extremely long lives, people might change
partners now and then, and might want to have a child with a new partner.
Concurrently with these developments are changes that we can
hardly foresee. What might be the impact of technology upon our ancient ways?
Might we some day have robotic partners? What about virtual partners who exist
only in an artificially intelligent computer, or who consist of actual
individuals living somewhere else?
Fortunately, we don't have to face these problems very soon.
Even if someone came up with a method of providing complete rejuvenation at one
stroke, it would be many years before such a revolutionary development could be
approved for widespread use.
Retardation Or Reversal
of Aging Would Have Major Financial Consequences
If, medically, we could bring 80-year-olds back to the state
of health they were in at 16, there would be a major decline in funerals and
in medical bills. It would impact pharmaceutical companies, and not in a
profitable way. (On the other hand, the marketing of aging reversal agents and
associated pills and interventions would probably generate fabulous
wealth.) Medicine would still be of the highest importance, but the
demand for new M. D.'s would probably fall off until a new balance point were
reached. And drastic changes would have to be made in retirement
arrangements, which would put an extra workload on Congress and upon, e. g.,
insurance companies. Here again, though, there should be ample warning and ample
time to make whatever adjustments might be necessary.
On the plus side, medical costs for Medicare should drop
precipitously. Also, age remediation treatments should generate billions upon
billions of dollars for their purveyors.
Current Status of NIH-Sponsored
Anti-Aging Research in the United States
According to The American Academy of Anti-Aging
Medicine, out of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 2002 budgetary
appropriation of $23.6 billion dollars, $880 million was earmarked for the
National Institute on Aging (NIA). Less than 1% of that windfall, or about $8 million
has been earmarked for the biology of aging. The rest of it is being invested in
studies of the aged, and of how they are coping with their parlous conditions.
($8,000,000 would be a little less than 1/3,000th of the NIH budget.) (However,
it should be noted that in 1999, the NIH funded the University of Wisconsin to
continue their studies of caloric restriction in primates to the tune of $6.75
million.)
Although one certainly wouldn't want to discount the
potential of federally-sponsored biological research into the retardation and
possible reversal of aging, the political cross-winds and bureaucratic
constraints upon federal funding of research may relegate it to an ancillary
role in the battle against senescence. Most funding in this arena is emanating
from the private sector.
Aging (It Is Said) Is the Single
Most Powerful Contributor to Disease and Death
Indirectly, aging is the single most important contributor to
disease and death. The probability
of dying doubles with every 8 years of age, running, perhaps, 250 times as high
(?) at
80 as it does at 16.
Well? Can Aging Be
Tamed?
Can aging be conquered? After all, how much progress have we
really made? Having lived through several of these "It can't be done's.",
I'm comfortable with the conviction that postponing, and hopefully, reversing
aging can be done, and in the fullness of time, it will be done.
Of course, the final proof will come only when the
elimination or reversal of aging has become a fait accompli, but I
believe that there is substantive reason to hope that you will not be condemned
to die of old age. Can I be certain? Not until it happens, but of one fact I can
be certain: if nobody tries, it won't happen.
Within 50
Years....
Within 50 years, and conceivably, within 15, I believe that
aging is going to be a treatable disease. I suspect that eventually, we will
feel about those who allow themselves to grow old the same way we do about
lepers. We will adjust to a life without a cancellation date ("...for.summer's
lease hath all too short a date.") Note that youthfulness does not
mean immortality. People will continue to die from accidents, wars, new
diseases... "all the ills that flesh is heir to."
Stay Tuned!
I'll try to update this again within the next day or two with
ideas about what supplements I'm taking, and why. I'll also point to other
discussions of what you might do to, possibly, slow your own rate of aging, and
about what's on the horizon in the way of approaching therapeutic interventions.
(For example, one string to the bow might be the Harvard spin-off that's trying
to market a product based upon the "Methuselah" gene.)
It's clear that Nature must have some way to insulate each
new generation from the aging of its parental cells. The next step will be to
determine what's been done to determine whether germ cells maintain themselves
in an ageless state, or whether they reconstitute themselves during
reproduction, or whether some of each occurs.
6/20/2000:
A few months
ago, I waxed eloquent concerning a seeming "breakthrough"
in not only the retardation of aging, but in actual rejuvenation,
with the possibility of indefinitely long life spans, as discussed in the link below.
06/02/2000
Interested
in Aging Slower? How About in Total Rejuvenation and Perpetual
Youth? (Ponce de Leon, Move Over!)
This "breakthrough"
was the discovery that an aged somatic cell taken from a very
old cow could give rise to spanking-new calves in which the age-related damage inherent in the old parent cells is somehow completely repaired
in the cloned calves' cells. Since then, there have been other
discussions of this phenomenon, and other discoveries that seem
to me to be gradually moving toward the virtual conquest of aging.
John Campbell, the quondam editor of Analog Science Fiction and
Fact, observed that if significant reductions in the rate of aging
could be effected, this would buy time for further improvements
in prolongevity. He also stated that someone had already been
born who would never die. (This was probably in the 50's or early
60's.)
It's interesting
to think that at some point in time, everyone then alive, through
an accident of birth, deserving or undeserving, would become eligible
for the prolongation of their lives. Gandhi, Einstein, Mother
Therese, and others would be excluded because they were born too
soon.
Of course, accidents
would sooner or later claim everybody, but schemes for copying
the personality to a cloned, identical-twin body have surfaced
in science fiction novels for decades. Various complications could
arise from such currently-unrealizable scenarios. Fredrik Pohl
and Jack Wiliamson, in their "Wall Around a Star", have
visualized a situation in which "Jen Babylon" on earth
steps into a replication booth in which his personality is copied
and sent thousands of light-years to a Dyson sphere around the
distant star "Cuckoo". One of him steps back out of
the booth and goes about his usual business with no greater effect
than as though he'd given a blood transfusion. The other "Jen"
steps out of the booth and is at a far star, forever removed from
the world of his birth.
To return to the
quest for life extension or quasi-immortality, discoveries are
occurring rapidly in this arena, and we may see revolutionary
developments in anti-senescence treatments within the next 10
to 20 years. It might be time to try to establish public financing
of this research. I've thought of contributing directly to leading
prolongevity researchers themselves, rather than through an organization.
Given a list of researchers and their addresses, I'd be willing
to contribute a little money each year to further their research.
What do you think about it? Does it sound practical? Or not?
Dr. Victor Lazaron
has noted that cancer and other diseases would set an upper limit
on practical life extension. The overall rate of cancer mortality
(doubling every 7 years) rises at almost the same rate as the
overall mortality rate (doubling every 8 years). It's perhaps
instructive to think of the cloned calves, whose cancer rates
are reduced to those of other newborn calves rather than running
at the cancer rate of the doddering cow that produced them. But
improved prevention, detection, and cure of cancer might be given
new impetus, if we could otherwise extend human life.
Extending
the Youthspan through Caloric Restriction
Studies
in Yeast:
"In 10 to
15 years, we'll be able to have in hand a drug that could slow
down some of the scourges of aging,'' Guarente (Dr. Leonard Guarente,
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge) said.
Studies in Fruit Flies:
Studies of yeast
at the University of Connecticut Health Center
There have been other studies that found long-life genes in fruit
flies and nematodes. There also have been experiments in mice
that show calorie restriction — a severe diet — can
extend life by up to 50 percent.
Huber Warner,
associate director for research into the biology of aging at the
National Institute of Aging, said the Indy gene discovery is more
significant because “it may be a different way to get the
same effect that caloric restriction achieved in mice and other
organisms."
He said it may
be possible to develop a drug that inhibits metabolism in the
same way as the mutated Indy gene. Such a drug would have to be
tested extensively in animals to assure that it is safe, Warner
said.
"If you wanted
to slow metabolism in people, this research suggests that this
could be a way to do it,” he said. “It is strictly theoretical
right now, but it is a possibility.”
Extending
the Youth Span Through Age Reversal (Rejuvenation)
Scientists
Show Cloning Can Turn Back Developmental Clock and Faithfully
Reproduce X-Inactivation
Of course, condemning our parents and grandparents to death
by the terminal illness of aging when we have within our grasp the possibility
of saving them is more than murder: it's genocide, it's
parricide, and ultimately, it's suicide. It means killing our parents, our
grandparents, and ultimately ourselves. As long as we had no prospects for
slowing, and probably, for reversing aging, it was in the lap of the gods. But
now that we know that Nature has machinery for complete rejuvenation of all Her
living organisms, we can no longer hide our heads in the sand.
Aging
Breakthrough? Cloning Super-Juvenates Cells
On
Living Forever - Interview with Dr. Michael West
A Cocktail-Shaker Full of Historical Opinions and Forecasts
Some
Current Opinions and a Forecast Vis-a-Vis Aging Remediation