Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/can-a-jellyfish-unlock-the-secret-of-immortality.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all

by mhb • 14 years ago

119 42 14 years ago

aresant• 14 years ago

Fun article but as you'd expect from the title "we won’t know for certain what this means for human beings until more research is done."

michael_dorfman• 14 years ago

If a headline is phrased as a question, the answer is always "no." If the answer were "yes", they wouldn't have phrased it as a question.

indiecore2• 14 years ago

Hacker News law of Betteridge's law of headlines: If the headline is applicable Betteridge's Law will always be mentioned.

kghose2• 14 years ago

Also, this fascinates me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

These are cells from a person, Henrietta Lacks, which can be grown in a dish and which keep dividing, for ever.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

From Wikipedia article: "The cells were later commercialized, although never patented in their original form."

Patenting a human cell? That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard.

sergiotapia• 14 years ago

They are patenting certain parts of DNA as we speak. It's nothing new, but it sickens me as well.

travisp• 14 years ago

Nobody patented "a human cell". What can get patented is the method for creating this cell line. Here's the classic (and controversial, but for different reasons) patent related to the Mo cell line (T-lymphoblasts):

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4438032.html

These cell lines do not exist in nature and what is patented was the creation of a new immortalized cell line.

polyfractal• 14 years ago

Fun fact: there are tons of cell lines that are "immortalized", usually using various oncogenes. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

HeLa cells are certainly the most famous. It should be noted that the HeLa stocks used in most labs now are radically different from original HeLa stocks.

Even in routine experiments, you have to keep a bunch of cells frozen in liquid nitrogen to replenish your "working stock" of cells. After around 30-40 passages (e.g. generations of cells), most immortalized cell lines start to get funky with mutations and exhibit different behaviors. You kill them off and go back to your frozen stocks to get back to the "original" genetics.

pacaro• 14 years ago

For the interested, I can highly recommend "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" - http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1...

reasonattlm• 14 years ago

There are the same arguments to be made here for a lack of relevance to humans as in the case of hydra:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/11/investigating-the...

Or lobsters, for that matter, but much more so for these tiny organisms with potent regenerative capacities.

kghose2• 14 years ago

And birds which regenerate hair cells responsible for hearing.

peteretep• 14 years ago

Spoiler: no.

Tipzntrix3• 14 years ago

I think these biologists are betting on "not yet".

stephencanon• 14 years ago

Obviously. It's a jellyfish, it can't even talk.

kleiba• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

Tipzntrix3• 14 years ago

"Increasing human longevity has no meaning, it is ecological nonsense."

This is an interesting quote from the article given by another biologist Stefano Piraino, not the main focus of the article. If we did find the secret to immortality, it would be stupid to give it to everyone. In that case, who gets it?

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

The wealthy.

indiecore2• 14 years ago

People who have no kids and are sterilized permanently.

nsxwolf• 14 years ago

The elite - most intelligent, most beautiful, most valued members of a ruling political party. It would be a 1970s dystopian sci fi movie come to life.

JVIDEL2• 14 years ago

Easy: if you want to be immortal you have to be sterilized too.

And you can't adopt nor rent a womb.

There, no overpopulation problem.

maaku• 14 years ago

Ridiculous. There's a lot more space in this universe than just planet Earth.

emiliobumachar• 14 years ago

Doesn't solve the problem. Suppose I have three kids, then get immortalized and sterilized. Each of my kids does the same...

anonymous• 14 years ago

You are somehow imagining that this will be administered in a strictly controlled manner. It won't. In fact, I will be very sad if it's not part of the regular capitalist marketplace.

Will it lead to overpopulation? Yes. Bloody wars? Yes. Almost completely stagnant population? Suicides left and right by 200-y.o. people? Perverse class imbalance? Complete overhaul of society as we know it? Yesyesyesnotreally.

Because once you institutionalise and put such and such rules in place (a bureaucracy), people stop thinking. They stop thinking and become not people, but things - and they do it to themselves, willingly.

And that is the greatest crime of all.

Tipzntrix3• 14 years ago

This is what I was thinking myself. What's to stop people from going after such immortality? They might very well give an arm and a leg, those on the outside are going to feel maltreated, and might even start a revolution.

As far as the "immortality" for these jellyfish go though, they are rather easy to kill. They can't even eat a whole prawn egg, and their water temperature has to be just right.

doktrin• 14 years ago

Taking but a moment to take a peek down the sci-fi fantasy rabbit hole :

It might potentially be fair to administer "longevity" to those willing to colonize another planet. This would solve the problem of distribution while creating a bit of an incentive to expand human civilization (which might well be an eventual necessity).

louischatriot• 14 years ago

If you don't have time to read this very long (albeit great) piece, the tldr version is: http://tldr.io/tldrs/50b64589bb2203997700060f

efa• 14 years ago

Thank you! Very useful.

username3• 14 years ago

First use case for the tldr.io bookmarklet and someone typed one up.

javajosh• 14 years ago

Yes, thanks. As much as I love the flowery prose of the article, it was really far too long and this tl;dr was much appreciated.

Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

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