Blood of world's oldest woman hints at limits of life

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25458-blood-of-worlds-oldest-woman-hints-at-limits-of-life.html#.U1kP70BOUoD

by happyscrappy • 12 years ago

162 126 12 years ago

jostmey• 12 years ago

Our body contains literally trillions of cells. It is absurd to think that among all these cells there will be only a few mutations. Mutations will occur in all cell types all over the body.

What I find really interesting is that the mortality distribution in Gompertz's law may be predicted using the Euler-Lotka equation. This says that the reason we die is because there is an absence of selective pressure for the individual in a species to live longer (link: http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full.pdf)

s_baby• 12 years ago

This says that the reason we die is because there is an absence of selective pressure for the individual in a species to live longer

Or there is a selective pressure making sure organisms don't have indefinite lifespans. You need death for a constant stream of sexual reproduction.

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

The longer an organism lives the more it can reproduce, the more copies of it's genes there will be. Any gene that increases (reproductive) lifespan is strongly selected for.

exratione3• 12 years ago

For my money the nuclear DNA damage angle is actually the more interesting part of this. The research community has for some years been debating whether or not stochastic nuclear DNA damage is important in aging outside of the issue of cancer. The consensus educated assumption has long been to think of course, nuclear DNA damage should lead to loss of protein homeostasis, and is therefore a meaningful contributing cause of aging, not just of raised risk of cancer. However there is nowadays plenty of evidence to support the opposite view, that the levels of stochastic nuclear mutations seen in human tissues really don't matter over the present human life span. Other than cancer.

This would be good if it continues to hold up. The less we have to fix in order to produce a first generation of treatments that effectively treat aging - i.e. produce rejuvenation - the better. Fixing nuclear DNA damage is going to be plausible via global DNA editing technologies like CRISPR, but we're a long way from doing it for all genes to restore to a template and erase damage. Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection. If you're 20-40 years away from peak cancer age in a wealthy region of the world, then I don't think your odds of dying from cancer are very large at all.

sspiff2• 12 years ago

You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing.

Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment. Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear.

Furthermore, we'd have even more competition over the limited amount of resources and habitable land than we have today.

Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation.

rch• 12 years ago

Don't worry, I'm sure there will be rejuvenation visas for engineers who are willing to work at a discount for the remainder of their extended lives.

jodrellblank6• 12 years ago

Translation: "I'm so jealous of rich people that I want people to die because of it".

Edit: See also the SciFi story Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_with_Lichen

wyager2• 12 years ago

You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing. Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich

You say this as though the primary concern of human existence is economic equality.

You're also making the assumption that rejuvenation tech won't be cheap enough for everyone at some point.

exratione3• 12 years ago

There is something about the prospect of treating aging that makes people take leave of all economic common sense.

Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies.

One of the interesting things about our age is that medicine is largely flat. Rich people can buy more time from more expensive physicians, and pay people to do their legwork and phone calls for them, and lie in pain in better-looking ward rooms, but there are very, very few forms of medical technology available to them that is unavailable to someone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and the time to make the phone calls and do the legwork.

Given that the treatments for human rejuvenation will be infusions (made up in a lab-factory in bulk, or a specialist clinical plant to order, and requiring very little attention from trained staff to administer) rather than surgeries (requiring a great deal of time from specialist staff to carry out), I think that the odds of their remaining expensive for long are minimal. Economies of scale emerge rapidly for such things.

(Infusions because these treatments will be things like delivery of engineered bacterial enzymes, gene therapies for mitochondrial DNA, drugs to break down cross-linked proteins, stem cell transplants, and so forth).

Look at stem cell transplants as the model of how the price of such therapies rapidly moves downward due to inter-regional competitive pressure for treatments of this nature.

carbocation• 12 years ago

The same is true of all medical therapy to some extent.

chongli• 12 years ago

Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment.

The problem with inequality is not that rich people exist or that they live powerful, opulent lifestyles. The problem with inequality is poverty. Shutting down amazing research such as this is not going to solve poverty. To argue otherwise risks running afoul of the fallacy of relative privation.

The scientists working on this would not be able to solve the issues of poverty and inequality anyway since it has absolutely nothing to do with their area of expertise.

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing.

Your response implies that any of the concerns you raised is sufficiently large that letting a hundred people die every minute is better.

Yes, curing death would raise other problems. Bring them on.

3pt14159• 12 years ago

Oh please. The rich always pay for the research and advances that the poor eventually get for commodity prices. And even if we fully cure death by aging, death by accidents puts the average lifespan somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 year period, given the drastically dropping birth rates in the first world, we'll have more than enough time to reach space or colonize the oceans, or build low orbit cities.

With every new 1000 people we get 10 new scientists, 10 new engineers, 10 new software guys; and technological advancement is easily sharable.

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

Healthcare is free if not heavily subsidized in much of the world already. And there is no reason such a technology would be more expensive than existing health care.

But why am I even bothering to say this. You're literally arguing it's bad to save people's lives or advance medicine. Even if it really did only benefit rich people, so what? Rich people dying doesn't benefit poor people in any significant way. See zero-sum bias (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2gd/fight_zerosum_bias/). "I want to see rich people suffer" rather than "I want to see poor people benefit."

fsk2• 12 years ago

Even if it were possible to 100% eliminate death by aging for $1, it's statistically impossible for everyone to live forever.

option_greek• 12 years ago

It's not the poor or the rich that matter. Its the advancement of human race that matters. Just think of scientists being able to use their experience for ever in pushing the boundaries. We probably won't even have to be earth bound anymore and can expand to other planets due quickening of scientific pace.

zo15• 12 years ago

Looks like someone has been watching too many Matt Damon movies. <ducks>

On a more serious, less snarky note, though: Why are you so scared of there even being a "wealthy dynasty"? For that matter, you and people with similar views as you are yet to prove that it would even be a bad thing. I'm curious how you arrive at such a conclusion; step me through it?

"Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation." Doom-sayers were spreading similar fud about food and population growth barely a century ago, and look how that turned out. Science is always a few steps away from fixing a plethora of the world's ills. Precisely as the above food-dilemma shows. And yet on the other side, you would seek to deny science power to prevent such things from actually being a problem? Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy you have there, buddy.

cwp• 12 years ago

Rejuvenation would be a good thing. It may not be available to everyone immediately, but that's true of every technology.

What makes you think this would only be available to the rich? That could happen, but it's not a given. The actual techniques that we're talking about might not be expensive. The original article mentioned saving stem cells extracted early in life and reintroducing them in old age. That sounds like something that could be done cheaply on a large scale.

And even if it is expensive, we don't have to make everyone pay out of their own pocket. Redistribution is a dirty word in the US, but that's not true everywhere in the world.

So yes, there may be social issues to deal with, but that's not a reason not to develop the technology. It's a reason to develop our society.

ufmace• 12 years ago

The trouble with the "space travel will save us from overpopulation" argument is that, no matter what technology we come up with in the medium-term future, it is difficult to imagine ever solving overpopulation problems with emigration of any type - we just can't move enough people fast enough. As far as I know, in the entire history of the world, we have never moved enough of a population of healthy, established citizens of any region to alleviate any overpopulation issues. Anything even kind of like that mostly involves heavily threatened populations relocating under duress with little more than what they can carry. If they're lucky, they might manage to settle somewhere that will help them get back on their feet.

There was an interesting passage in the Red Mars series about this. On their Earth, then had 11 (!) operational space elevators and a severe overpopulation problem. The numbers were all theoretical, of course, but they calculated that, even with 11 space elevators working full-tilt on sending people off the planet, they still wouldn't come close to making a dent in the world population. It's hard to imagine any kind of technology that could actually move and settle people off of Earth by the billions.

dekhn4• 12 years ago

So, as cancer is one of the leadng causes of death, your prediction implies that population (especially older population) will increase. Or people will die of other things. That's an important thing to be prepared for (the other thing people die of in first world countries is heart disease).

Anyway, I suspect the future won't be quite so rosy as you predict. Many people have predicted revolutions in cancer treatment, but realistically, we've only made incremental (great, but only incremental) progress.

embwbam• 12 years ago

Have you read The Emperor of all Maladies? The impression I got from the book was that we are finally beginning to understand the mechanisms behind specific cancers and create therapies to fix them. It seems like we are close to beating cancers one at a time with targeted drugs.

briantakita• 12 years ago

Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection

There have also been innovations in holistic care, including cases of cancer remission.

Promising aspects of holistic care is it's relatively inexpensive, easy to train practitioners, & covers a wide swath of healthy living.

Some of it is incorrect and some of it works. I trust that our culture will iterate & hone in on the good practices.

solox3• 12 years ago

Older people die from not being able to perform mitosis of vital cells (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12573379) -- a decade-old observation. She is just a new, other data point.

logfromblammo3• 12 years ago

I wonder if the technology and the knowledge will ever be at the point where "life hackers" are extracting their own stem cells, applying home-brewed telomerase, and reinjecting them. It seems like the sort of thing that a subset of HN folks would do.

happyscrappy• 12 years ago

The article mentions that possibly all you would have to do is remove some stem cells at a young age and inject them when you are older. Presumably the cells would be kept alive at very low metabolism so they don't divide much.

jasonford1• 12 years ago

I met a woman at the first Quantified Self (http://quantifiedself.com/) conference who was very much into such activities. She wasn't performing the process you described, but she absolutely would be willing. Experimenting with biology in your own homemade closet lab becomes more and more financially feasible everyday.

atrus• 12 years ago

I would hope not, as simply extending telomeres is a fantastic way to give yourself cancer.

logfromblammo3• 12 years ago

It is my understanding that some forms of cancerous cells extend their own telomeres, so having stem cells with shorter telomeres is not a defense against this. In any case, wouldn't the cancer be the result of damage to the coding DNA or the intercellular environment anyway, and not a function of telomere length?

The telomeres are there to ensure that the cells with more transcription errors die first. But in the case of aging, there are no younger cells for this die-off process to prefer. Given the choice between a certainty of cancer and cells that cannot even reproduce, some people may roll the dice with cancer, and hope they can live long enough to overcome that problem as well.

dekhn4• 12 years ago

I've been waiting 20 years for people to do this. Still waiting. As the people who want to make glowing plants for streetlights have learned, reality is tough

naterator• 12 years ago

Meta: I love that lately there have been more health and biology related submissions here on HN. Dovetails nicely with YC new shift/interest, and matches one of my great personal interests.

Do other like this as well, or do people wish that HN would stay focused on software, VC, and traditional tech? Just curious. Obviously it's getting upmodded, but still curious to hear if there is another side.

alandarev• 12 years ago

Technology by itself, existing inside of computers alone, limits the possibilities of impacting our lives.

Companies which manage to use technology to actually change the lives of people usually cause greater impact overall, and I am just as you happy to read articles of such examples. In this case, it isn't a ready product, nor any change at this point, but a fundamental step towards.

judah• 12 years ago

Technology + medicine = huge advancement for humanity.

This really is a frontier that has yet to come to full fruition. I'm all for YC/HN spreading into biology and medicine.

Personally, it is an area I'd like to move towards in my own career. I love web development and technology, but I'd love it more if I could apply it to medicine in some way, to produce a more tangible benefit to humanity.

eyko• 12 years ago

Does this mean that donating blood reduces your number of white blood cells, and hence your life?

saalweachter3• 12 years ago

My vague understanding is that your blood stem cells are in your bone marrow.

nightcracker• 12 years ago

Yes, but the article suggests that the amount of blood they can produce is limited in your lifetime before they burn out.

So the question still stands: does donating blood mean a shorter maximum lifespan, because you can no longer replenish your own blood cells?

gameshot911• 12 years ago

This part caught my interest: "Holstege says the results raise the possibility of rejuvenating ageing bodies with re-injections of stem cells saved from birth or early life. These stem cells would be substantially free of mutations and have full-length telomeres."

Makes me wonder if I should take a blood sample now (age 26) and have it frozen on the off chance that it would be of use later in life. Basically a hedge against, 50 years from now, "well we have the amazing rejuvenation technology that can replenish the fresh blood cells, but only if we have a sample of 'young' blood. Sorry everyone aged 60+."

DEinspanjer• 12 years ago

Yep. I jumped to the exact same conclusion. I did a quick search to see what was out there and I came across this article from 2008 talking about a few such companies and how it was being discounted by many scientists as not likely to be useful: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/health/29stem.html?pagewan...

At least a couple of the companies mentioned in that article appear to be out of business. The prices quoted back then are non-trivial for middle class Americans.

It still seems like the sort of thing that might be worth the expense. If they come up with the solution when I'm 80, but I don't have any source of young stem cells to rely on...

Same goes doubly for my kids.

jebus989• 12 years ago

This really isn't worth worrying about. I know it seems like a Pascal's wager scenario but "youth of stem cells" isn't a problem. We know how to lengthen telomeres (hTERT) and generating human iPSCs is a routine procedure.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I think that would be wise. We don't know what kind of technology we'll have in 50 years. On the other hand, perhaps it will be so advanced that you won't even need your own stem cells to get rejuvenated. Would that be possible?

logfromblammo3• 12 years ago

I'd like to pull out some stem cells and make a slight alteration to my phi-GULO pseudogene, and inject the altered cells into my liver. That seems relatively simple and within the reach of current technology.

Within 40 years, I can envision sequencing multiple instances of my nuclear DNA, detecting and correcting the transcription error noise, and resequencing what is likely my "original" DNA sequence as the basis for a reconstructed stem cell.

That cell would be multiplied, and the resulting rejuva-goo injected into several points on my body under general anaesthesia.

But that process would still be 10 to 100 times more expensive than one used by people who had access to preserved cells from their younger self. The upside is that this process could also screen for and correct known genetically-linked diseases, or species-wide flaws such as the aforementioned phi-GULO at a marginal additional cost.

exratione3• 12 years ago

My thinking on this is that by the time your banked cells might in theory be useful, the research community will have figured out how to make any old cell do everything that they want it to.

You might look at progress in induced pluripotency and very small embryonic like stem cells to see how rapidly things are moving there for the creation of useful cells.

Also worth noting: the preliminary signs are so far weighing on the side of concluding that cells from old people are not significantly less useful than cells from a young person for the purposes of therapy. The bigger differences are inside the body, in the cellular environment.

And again, all the incentives in the very well funded stem cell research community lie in the direction of fixing or working around everything that will prevent them from applying treatments to old people. The overwhelming majority of people (i.e. potential customers) with conditions that would benefit from stem cell treatments are old people, and thus large sections of the research community are working on understanding and manipulating the activities of stem cells in old tissues to try to (a) figure out exactly why they are not working as well as they used to, and (b) restore them to action.

There are some interesting experiments in heterochronic parabiosis that are worth looking into, but also many other lines of work in which researchers are identifying specific signal proteins that direct stem cells into ever greater quiescence. This is most likely an evolved program to lower the risk of death by cancer, reacting to rising levels of cellular damage, at the cost of greater dysfunction and eventual death by tissue failure.

scrabble• 12 years ago

What would prevent someone from simply getting a blood transfusion from someone younger?

In that same line of thinking, if I'm donating blood or giving blood samples regularly, does that increase the chance that I will die at a younger age?

cab_codespring• 12 years ago

I wonder if there is a way to save some of your stem cells now, while you are are younger, just in case the technology is available when you are older.

grok2• 12 years ago

A comment in this article about the "worn-down" telomeres in the lady's white-blood cells makes me wonder if it would be possible to study the size of white-blood telomeres in any person relative to their brain cell telomeres and predict how long someone is likely to live (given no other health problems)...

Blood of world's oldest woman hints at limits of life

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