Telomeres – Too much of a good thing? | Hacker News Reader

Telomeres – Too much of a good thing?

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

177 pointsdiscombobulate68 comments

This is an interesting subject. I first heard of Telomeres from Dr. Rhonda Patrick[1]. She has her own podcast and actively visits podcasts of other hosts to talk about health and longevity. For anyone interested, link below.

I've gotten flack for mentioning Joe Rogan podcast here before, but I discovered Dr. Patrick through Joe's podcast and her visits are some of my favorites.

[1] https://www.foundmyfitness.com/

Wow, why did you catch flack for mentioning the JRE?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557489

somewhat understandable why people have this view of him and his show. he let's his guests go on about what they think. it's usually a 3hr show. this gives people the perception that he believes in whatever they're saying because he doesn't interrupt his guests all the time.

imo Joe is very open minded, an avg Joe (had to) that is willing to hear people out and is fair handed in contrasting opinions. listening to the one with him, hannibal burris, and sam harris shows that he tries to take emotion out of argument and see where each person is coming from. but other times he'll just repeat things what he has heard other guests has said. for instance drugs that clogs up the blood for bicyclists when he had lance armstrong on.

i wouldn't say his show is scientifically dense though. that really depends on the guest. so when you have a person like rhonda on, yea her field is science and it's going to be dense in that subject matter.

Isn't giving over airtime on your own show somewhat an endorsement? If you're giving them free advertising, you should probably at least spend some time vetting their credibility. Seems irresponsible to give a platform to moon landing truthers.

Moon landing truthers get pretty much almost no time with anyone of consequence, so they are already well black listed. Rogan at least lets you see what is inside of the minds of these people, which is fascinating in itself. No subject, no matter how distasteful or apparently false, should be completely eradicated from the human dialog, even if only to reconfirm your distaste for it.

I kinda have a soft spot for ol' Joe Rogan and I see him hosting moon landing theorists on his show as not unlike Louis Theroux doing a show about UFO nuts. Interestingly enough Rogan did have Theroux on his show once, I was hoping it would be a good interview but it went really badly.

Well every major and minor news source in the US gave air time to a climate change denier, birther, and vaccination sceptic. I mean in the grand scheme of things, the JRE is nothing and IMO some of these guests put forth great ideas I would have never considered. Speaking to this article, I'd be interested to hear if any research has explicitly set out to verify the "long telomeres cause cancer" claim.

Oh hey, I remember that thread! I was supportive, at least.

Jamie, see if you can pull that up

I could never get into it because of his personal beef against veganism (no pun intended).

I think it started when the guys who made Cowspiracy went to his show. After that he went on a mission to find every piece of pseudoscience or blog post that said the animal industry is actually good for the environment, or that plants have feelings, or that vegans were unhealthy, and then went on a Twitter rage against vegans.

It was pretty clear that his open-mindedness was quite limited. The sad thing is that a lot of people think he is a reliable source of information.

One thing to remember about Joe's perspective on veganism is that he is a hunter and public figure, so he has attracted attention from militant vegans. While he has vegan friends and doesn't seem to really care what people eat, he's vocal with his annoyance with that particular subset. Plus he's a comedian, so you can't take anything he says personally.

On a side note, I'm still waiting to hear some hard science on the affects veganism (which clearly doesn't include The China Study). If the right person were out there, I'd be curious to hear them on JRE.

What I've read so far of interest relating to age prevention or reversal since I'm a programmer myself and you may find these interesting...

A Healthy lifestyle slows telomere length decline by producing more telomerase in your system than otherwise. Activities such as aerobic exercise where you sweat a lot, eating very healthy food, having a bit of red wine now and again and probably most important, having a solid network of people you interact with (and or animals) that care about you and express this for the most part in a positive way.

There is also strong evidence that caloric restriction slows your aging process by up to 30% coupled with high nutrition (CRON diet) which is backed up by tons of experiments in animals as seems to be fundamental to our biology.

The company "Elysium" produces a drug "Elysium" $50 that claims to slow the aging process through increasing NAD production which we lose through aging, putting you in maintenance mode (similar to CRON?) without having to starve yourself.

TA Sciences sells TA-65 and claims to elongate telomeres and reversing aging? by boosting telomerase activity from refining the Astralagus root's enzyme and putting it in pill form (1 part in 10,000 so its 10 times more expensive than Elysium).

The other route is gene therapy but it costs 1,000,000 dollars (picture Dr. Evil) which Liz Parrish has partaken in is reported to have increased her telomere length along with a muscle enhancement to avoid sarcopenia.

An interesting one is stem cell infusion that I've read about as well as stem-cell injection sites for stem-cell therapy which has been reported to have miracle-like effects in reversing symptoms of stroke to arthritic conditions but I don't know the pricing on this one.

Aubry De Grey seems to have tons to say on aging but I have yet to make heads or tails of his conclusions even though he seems to be super smart.

David Sinclair is a big proponent of NAD and Sirtuins, having a high degree of credibility in the field and finding proteins that stimulate our production of NAD, seems very sound.

I didn't list references as probably something you should look into yourself and more research is coming out so fast to debunk or bunk it.

Does the caloric restriction thing basically mean that for each person there is a certain amount of food they can eat before they die?

That wasn't a finding that I read about anywhere but I'm sure if you ate 1000 hotdogs in a day you would die.

That's as much of a folktale as the "you have a certain number of heartbeats before you die" story. No.

One thing to bear in mind is that most of the relevant studies are carried out in mice, and mouse telomere dynamics are significantly different from those of humans.

Telomerase gene therapies clearly slow aging and extend life in mice to some degree, but the actual mechanism involved is up for debate. We can argue that it has more to do with stem cell activity and influence on mitochondrial function for example than keeping cells out of senescence.

My comfort level for telomerase therapies would be increased by running them in dogs or another longer lived mammal with telomere dynamics that are closer to those of humans and observing the results there. Of course this might well be beaten out by actually running them in humans if the BioViva / Sierra Sciences collaboration gets their medical center running in Fiji to offer the gene therapy at a reasonable cost some time in the next year or two.

Liz Parrish had some cutting edge genetic therapy done to increase her telomeres.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3ocsbi/ama_my_n...

We don't know how it will end up for her. She might live past 150, or she might get horrible cancers all over her body in 5 years.

We also don't know if she actually had undergone the treatment, it can simply be a scam.

Truly, anything can be a scam. I think the most disappointing outcome for her will be if she lives out the rest of her life in an average way. Did it work? Didn't it work? Sure, living past 90 would be nice but did her treatment have anything to do with it if that's the case? There are some things we won't know in our lifetimes.

If it worked I would expect her to start looking younger in some way.

I believe increasing telomere length may slow ageing, but wouldn't reverse it.

I'm moderately impressed that she hasn't already eruputed into a tumour monster.

It's been a year and so far no success...

while unfortunately we have not yet succeeded in undoing all aspects of aging just yet, we have gathered tantalizing human data for the first time in history

http://bioviva-science.com/blog/one-year-anniversary-of-biov...

Tert has been shown to have non-canonical functions interacting with signaling pathways (wnt and nf-kb). It's easy to think of genes as a single function entity when the truth is a lot of genes have pleiotropic effects. The same can probably be said for other genes involved in telomere maintenance. It's probably more complicated than a simple correlation between length of telomere and resulting phenotype.

This is a really well written article. I knew nothing about telomars, their importance in the field, nor the controversy surrounding their length.

While some of it was over my head (specifically that image of telomar transformation(?)), the author did a fantastic job of giving an overview of the field, create a compelling argument (at least to a layman), all with several links that (I hope) support and cite his arguments.

Good lessons in persuasive writing here.

Interesting how entities initially considered more or less as packaging stuff without much use, such as histones and telomeres, turn out to be a lot more than that. People, and investors, may tend to focus on the obviously active part of the code and to overlook the architecture.

Like how thr non-coding regions of the genome were termed junk DNA

The term junk DNA is mostly used in popular science media, not by scientists themselves. It was pretty obvious early that some noncoding regions did do something and weren't just junk, but somehow the term still survived.

Lots of scientists use the term junk DNA. I've worked in and around sequencing for 20+ years now and the term in common in arguments about what the function of non-coding regions is.

In my introduction to biology class at UVU in 2004 they taught us "junk DNA."

My bio course taught the terms introns and exons.

Exons are the portions of DNA that are used to express proteins.

Introns correspond to "junk DNA" and are removed prior to protein expression. Their function is not fully understood.

This is missing a ton of important details.

Much of so-called junk DNA is in non-coding regions that are not within introns. For example, there are long regions containing just repetitive viral DNA sequences with no coding DNA anywhere; this is often what people mean when they say junk DNA. But those regions aren't intronic, because they are not spliced out of the preprocessed mRNAs.

In the textbooks and online resources I used to learn molecular bio, the term junk DNA was used liberally

the term junk was intended to convey something apparently worth keeping (perhaps in the attic), as opposed to garbage, which is thrown away.

I feel like evolution would have weeded out significant waste from common systems shared among life. We may have been too quick to throw things we find in the junk pile instead of the "probably don't completely understand how this fits together yet" heap.

I agree with your second point, but not the first.

If true waste has very little/no cost associated with it, evolution wouldn't be able to select for it's removal.

That's a great point, though I surmise that there is no waste in the human body.

Human's constituents are entirely composed of cells or organelles, and those all consume energy. If there were any cells/organelles that did not contribute at all to the human, he would have a lower performance than humans without the waste, and so evolution would select them out.

I surmise that there is no waste in the human body

This is a naive interpretation of evolution. For one, selection doesn't occur instantaneously.

I'm waiting for the onions, with their ability to replicate a genome 5X larger than hours, to suddenly take over. ;-)

So quick questions: Is this Elysium Health supplement I'm taking going to give me cancer?!

I've seen those ads. It's pretty unlikely that it will substantially increase your cancer risk. I would also mention that while there is some science behind their claims, the studies they put on their site are insufficient (n=120 people, t=8 weeks of study) to make any medically valid claims, and the efficacy of the treatment (consuming NAD+ and plant sterols) hasn't been clinically proven to have a positive effect on human health. They also don't claim the participants saw a benefit, just that their NAD+ levels were elevated

I am personally bullish on the thought process behind NAD+ [1], but I probably wouldn't buy a consumer product for it today without some serious clinical proof. Caveat Emptor.

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4112140/

Disclaimer: I'm involved in the business side of the aging industry, but I only have a BSc in Genetics/Biochem, not a PhD.

This type of thinking is exactly why we are where we are today with Trump.

It's not an endorsement to have a conversation, for God's sake. People seem to have forgotten that freedom of speech includes the freedom to sound as stupid as you want. If it's so glaringly obvious to you that it's dumb, then have the confidence that others will find it dumb too. Don't deny people the opportunity to even talk with them because they're interested in what others have to say. You end up driving people underground, which is even more dangerous, like what happened with the Trump supporters, who were too afraid to even talk about the issues that were motivating them.

You are conflating minority viewpoints with reputability. No serious media source would invite a conspiracy theorist with no credibility. Differing viewpoints are an important part of any discussion.

Stop changing the subject. The issue that you brought up is whether or not Joe Rogan giving air time to something is endorsing it. Which it isn't. It's having a conversation on a podcast.

And why are you comparing Joe Rogan to a "serious media source"? He's a comedian with a podcast, who can talk to whomever he wants that he deems interesting.

>Stop changing the subject. The issue that you brought up is whether or not Joe Rogan giving air time to something is endorsing it.

I was referring to an endorsement of the person, not the topic. ie "Seems irresponsible to give a platform to moon landing truthers."

The concept of "platform" (and thus no-platforming) is an area where IMO ostensibly progressive society has gone off the rails. It starts with good intentions, maybe as a reaction to the silliness of giving equal time to scientists and unqualified critics on mainstream media.

But then it morphs into this idea that thinking and talking about an idea, or being seen with people who hold an idea, without foaming at the mouth against it is the same as endorsing it, and that is a very dangerous place to be.

Hah! The interesting thing about 'reputability' is this - Your ideas have to be in about the same ballpark as mine. If they are any more, then you're just a crazy conspiracy theorist who I shan't waste my time on. Any less, then you're just one of the sheeple who believes in the propaganda and will not question, so no point in wasting time in engaging in a conversation.

Think about it.

Jesus Christ tens of millions of people voted for Trump, they were in no way underground or suppressed

Wrong. All the polls said Clinton would win, some by a large margin. A significant number of Trump voters weren't ready to admit even to pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump. But they voted for him in the voting booths.

Edit: How did we get talking about the US Presidential polls on a submission about telomeres? Let's try to keep discussions on topic as much as possible rather than moving into inflammatory territory (as you did upthread) just because we might be able to tie it in somehow, no matter what's been said upthread.

Original comment:

Polling is inexact. It's a sample. Just as many people misunderstand how "theory" is used in science compared with in conversational speech, or how <particular topic you have knowledge about> is misrepresented in the news, and general public misunderstandings of statistics, and that the line between polls and predictions wasn't made clear. All of that can and should be improved.

I wonder what the demographic breakdown is of people who refuse to answer a phone call from an unknown number, or refuse to answer polls or surveys if they do pick up?

There's a lot of miscommunication going on with people not listening to each other. It's great that you are engaging in the conversation. Using the polls in the non-nuanced way you are here is just as bad as how the polls were used. As you mention upthread, there's a lot of assumptions being made all around, attributing positions and beliefs beyond what's actually being expressed. Let's engage each other honestly and with charity, and find some common understanding, if not agreement.

Is being presented with polls that aren't in your favor suppression now? I didn't learn this definition of being suppressed until this election from trump supporters, according to whom predictions against you are some form of bullying or suppression.

And what evidence do you have that there was an undue number of "shy" trump voters? There are some every time around. This [1] article says there's not much evidence of shy voters accounting for trump's victory.

Why should I believe the presidential candidate of half the country's voters was some underground repressed phenomenon?

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shy-voters-probably-aren...

Please don't take threads on generic partisan flamewar tangents.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13159598 and marked it off-topic.

The first time I heard about telomeres many years ago, it blew my mind. What everyone has thought of, but no scientist is willing to say out loud is that maybe if the telomere count is reset (like it is for babies!), then we'd have cellular immortality. You could still die from accidents, disease, homicide, but not from ageing.

One sentence background info: Telomeres set a count on how many times a cell can divide before it ceases to divide and becoming old and useless; in humans, the count is 40-60 divisions and then you (the cell anyway) dies. Simplified, but that's the essence.

Yes, this is all extreme speculation, but if telomeres are the basis of ageing, can you imagine the upside for discovering a "cure" for that?

If only someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg were willing to throw a billion or $10 billion to answer this question. Ideally it should be government funding it -- like an Apollo moon shot or Manhattan project effort. But any kind of research with words like "immortality" in it will never get off the ground. It has to be funded by an individual or maverick organization.

On the contrary, plenty of scientist have had the idea and researched the topic. It is not that easy because immortal cells have the tendency to become cancerous.

Before suggesting intellectual dishonesty in all scientists check the first paragraph of the article that says as much.

I didn't accuse anyone of dishonesty. Scientists do say that long telomeres are associated with longer life. But they are very cautious in not saying (at least publicly): Let's see if we can find a way to lengthen or regenerate telomeres and see whether that permits immortal cells and people living hundreds of years.

"What everyone has thought of, but no scientist is willing to say out loud"

What no scientist is willing to say out loud, is basically what scientists have been saying out loud since the mid 90ies. It has nothing to do with unwillingness to talk about the subject, but it has not been pushed that hard because there was* a strong belief that messing with telomeres had a very high risk of causing cancer.

*is? Although I think this belief has softened lately

> what scientists have been saying out loud since the mid 90ies

Maybe when they speak privately, but every scientist has a huge fear of branded a crackpot if they said something even remotely like, "I'm researching the possibility that we can make immortal cells".

To take one concrete example, Geron, a company that is/was very active in this area was always careful to say that they are investigating telomerase to control cancers, etc. They never even hint that they might possibly be interested in the Holy Grail result of solving ageing.

> What everyone has thought of, but no scientist is willing to say out loud is that maybe if the telomere count is reset (like it is for babies!), then we'd have cellular immortality.

Plenty of scientist are actively thinking about this and are fighting against that because that's precisely one of the things that cancerous cells do.

Further reader: Hallmarks of Cancer, the next generation, Hanahan & Weinberg 2011, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21376230 (open access)

Did you read the posted article? He's arguing the contrary position (longer telomeres, longer lifespan), which is the opposite of the traditional view that we can't tamper with telomere length because it'll cause cancers to grow too fast.

They're not the basis of aging, they're just a component of it. Even with immortal cell lines, your body would still sag and decay, as there is so much we have no regenerative capability for. We can't even regenerate small patches of skin without leaving scars

Telomeres also have a function. It's no coincidence that telomere-lengthening telomerase is active in 90% of cancer cells. Telomeres might be an important cancer-inhibiting mechanism. It's in principle a good first defense against uncontrolled cell division

You're speculating about what's not possible. Considering that the upside of telomere breakthrough is so enormous, why don't we also speculate on what might be possible?

You can grow fresh skin, new legs, new arms, and a new heart by having a baby. A baby comes from your cells in which telomeres have been reset. If it possible for you to generate fresh skin, legs, etc. for a baby, there might be a way, hypothetically, for you to regenerate your own skin and legs using some similar mechanism.

We still have the homologues of the old regeneration genes that are still active in lizards and such. However, they're not usable because of our strong tumor suppression genes.

We're at least a thousand times bigger than a small lizard and expect to live much longer. Sadly, evolution favored cancer suppression in our genes to ensure our longevity and regeneration didn't provide enough to keep it around. It would be an absolutely monumental task to reverse tens of billions of generations worth of genetic change, and we would basically have to cure cancer first for it to be useful.

Hoping for telomeres to be the basis for aging is unlikely to yield fruit. There is a nice summary of the basis for aging [1] and I think it lays out a case for aging to be more involved and harder to surmount than that.

Telomeres are widely recognized as related to aging, and there is intensive interest in therapies to try to test the hypothesis that keeping them longer will prolong life or reduce disease. In fact, there are over 100 clinical trials on the topic [2].

1 = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/

2 = https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=Telomere&Search=...

The idea that we'll just find one simple magic change and that will vastly reduce aging/senescence is wishful thinking. Literally nothing in our biology works that way.

> The idea that we'll just find one simple magic change and that will vastly reduce aging/senescence is wishful thinking

I used to agree with that sentiment. Except a single mutation in a single protein seems to be responsible for sleepers that only require ~6 hours/night for a full night's rest. There's a lot of strange stuff in biology.

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/genetic-modifications/

"then we'd have cellular immortality. You could still die from accidents, disease, homicide, but not from ageing."

Is death from "aging" a medically recognized cause of death? I thought people died from things like heart attacks, cerebral hemmorages, etc.

"If only someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg were willing to throw a billion or $10 billion to answer this question."

Google's way ahead of you. They have an anti-aging startup.[1] I'd be curious to find out if the fruits of their research will be available to the general public or only Google employees.

[1] - http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/googles-anti-aging-...

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