Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
For example:
1. The 20th century brought us the "war to end all wars," followed by a "lost generation" that essentially turned to boozing and high living as a way of escaping the loss of joy and the mass death of trench warfare; it brought us the mechanized warfare of WWII, by which devastation and death rained from the skies upon countless thousands of innocent people, the vision of a Third Reich and mass slaughter in ovens of an innocent religious group, from which thousands recoiled in horror but were powerless either to stop or to comprehend how such things were possible, and nuclear death that engulfed massive numbers of Japanese innocents, from which a mass stockpiling of such devastating weapons by the world's superpowers ensued, with follow-on proliferation now having reached into the hands of megalomaniacal dictators whose main claim to previously unthinkable levels of power will lie mainly in having developed such weapons and in being prepared potentially to use them, all followed by a "beat generation" that turned to drugs and other forms of escapism, and by a "hip generation" that did the same and by subsequent generations that are still groping in the dark, so to speak, to make sense of it all while somehow hoping that mankind will improve dramatically in its quest to achieve peace and tranquility notwithstanding all the sorry history to the contrary in ages past. As technology enables us to develop ever-greater forms of lethality, does anyone see "immortality" in his future even if one could live appreciably beyond the limit of 100 years that serves today as a pretty good measure of when the very few remaining representatives of a generation will in themselves be on the verge of dying. Yes, we all hope for solutions but let us see evidence of such solutions in action before laying claim to immortality.
2. The obvious problem that, when one reaches much beyond the age of 90, he begins to "fall apart." I know that is not a scientific phrase, but it accurately describes what happens when senility, dementia, and other mental problems attack the mind, when the body shrinks and most muscle mass is lost, when the skin deteriorates, and when cancer, congestive heart failure (or other heart disease), strokes, arterial, vascular, and blood problems, or any one of countless other illnesses attack and eventually overwhelm the body. And when there is no obvious illness, there is a winding down, a dying in one's sleep, a passing away owing to "natural causes." It would be one thing if some or most of these illnesses has been cured and scientists were able to say, "we are close and in a short while we will solve the remaining problems." It is quite another when science has not the slightest idea, based on today's knowledge, of how to solve even some of this onslaught of lethal conditions that affects us all at life's end.
3. The pure force of random accidents. This may not mean much if a lifespan is measured by a century. Multiply that by several centuries (assuming the other problems could be solved) and, in time, the odds will catch up with most people. Thus, solving the aging problem still leaves unsolved the cases of accidental, traumatic death, etc. that has never been a trivial problem at any point in history.
This piece, to my mind, projects fairly extreme forms of wish fulfillment in assuming that modern science is anywhere close to holding the "key" to solving any of this, much less in speculating that the answers lie in analyzing the genes of the little girl featured in this piece.
I understand the fascination of believing that potentially vast amounts of human betterment might result from the careful study of genetic conditions, and I have no doubt that much genuine progress can come from such studies. But science has to be tied to reality, above all things, and it does no service to its cause to deny the obvious (such as the items noted above), or to engage in what I believe are unsubstantiated speculations about "immortality," in hoping for the best from any given avenue of research.
Apart from speculating about immortality, this piece is interesting, and even fascinating, in highlighting the study of this young girl's unusual condition.
Beyond that, surely child mortality, literacy, and poverty are enough to prove your point, GDP doesn't really even fit!
How about the fraction of disposable personal income spent on food?
http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/cpifoodandexpenditures/data...
From 1929 to the present that has dropped from 23.4% to 9.5%. This despite what other evidence suggests is a considerable increase in the quantity and overall quality of said food. For instance today we eat far more meat per capita than people did 80 years ago, and meat is rather expensive.
> This despite what other evidence suggests is a considerable
> increase in the quantity and overall quality of said food
Currently -- iirc -- most fertilizers come from livestock feces. My personal views on whether or not we should be 'farming living beings' notwithstanding... You have to feed those livestock something in order for them to produce feces. The current practice is to grow food for them (or to feed them the ground out remains of other livestock animals). So you need to grow more food in order grow more food? That doesn't seem sustainable.
This is not even getting to the issues we have with fertilizers running off into waterways and creating 'dead zones.'
2. The growth of 'comfort' or 'junk' foods I see as more of a regression than anything else. Their existence would be fine, if it weren't that some people don't know the meaning of moderation...
You have chosen to compare what I was talking about, GDP (Nominal in this case) and a percentage of dollars (since you quote the USDA, I was talking about worldwide btw, just like the op) to food. It's an apples to oranges comparison, and for the most part, reinforces my comment above, that someone down-voted.
Yes, we spend less on food than we did in 1929. Do you have cows in your back yard btilly? Probably not. Why do I ask? Because comparing the farming industry in 1929 to the industry of 2010 is like comparing the age of slaughtering your own "home-raised" cow, to the age of mechanized cow raising, slaughtering, and delivery into the closest super market. Um, of course the price is lower. The real interesting part, though, is that the price could be even lower if the money supply wasn't artificially increased by trillions of dollars. Fun fact, if $1.00 would have purchased $1.00 worth of goods in 1929 (which it did), if you had instead, saved it until 2010, it would purchase ... wait for it ... $0.08 worth of goods. Does that not strike you as odd, that although productivity has boomed, e.g., we can make more things for less dollars, the value of the dollar has plummeted?
But to the main point, it shows by your argument that you failed to grasp the full extent of what I was saying. Money is just paper. How do I know that? When a country can lend itself (by selling its paper for another countries paper, in the case of the US, China purchases the vast majority of US treasuries, though, no one even knows if China is printing money, or being disciplined with their monetary policy) trillions of dollars and put that into circulation, of course the GDP will rise, but has progress been made? NO. GDP is nominal, not absolute, and it does not reflect productivity, or even actual PHYSICAL output! It reflects prices.
In a small country of 10 people, if all of those people have $1, and a barrel of oil is $1, the GDP is $10 or 10 barrels of oil. If the government prints up $10 more dollars and hands it out to those 10 people, now everyone has $20, but oil prices increase to $20 since MV = PQ. Ah, now the GDP is $20, but we can still only buy 10 barrels of oil. Now that is Your kind of progress.
My point, to wrap it up, was that things like global literacy and hunger are things we have been improving. Improving global GDP has no measurable impact by just inflating the number. The number is just a number unless it is put in real terms, which is not how the original post read when it listed "improving global GDP" as some kind of accomplishment.
Before you asked for a real currency, backed by something. With the implicit point that you don't believe the numbers.
Well my point is that any basket of goods implicitly defines a currency. Therefore food defines a currency, which is backed by the very real effort and resources it takes to produce that food. I've shown that GDP per capita in that "currency" has gone up. I presented figures for the USA because that is what I found first, but the same is true for the world as a whole. This is true at the same time that the number of people has gone up. Which means that food production must have gone up a lot.
You demanded a real measuring stick. I gave one. There is nothing special about that measuring stick. You can adjust for inflation using the CPI. You can adjust by many specific things we use daily, such as the cost of energy or metal. GDP has gone up.
Now you say that it is an apples and oranges comparison? Well of course it is! Productivity increases because we do things more efficiently. Using 1920s methods and technology we can't be any more productive today than we were 80 years ago. But we're using 2010 methods and technology, and there is a stark difference. The result is that today we generate more stuff, services, and things people want than at any point in history.
So yes, you are trivially right that inflation makes GDP numbers meaningless in isolation. But those numbers don't exist in isolation. We have lots of ways to adjust for inflation. After you have done so, it is clear that you can quibble about specific numbers but the broad point is good. Productivity has gone up.
No one offered up inflation adjusted GDP, and my point, which was very simple, though long winded, was that you simply can't say "Increases in GDP make the world better".
Look at zimbabwe. Their GDP is Hundreds of Trillions of Zimbabwe dollars, because they print a 1 Trillion dollar note.
To be more fair, the OP would have been better off using your food example instead of saying "GDP rose". I wasn't arguing that we are worse off today than 1929, just that it isn't because of an increase in GDP. If the currency wasn't inflated, we could get better off with GDP staying constant, through productivity gains.
Ted talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth...
Chart of warfare deaths: http://www.martincwiner.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/maled... (Note: that last one includes 2 world wars!)
Edge article: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
This is not how technology advances. Advancements happen, problems are solved (and created) and we deal with them after the fact. We don't coordinate our efforts into an orderly march towards the future.
As much convenient as it would be otherwise.
Someday you may get a replacement organ in time due to r&d stemming from this girl's DNA.
You don't know that. Nobody does.
We don't know exactly how aging works and this theory needs to be tested as well. If we stop research because we just know something, we'll never get anywhere.
"Her teeth, including her baby teeth, are like those of an eight-year-old. The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit
"The Hayflick limit was discovered by Leonard Hayflick in 1961,[1] at the Wistar Institute (Philadelphia), when Hayflick demonstrated that a population of normal human fetal cells in a cell culture divide between 40 and 60 times. It then enters a senescence phase (refuting the contention by Alexis Carrel that normal cells are immortal). Each mitosis shortens the telomeres on the DNA of the cell. Telomere shortening in humans eventually blocks cell division and correlates with aging. This mechanism appears to prevent genomic instability and the development of cancer."
So basically she's gonna die from cancer after the average number of years.
But if her telomeres are shortening, doesn't that mean her aging will eventually catch up to normal because her cells stop regenerating?
It means she is aging. She is not developing.
* How the journalistic storytelling style is different from the US one. I guess I have grown accustomed to reading NYT and other newspapers here. For example, I don't think the sentence "Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends" would have been used for a story like this.
* And more importantly this: "Pakula [her doctor] practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs' house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper -- Brooke's file -- sits on his desk. "This can't be lost," says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents." It's outrageous that they are using paper records to track this girl. At this age of iPads and other amazing handhelds, doctors' offices are still operating in the 1960s.
how come "immortality" comes to play here?
(by aging I mean the kind that kills you. Being an adult does not kill you; being old does.)
Actually, being old does not suffice. You need a combination of short telomeres and cell damage.
For example, suppose that we had medical treatments to prevent cancer, almost all infectious diseases, and aging. Your life expectancy goes up, but sooner or later you're going to be hit by a bus or something -- not exactly eternal life. But still a darn sight better than having a mere 8 years as your life expectancy.
However, I wouldn't call it "immortality" until she's 70 and has the body and development of a teenager. Unfortunately, unless that happens, it's just a rather sad medical condition. Even if we can learn from it.
With all of the knowledge and advanced technology of today, something tells me we should be able to figure out how to stop aging - or at least slow it. We should be able to cure cancer. We should be able to cure AIDs. We should be able to regrow missing appendages or failed body parts. Am I the only one that thinks about these things? I would love to get involved in this field one day. I know there have been great advancements in these areas, but it seems like there is so much more that we could be doing.
De Grey published a book about their approach a couple years ago, and wikipedia has a basic overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negli...
No, but there's fewer of us than there should be. Which is sort of understandable; aging is terrible and until recently there wasn't much hope of doing anything about it, so not thinking about it may have been best. But today that strategy is counterproductive; we're spending trillions of dollars to slightly extend the lifespans of old people, but we won't spend even one percent of that investigating ways to prevent or repair the underlying damage done by aging.
FWIW I've started making semi-regular donations to the SENS Foundation. I believe their work has the potential to be tremendously valuable in terms of both economics and quality of life.
Unfortunately, we are limited by which organs and tissues we can replace. Case in point: we cannot transplant the brain. Intracellular and extracellular buildup (eg. amyloid beta, lipofuscins, etc) will cause inflammation and cellular damage, and there is no way to remove them. Loss of telomeres and the accumulation of mutations leads to the breakdown of the genome, which is the host of the majority of a cell's state information. We ARE computer programs, and the moment memory gets corrupted things start to break down and behave improperly. The probability of any one of an unlimited number disease states in a cell correlates also with the level of misfolded, degraded, improperly tagged or trafficked gene products, which will always increase with time, even if the central program is well-behaved.
Remaining at homeostasis requires us to not reach chemical equilibrium, which requires we consume a ton of energy. Converting the necessary molecules during cellular metabolism puts our cells under heavy oxadative stress. Living requires a substantial number of evolved countermeasures, but eventually it will all catch up to us.
Why then are we so inept in our understanding of biology? The sheer astounding complexity of our biological machinery is not matched by any other problem that faces us. Biotechnology is amazing, but we are vastly limited by what we can do outside the context of in vitro techniques or simple, sacaled down in vivo assays. The real systm is always too complex to fully understand, and with so many unknowns we are essentially flying without radar. We can study proteins, promoters, etc. (slowly and with great difficulty) but we cannot "repair" them. We can't excise a damaged region of the genome and replace it at will. You would probably be shocked to see what techniques are actually even available--with my own limited experience it often feels like we are blindly throwing darts at targets that may not even exist. Our sequence information gives us clues, but we lack structural information (especially post-translational modifications) or knowledge of interaction details in the biochemical pathway.
If every physicist, computer scientist, mathematician or engineer stopped what they were doing and began work on this problem we might make some headway. Right now our hands are tied. This is absolutely the most important and complex problem in the world. We need the transcriptome, proteome, interactome, complete structure data, better algorithms, faster computers, higher resolution imaging (spatial, temporal, etc), better techniques, higher througput, I could go on and on. We certainly haven't entered the industrial age of biotech yet...
Do consider giving biology a try. We could use you and everyone willing. If you want to live twice as long, not get cancer or Alzheimer's, or cure any important infectious diseases, you should join us. Especially if you're a logical and abstract thinker.
1) What are the names of the courses you're taking this year? 2) What books are you reading for your studies? 3) Who would you most want to work with, in your field?
For the next academic year I'm taking the following: Biotechnology, Physical chemistry, Analytical chemistry, Instrumental analysis, Biochemistry, Drug design, Cancer bio, and doing some limited original research.
My favorite books in the past were "Cell and Molecular Biology" by Karp, "Molecular Biology" by Weaver, and "Janeway's Immunobiology", all of which enabled me to read the primary literature and contributed greatly to how I now see the world. There are also a bunch of poor or suboptimal ones that are not really worth worth pursuing. Once you read a few good texts, jumping right into a journal of interest is highly integrative!
Perhaps this is unwise of me, but I haven't yet made note of any of the people that are doing the reseach I'm most interested in. Even if I did, I probably won't be able to do work with them at this early stage.
In any case, my hope is that I can spend most of my time coding and searching through the chemical state space and biochemical pathways with computers. I strongly feel high-throughput techniques are indespensible and need to be utilized to make the best use of limited, prescious time. I would still enjoy spending some days in the lab running assays as they can also be quite fun.
We can't "code" an organism, unfortunately. That won't be possible for some time. Venter has inserted a bacterial genome into a preexisting cell and called it "synthetic life", but this is hyperbole. He essentially just swapped out the operating system if you will. Both the genome and the cell were preexisting. This would be impossible to do for a eukaryotic cell with any of today's technology since we have extremely complicated molecular (genomic) machinery. Not to mention how much of our state information is epigenetic--precise methylation, etc.
We certainly cannot create novel proteins outside of fusions between subunits. Protein folding is just way too difficult to solve. If we ever figure it out, society will change overnight.
If you would like to study this, get some texts on cell physiology, molecular biology (genetics++), and maybe do some reading on higher level function. Like me you will see that your existing skill set is not immediately transferrable until you learn enough biology: you cannot effectively program in a language until you really know it innately. Biology is the same way, just much, much more sysemitized, complex and abstract. It has a very high barrier to entry (akin to learning Vim, but takes longer.)
On another note, Kary Mullis has a clever idea that he thinks could make cures for all infections diseases: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mullis10/mullis10_index.html
She's also had many severe medical conditions which required intensive medical care. She still has to be fed via a gastric feeding tube. I doubt anyone with a similar condition would have survived the first 5 years of their life as short as 60 years ago.
It saddens me that the state of human genetics in the United States (perhaps elsewhere, but I've only done genetics here) is such that Mr. Greenberg would even have to consider such things.
I'm not familiar with how this works abroad, which is why I tried to qualify my statement.
If anything, I think it's sad that the father sees his daughter as some sort of valuable item, rather than working with researchers to help figure out why this developmental problem came about.
Even if the genetic information is an important piece of the puzzle of immortality, is keeping this information from the public, and himself, in anyone's best interest?
Haven't several things been done for her family retroactively? If not, then we should honor them/her because we can.
Lastly in respect to her cell line, I do object to all the patents that have been made in relation. All of this should be public knowledge.
WRT your username, I love mispronouncing carbocations as carbo-cashuns.
Interesting that the definition of immortality is living 1000 years.
Immortality in his sense I believe simply means you don't die of age, but there are a lot of other ways to die.
See a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbG2tSDfOo
I strongly doubt there is a bright line separating developmental genes from normal steady-state genes. A multicellular organism is one hugely complicated, parallel, state machine. If certain states become unreachable, that doesn't necessarily mean all the genes responsible for those states are no longer doing anything.
Are there legal precedents regarding situations like this? If she developed into a body/mind of a child who understands how to buy something, could she buy alcohol/cigarettes? If someone had sex with her (again, not now, but say she developed to the equivilent of a 13-15 year old) then presumably it wouldn't count as sex with a minor? (If someone were to have sex with her right now then it might be proven to be non-consensual, but not legally paedophilia?)
Sorry, latter part of that is not exactly a nice subject, but pretty interesting from a legal point of view I think.
One of the worst parts about this (from a scientific standpoint) is probably the waiting game - will this person's DNA eventually mutate, forming cancer or other age related diseases? Are there tests, other than appearance of age related diseases, to determine if she is aging?
[EDIT] VladRussian pointed out that they talked about the length of her telomeres corresponding to her actual age. Hence, she isn't "immortal", but there is something else going on.
Also, giving "mankind the gift of eternal life" is a flawed idea. Simply by improving our medical science which has given people a longer lifespan has caused a ridiculous amount of problems.
There are too many people on this planet and by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet.
Of course we'll have to deal with the sociological and economic ramifications of that in the scope of limited resources. But it is entirely appropriate to rage against the dying of the light.
Taking social problems as an example, governments are scared to do anything about it because they'd have to do things like raising the retirement age, which is what France had major problems with recently.
The people that dont want things to change for the older population are the older population and that is the demographic that is already huge and getting larger and larger and because their against it, nothing will get done.
This is a very specific argument but my point applies to the broader problem.
by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet.
Neither of those assertions are clear. Arguably the opposite is true; people may end up caring about the environment a lot more if they can expect to live for centuries rather than decades.
My point is that if we didnt push back death we wouldnt need to do much about aging. I'm not saying we shouldnt advance as a society but IMO the vast majority of the problems of this earth are caused by people.
But thats just my misanthropic view on life.
There are not too many people on this earth yet either. My guess is that your analysis is coming from the wrong places. If there were too much human biomass, everything would be working to offset that equilibria. Granted our environmental impact is presently suboptimal, but that is changing as we see diminishing returns in existing methodologies.
Who says immortality will even look like you picture it? Try thinking about what the world will look like in ten years--how accurate do you think you'll be? Science wouldn't be science if we could figure it out ahead of time.
I am pursuing this line of research precisely to rebel againt this kind of attitude (no offense, of course).
Every one of us--our perspectives, acquired knowledge and experience--is invaluable. On the same order of importance as genetic diversity. Our planet likely only gets one shot at reaching the stars (evolution got rather lucky to find the intelligence gradient). One day we will (hopefully) all agree on this, perhaps that being when Hollywood stops being so misanthropic and people start to appreciate the human capacity.
As stated in the article, assuming we do figure out how to make people live forever (or a very long time), Who is allowed to use it? The rich? The fastest? Strongest? Smartest?
Everyone can't live forever, there would be too many people. Unless we move to colonize space of course.
Compare gymnosperms (conifers) and certain angiosperms (flowering plants). The former persist for long periods under drought and stress conditions and only bear seeds after a two-year long development. Some desert angiosperms sprout, pollinate, spread seeds, then die in the span of a week. -- Different evolutionary strategies evolved under different environments and selection pressures.
(Concession: evolution isn't "optimal", but it has found good enough solutions that I often call it such.)
If they can find someone's who's telomeres haven't shortened or aren't shortening (and they haven't contracted any cancers) then there might be a chance.