Scientists Find Way to Partially Reverse Aging in Mice | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Find Way to Partially Reverse Aging in Mice

businessweek.com

35 pointscwan11 comments

This isn't anything interesting. They took gene-engineered mice that lacked telomerase, and rescued them by giving them telomerase.

It's not life extension to fix a problem that you created that shortens life. Fixing premature aging != enhancing longevity in mice without premature aging.

"At Harvard, they bred genetically manipulated mice that lacked an enzyme called telomerase that stops telomeres getting shorter. Without the enzyme, the mice aged prematurely and suffered ailments, including a poor sense of smell, smaller brain size, infertility and damaged intestines and spleens. But when DePinho gave the mice injections to reactivate the enzyme, it repaired the damaged tissues and reversed the signs of ageing."

There is a therapy that extends non-genetically-crippled mouse life span by 50% that involves p53 and telomerase, but this thing above is not it.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/01/50-maximum-life-e...

The good rule of thumb is to never, never get excited about a therapy that rescues mice from an artificially introduced condition of accelerated aging. These things are almost never applicable to normal aging.

You have excellent points here. I wouldn't call it not interesting though. One interesting version of this experiment would be to take these same telomerase-deficient mice and see if they live longer than normal mouse while receiving the enzyme they fail to produce on their own. What this experiment shows is that telomerase is essential to the function of normal body tissues, and that its absence causes severe problems. The next step would be to see if their life-spans are lengthened with continued treatment, if they live as long as a normal mouse, or if their lifespans are indeed shortened even with continued treatment.

Human beings and other large mammals suppress their telomerase. Why? Because it can save them from cancer. If the cancer cells never mutate to activate their telomerase or the alternative pathway for fixing telomeres, they start to malfunction and die off before the tumor gets larger than about an inch across. Often, this isn't such a big deal for a human. For a mouse, it's a really big deal and they'll probably die. Hence, there's no anti-cancer benefit for a mouse to suppress telomerase, so they're designed to have it "on" all the time.

Whales almost never die of cancer. By the time a cancer gets as large as a human's head, the cancer cells have mutated into dysfunction or parasitism of other tumor cells. Tumors that have been around long enough to get that big tend to die off. For a whale, a tumor the size of a human head is no big deal. The folks that still kill whales (for "research") find tumor scars in whales all the time. They just seem to shrug it off.

Activating a human being's telomerase in the fashion discussed in the article would likely bring about an early death of cancer.

I too have developed a mouse life-extension technique. Trials show that the simple, low-cost measure of removing mouse traps from your home can increase mouse life expectancy by up to 50%.

It's too soon to say whether this same technique could be applicable for humans.

Now that's the twenty-first century I signed up for.

It's a good day to be a mouse.

This sounds like a ludicrously silly joke, but dang, have you noticed how good mice have it? They've cured cancer in them dozens of times over, they've cured aging, and they've even given them magic pills to make fat mice skinny.

Douglas Adams was right. Damn mice really are the smartest animals on the planet.

(Seriously, I imagine this is because scientists can kill, breed, and experiment on mice without any ethical qualms. If you'd killed a billion people in science experiments over the last hundred years, you'd probably see similar results)

This is kind of related to an article I read awhile ago that I found very interesting. It talked about how the more people ran, the longer telomeres in their cells were:

"When the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, however, the situation was quite different. The sedentary older subjects had telomeres that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects, suggesting that the older subjects’ cells were, like them, aging. The runners, on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ‘‘at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect.’’"

from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-exercis...

So, can this discovery help the still-living?

Meaning, can this be adapted to reverse the aging of, for example, my parents?

More importantly - Can it reanimate the no-longer living?

I think you mean the no-shorter living :-)

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