Hacker News Reader

Comment by hericium | Hacker News Reader

I like how aging is explained in "Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to"[1]: cells are analog holders of information and just like analog tapes, each copy holds data of slightly lesser quality. After a number of copies, cells become less performant in their job and eventually some lose enough information that new copies cannot function properly enough to survive and/or not mutate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93...

View on HN

Then why aren't children affected, each generation becoming more damaged than the last? Are reproductive cells special in some regard? If so, can we make normal cells more like that? (I know about older parents having a higher risk of giving their kid Down's and autism but that only happens for a small percentage and the rest of the kids are fine.)

Perhaps the (biological) choices are growth and decline. No steady state (stable equilibrium) is feasible. Just a stupid guess; I have no basis for this notion.

Human race is not destroying its DNA at current pace for long. Deterioration may be more pronounced in a few generations.

And as to why the child is not formed from bad copies of worn-off cells of a mature parent - it's been some time since I read the book but I think that there was some reset mentioned when a whole new person is formed inside another organism. Fetal stem cells are known to have superior properties.

But if you look further at David Sinclair's videos on YouTube, the aging problem is not the lost of information but mostly the lost of capability to read/interpret the information. The cell then doesn't operate as it should. He's working now on ways to "polishing the CD" so information can be read as in young cells.

Cells may be analog, but DNA is digital -- with error correction even (or error deletion at least). I don't know the details of the epigenome, so maybe that isn't digital?

DNA is not digital though. It has a geometrical structure (independent of epigenetic modifications) that is dependent on a slew of environmental factors that alters it’s meaning. The computer programmer’s incessant need to reduce complexity to bits needs to stop.

DNA is literally digital: it is a quaternary system based on four values: AT, TA, CG, and GC. Those are the only four values possible within the system. If you want to claim it's not (without resorting to the epigenome) then nothing is digital.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com