Gene Therapy Reverses Biological Aging by Six Years | Hacker News Reader

Gene Therapy Reverses Biological Aging by Six Years

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35 pointsbarry-cotter9 comments

It's been possible to increase growth hormone by injection for a couple decades now, and I thought there was a cancer problem[0].

Also, there's the drive for homeostasis. In my own experiments with dietary supplements, I get a short term boost due to the supplement, but the body gradually re-configures itself accordingly, so there's no long term benefit. e.g., caffeine[1]

[0] Growth Hormone's Links to Cancer https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30500870/

[1] Chronic Caffeine Alters the Density of Adenosine, Adrenergic, Cholinergic, GABA, and Serotonin Receptors and Calcium Channels in Mouse Brain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3437321/

EDIT: Author has a wikipedia article and a website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Hanley_(microbiologist) https://bf-sci.com/

You point to one example of homeostasis and therefore we should just give up on all medicine? That’s like someone putting down the idea of vaccination because they developed a coffee tolerance. The human body is complicated and diverse and homeostatic forces aren’t omnipresent or present at the deepest mechanistic levels.

"Two of the authors examined the ethics and regulation of self-experiments intensively, culminating in a journal publication. There are 14 Nobel Prizes awarded to self-experimenting scientists, with 7 Nobel Prizes in the area of their self-experiment, and no ethical obstructions to self-experimentations. There are 473 documented self-experiments, 48 of them since 1975, with multiples of this number estimated."

This reminds me of an interesting book on the history of self-experimentation in medicine called "Who Goes First":

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Goes-First-Lawrence-Altman/dp/052...

From thread

> Some very cool things happened. He recovered from injuries faster, had a greater appetite for exercise, slept better, had higher testosterone, some arthritis symptoms cleared, cholesterol improved, heart rate and blood pressure down, and eyesight improved.

Original paper

https://www.gwern.net/docs/longevity/senolytic/2021-hanley.p...

The DNA injected is a plasmid with a myosin promoter supposedly introduced via electroporation through the call membrane and then presumably into the nucleus.

Successful electroporation of large DNA fragments is difficult (31aa here = 93bp). Widespread DNA uptake, nuclear localization, and subsequent integration is a low probability event.

Another barrier from what I understood working with transgenics is that Plasmid DNA is a foreign DNA morphology outside of our mitochondria. It is the shape of bacterial DNA and initiates a host response to destroy it. That could be old/incorrect understanding from myself though.

Another thing which bothered me was there was no discernible increase in growth hormone. Activation of GHRH should lead to increase in growth hormone? Perhaps Somatostatin activity is regulating away the increase.

Anyways, I’m skeptical of successful DNA integration and therefore the beneficial claims. The subject isn’t living in a bubble, there will be cofounders and lifestyle changes over 5+ years.

Notable that last author is George Church, famed Harvard genomicist turned biohacker. While he may not be the subject of this paper, the smart money is that he's doing this too.

Pretty cool if it becomes a therapy that is generally available to people.

Not sure I like the "he said it was traumatic" part though.

What do the elctrocutions add/do?

It's electroporation. You use electrical currents to create temporary pores for the DNA sequence to enter the cell. Otherwise you need some mechanism to get the DNA in.

But anyways N = 1, so no control.

And why not just take injections of growth hormone?

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