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Comment by tee_0 | Hacker News Reader

They did an experiment that makes mice appear old and be old by every metric we know of. Frailty, organ degradation, everything. And they did this with a specific mechanism. This is literally the most important step in solving aging that has ever happened. There is a high probability that we have discovered the cause of aging. Nobody gives a shit? Was it even in the news? A post on the front page about teslas crashing has 2000 comments and there’s a few people in here and only to move the goalposts? What the hell is going on?

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First time, eh? These articles appear twice a week on here.

We’ve made cured nearly all diseases in mice, including baldness, Covid, cancers, heart disease, and now have made them reverse aging and practically immortal.

Very few of those treatments have worked in humans and even fewer have made it into commercial viability.

I’ve been looking at these headlines for 13 years with science literacy. I’ve become jaded as well. But this is the real deal. The idea that epigenetic model of aging is different in mice than any other mammal is so off base that it’s not even worth considering. This is nothing like those experiments that show apricots reduce cancer by 2% in mice — highly subject to mouse physiology with negligible results. Whatever animal they apply this cleaving to will display the same results, namely accelerated aging by every metric… this is massive and groundbreaking. Anyone who has any biochemistry literacy should know that

> Whatever animal they apply this cleaving to will display the same results

That’s the kicker isn’t it. “will”, not “does”. As someone who is not in the field it’s hard for me to get excited before you can at least say they’ve reproduced it with another species

It will. There’s no ambiguity about it. The only ambiguity is whether the effect is responsible for all aging symptoms or just most of them.

I read about this on Thursday from a CNN.com article that appeared on their home page.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/health/reversing-aging-scn-we...

Perhaps because we feel we have heard it before?

I hope you are correct

Why didn't that experiment start with real old mice? And reversed their age to young again? That could be more convincing that "reversing" ageing of artificially aged mice.

Because they haven’t reversed aging in this experiment and the partial reversal they did achieve was using tools that already exist. The point of the experiment was to prove that epigenetic information loss is the cause of aging. The next step is to figure out how to completely reverse epigenetic information loss.

Sounds theoretically possible. I mean it definitely happens at conception, and methylation happens at specific sites where it should, and not where it shouldn’t. So there should be a mechanism.

Even if it’s trickier than that, there are probably lots of ways to selectively restore the epigenetic information in specific patterns or specific sites that might help chip away at disease.

Somewhat related link from quick googling:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002192582...

I suppose the next step is to scale it up to larger mammals, no? Do it with a monkey.

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