I would rather live to 75 as a healthy, active adult than to 95 as a senile invalid.
Longevity proponents are very much talking about extending healthy lifespan, not simply making people live with old age and illness for longer.
Experiments hint that the secrets to longevity are close to being unlocked
by cedars 17 Replies latest social current
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slimboyfat
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james_woods
Longevity proponents are very much talking about extending healthy lifespan, not simply making people live with old age and illness for longer.
That really should be the goal. Average lifespan has indeed been getting longer with ordinary medical advances, but it has increased the incidence of old age diseases, such as altzheimers.
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cedars
james_woods - Kenyone actually discusses Alzheimers in her talk. Here is a transcript of the relevant part:
So the next question, of course, is:Is there any effect on age-related disease?As you age, you're much more likelyto get cancer, Alzheimer's disease,heart disease, all sorts of diseases.It turns out that these long-lived mutantsare more resistant to all these diseases.They hardly get cancer,and when they do it's not as severe.So it's really interesting, and it makes sense in a way,that they're still young,so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old?So it suggeststhat, if we could have a therapeutic or a pill to taketo replicate some of these effects in humans,maybe we would have a wayof combating lots of different age-related diseasesall at once.
Cedars
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slimboyfat
Check out the Methuselah Foundation:
The CEO David Gobel is a JW. I wonder how that goes down in his local congregation. It sounds like hedging his bets to me - if the JW "New System" doesn't work out then he's got plan B, life extension.
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baltar447
LOL! the CEO of a corporation dedicated to life extension! That's hillariously ironic.
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IamPresence2012
@ Witness My Furry
No,,I picked this name as it reflects with my new email address.
I am not looking to convert anyone,,,, I preached as a JW till I was 25. Not going that road again,, I was responding to a ? and offering info, so what if I copied & pasted..... I was not aware their were still MS policing forums,,, apologies if the mayan people or calendar insulted anyone,, I should have cut that out,,,,, but again I was just coping n pasting.
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frankiespeakin
Iam,
Where did you get this 12 stand DNA from?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA
Alternate DNA chemistry
For a number of years exobiologists have proposed the existence of a shadow biosphere, a postulated microbial biosphere of Earth that uses radically different biochemical and molecular processes than currently known life. One of the proposals was the existence of lifeforms that use arsenic instead of phosphorus in DNA.
A December 2010 NASA press conference stated that the bacteriumGFAJ-1, which has evolved in an arsenic-rich environment, is the first terrestrial lifeform found which may have this ability. The bacterium was found in Mono Lake, east of Yosemite National Park. GFAJ-1 is a rod-shaped extremophile bacterium in the family Halomonadaceae that, when starved of phosphorus, may be capable of incorporating the usually poisonous element arsenic in its DNA. [ 41 ] This discovery may lend weight to the long-standing idea that extraterrestrial life could have a different chemical makeup from life on Earth. [ 41 ] [ 42 ] The research was carried out by a team led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geomicrobiologist and geobiochemist, a Postdoctoral Fellow of the NASA Astrobiology Institute with Arizona State University. This finding has, however, faced strong criticism from the scientific community; scientists have argued that there is no evidence that arsenic is actually incorporated into biomolecules. [ 42 ] [ 43 ] Independent confirmation of this finding has also not yet been possible.
Quadruplex structures
Further information: G-quadruplex
At the ends of the linear chromosomes are specialized regions of DNA called telomeres. The main function of these regions is to allow the cell to replicate chromosome ends using the enzyme telomerase, as the enzymes that normally replicate DNA cannot copy the extreme 3′ ends of chromosomes. [ 44 ] These specialized chromosome caps also help protect the DNA ends, and stop the DNA repair systems in the cell from treating
Quadruplex structures
Further information: G-quadruplex
At the ends of the linear chromosomes are specialized regions of DNA called telomeres. The main function of these regions is to allow the cell to replicate chromosome ends using the enzyme telomerase, as the enzymes that normally replicate DNA cannot copy the extreme 3′ ends of chromosomes. [ 44 ] These specialized chromosome caps also help protect the DNA ends, and stop the DNA repair systems in the cell from treating them as damage to be corrected. [ 45 ] In human cells, telomeres are usually lengths of single-stranded DNA containing several thousand repeats of a simple TTAGGG sequence. [ 46 ]
DNA quadruplex formed by telomere repeats. The looped conformation of the DNA backbone is very different from the typical DNA helix. [ 47 ]These guanine-rich sequences may stabilize chromosome ends by forming structures of stacked sets of four-base units, rather than the usual base pairs found in other DNA molecules. Here, four guanine bases form a flat plate and these flat four-base units then stack on top of each other, to form a stable G-quadruplex structure. [ 48 ] These structures are stabilized by hydrogen bonding between the edges of the bases and chelation of a metal ion in the centre of each four-base unit. [ 49 ] Other structures can also be formed, with the central set of four bases coming from either a single strand folded around the bases, or several different parallel strands, each contributing one base to the central structure.
In addition to these stacked structures, telomeres also form large loop structures called telomere loops, or T-loops. Here, the single-stranded DNA curls around in a long circle stabilized by telomere-binding proteins. [ 50 ] At the very end of the T-loop, the single-stranded telomere DNA is held onto a region of double-stranded DNA by the telomere strand disrupting the double-helical DNA and base pairing to one of the two strands. This triple-stranded structure
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Witness My Fury
Apologies then IP2012: It's just we seem to get a lot of nutters come on here spouting their nonsense and trying to convert us to their fundie cults or other speculations.. I guess we can only expect an upsurge of that this year (2012) with all the hype surrounding it.
