Monday, November 29, 2010
Tiny Little Benjamin Buttons?
Scientists in Boston, Massachusetts have made an amazing breakthrough, taking aging mice and turning them young again. Just like the title character in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", the mice appeared not only to stop aging but grow younger, looking healthier and biologically fit. Biologists at Harvard Medical School were able to pull off the feat by using "telomeres"-the protective DNA "caps" on the ends of chromosomes. The caps prevent our chromosomes from "fraying" and the genes inside from unravelling, leaving biologists to speculate what would happen if an enzyme saturated with the telomerase gene would slow the aging process. Using 6 six month old mice as templates (80 human years), scientists were able to not only slow the aging process, it actually appeared to undo premature aging so that the mice became the "physiological equivalent" of young adults. The mice's shrunken brains increased and the coat hair was literally restored to a "new sheen"!
Now this may seem like quite a stretch, but I actually believe that this type of technology could eventually be used on humans in the near future. Rather than being a type of anabolic steroid, which merely enhances growth rate, this new telomerase gene is biologically meant to SLOW the decaying process. Is something like this too far-fetched for practical use or will we begin to see many "Curious cases of Benjamin Buttons"?
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11 comments:
I think it is really exciting that humans have the brain power to reverse aging. If we started using this method on humans, I think it would save the economy a lot of money. Older people could just go through this process and become younger and healthier again. They could also go out and work again and not have to rely on the government to support them. However, I do find it a little disturbing. Who wants their grandparents to look younger than they do?
There are both positives and negatives to this finding. First This is a good things because, like erica said, if the older people do this they can go back to work, and since those people have experienced the work life and know about it they can keep contributing to a business with the infinite knowledge of being able to work so long. Also, it's just the fact that people get to become younger that is so exciting. Just think, maybe 50 years from now, when we are 66 and 67, we may be able to do this and make us be younger, say 40, and be able to work some more.
However, there are bad things to this. First we are cheating death, yes i understand it just prolongs our life, but what if someone keeps doing it and doing it forever. Our population would just keep getting larger and there would be younger people and after a while we may run out of food. Another thing about his is that this would be very expensive and only people with the money would be able to afford it. That means the people who are already making big money can just keep making big money and not give anyone else a chance to make that money.
Although this is a smart thin and this can finally be "The fountain of youth" we have been looking for, there are many negatives to living forever and we are just meant to die some time.
I am not a fan of this new break through. Why would you want to extend life. I think that we cherish life because there is a limit to it. I don't think humans should be playing with "life." I also think that if the extending of human life becomes a common practice in the future, it might endanger the ecosystem of the Earth. The human population will continue to rise and may endanger other animals. I think that the technology that we have developed is going far beyond how much we can comprehend in the sense of impact to the rest of the living organisms in the world. I think that we really need to consider the merits and consequences of technology that plays with nature. I really do not think it is our place to be medling and changing the course of nature.
This to me sounds so dangerous. I'm no scientist, but testing this technology on humans sounds like such a premium situation for mistakes, especially when dealing with DNA alterations in humans. In any case, aside from the potential medial risks associated with testing, I'm not sure if we truly want this. In a philosophical sense, we were not made to live forever. The inevitability of death (according to many philosophers) is what gives our lives meaning and a sense of having to do something. If you knew you were going to live forever, why try? Furthermore, the only thing that is for sure in life is death. Death, in an ironic way, is our anchor to reality. It is the true leveler of the playing field. Everyone dies. But what if not everyone did? This poses a very serious and even slightly disturbing question of: who (or what) decides who will live forever?
I looked back, and I misread. It never said immortality, but I assumed it did. My mistake! In any case, who gets to say who gets an abnormally extended life? This is not a rhetorical question, I'm not saying this technology is bad, per se, I'm thinking outloud.
I very much agree that scientists and humans in general should not be messing with death and the limits on age.
While this is fascinating research and it definitely fulfills the ideas that previous scientists have only been able to dream about only years ago when telomeres were discovered, we should probably be thinking about other things that are truly hurting our society, medically. This just seems like an evasion of inescapable death and, if successfully altered for human DNA, would just allow humans to delay their deaths rather than live healthily to live well, without diseases that are caused by unhealthy lifestyles, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity (sorry. these are definitely beaten over the head all over the place, but obviously there's a reason).
Hopefully the medical and scientific industries will stop selling cosmetic remedies that cater to human insecurities and focus on other medicines.
I agree with Christian that by being able to "reverse" our age in the future, we're in a sense cheating ourselves from death. These days we're trying to stabilize our world by controlling our rapid population growth, but having a breakthrough such as this (turning aging people young again) could potentially destroy us and our world. We're going to be maintaining such a huge population that we're not going to have enough resources for anyone.
Not going to lie though, this breakthrough does sound really cool and I'm sure it appeals to everyone...but I don't know, we're kind of going against nature here.
I guess the idea of being able to turn younger is a major breakthrough in the science industry but there are some things that we still need to keep in mind. Like Christian said, food might run out if more and more people are living.
And also, too many people would be on earth and restrictions may occur. For example, China, there is already too many people there and they have the restriction of only being able to have one child with benefits and others you need to pay the expenses with your own money. If more people turn younger, then the restriction of only having one child might start to form in every country in the world! And also, some people might not even want to work even if they could turn younger which is very bad for the younger generation because we are paying for the social security of the retirees so if more people are retired and still living, more money will be coming out of our pockets to pay for their social security!
I feel like this is a bad sci-fi movie waiting for rotten tomatoes.
Do people never get enough? Why are humans overcome with greed? This takes materialism to a whole new level. Like many above me have mentioned, can't we just let life go on as is? We don't even know the side-effects of these things yet. Plus, who knows how much will go wrong once we start messing with death? (OMG...Harry Potter flashback...haha).
I think that the technogoly we have these days to do these kind of things is really cool and neat. But I do not know if i quite like this idea of getting younger, espeically when it comes to humans. Everything is made to grow old, that is what everything has been doing since earth's existence and I'm not quite sure if we should mess with that. There could be a lot of weird things that could happe. I think i personally need to reconsider this new advance.
this is quite the development in biotechnology. but when i think about anti-aging and what jason brought up as what it is commonly associated with, immortality, i think about residence evil... the whole series.
As a person, would you really want to get to the point in your life where you've run out of things to do?
In ancient roman mythology, gods, being immortal beings, would get bored with themselves and start sleeping around with their direct family memebers and messing with the lives of mortal human beings
If we didn't have death, we'd be bored out of our minds because then there's no time limit! (err... like a basketball game without a shot clock)
I love your comment jason, hits the nail on the head on what i was gonna say.
On a religious note-as a roman catholic, don't mess up what god gave us.
on a logic note-if life is full of adversity and hardship, why would anyone want to live longer?
-raymond lim
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