17 thoughts on “Telomerase”

        2. Sorry,

          I meant to say that Absolutely, we should work on such things.

          You are still going to die.

          Addendum is that see so many people in their 40’s and 50’s of my generation that have this inordinate fear of death. It drives them to do many stupid things.

          The downside of such thing is to have certain rich people hang around for 150-200 years is probably bad for society.

          1. …Dennis, I don’t think there’s anyone here who doesn’t know and accept that……

            I really think that there are a lot of people in our age group and especially the baby boomers that don’t accept their own deaths. I look at Ray Kurzweill and I watch the money that some people are plowing into life extensions and see their reasons for doing so, and much of it is driven by an inordinate fear of death.

            The never trust anyone over 30 crowd is now twice that age or more but many of them don’t want to admit it.

          2. …much of it is driven by an inordinate fear of death.

            No, it is driven by an entirely reasonable desire to continue to live and do what they love Are you tired of life? Are you eager to die?

          3. I look at Ray Kurzweill and I watch the money that some people are plowing into life extensions and see their reasons for doing so, and much of it is driven by an inordinate fear of death.

            Well, duh. If people wanted to die, they wouldn’t be trying to live longer.

            Personally, I hope to at least live long enough to see the heat death of the universe, but I’d only give a 50:50 chance of that, mostly driven by whether I can survive this century. I’m sure I can find interesting things to do until then. and I see absolutely no reason to die if the technology allows me to live longer; our descendants will look on today’s adults dying at 70-80 as we do at kids dying a few hours after they’re born.

            And the whole ‘OMG! Bill Gates might live to 150!’ thing is just silly.

    2. My worry is that we’re making all these advances in mice. If the techniques become mainstream we’ll all have to adopt a lot more cats to keep them under control.

  2. Note, it’s ‘telomerase,” see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase

    This is a rather old report, by the way (from 2010). DePinho has moved on from Harvard and now runs MD Anderson in Houston. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_A._DePinho

    But there is no evidence that transient up regulation of telomerase causes or increase site risk of cancer. While it is true that about 85% of cancer cells show telomerase turned on, others use a process know as ALT (Alternative Lengthening of Telomers) to prevent cell death due to shortened telomeres. If cancer cells derive from errant stem cells, as some believe, then it is natural they have telomerase activated, since most stem cells do naturally.

    Much is yet to be learned about the role telomeres and telomerase play in aging of humans; for my part I think is is significant but also complex. (For example, hTERT, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres, has been shown to localize to the mitochondria, which was a surpassing result and may have impact on the generic mitochondrial theory of aging.)

    1. I enjoy reading about the advances in cellular biology to combat aging, but are any significant advances being made about how furniture ages, and wouldn’t similar strides have a potentially unknown impact on the antique markets?

  5. There’s an issue that has barely been touched upon; that of just how long a life one can have, with current human physiology, and actually appreciate it.

    The basis of this is fairly simple. Human brains are of limited size, and have many other things to do apart from storing memories. Therefore, there must be a limit on storage although we don’t know even approximately what that limit is.

    This leads to the conclusion that at some point, anyone living to a great age (older than anyone seen so far) will experience his or her memory filling up. Which means that life extension technology should, ideally, go along with memory archiving technology. And that, in turn, means some way of inserting memories (and presumably other data) into brains directly. After all, archiving something isn’t much good if you can’t retrieve the archive! And also memory erasing tech, which could be extraordinarily dangerous in the wrong hands.

    The human being of the far future (in technological terms, which may not actually be all that far in terms of time) may well have a regular job to do, maybe once a decade or so. Putting old, semi-useful memories into inactive storage to make room for new experiences.

  6. Frankly, I don’t think I want to live forever. I just want the freedom to pick and choose when to go. Bidirectionally, mind you. I already have that freedom in one direction.

    1. Bart, I’m not trying to offend but your comment smacks of rationalisation. You know you won’t, so you convince yourself you don’t want to. If it was actually possible, you might think differently.

      A semi-religious point: All the talk about “living forever” ignores the fact that there is no such thing and never can be. Imagine that it’s (figure from air) 1000 years from now and you’ve managed to keep going that long; mind uploaded into machinery with quintuple failsafes, regular complete-state backups into diamondoid media scattered all over a good portion of the near parts of the Galaxy, whatever combination of methods your paranoid side can conceive. Nevertheless, way down the path into the unknowable future, even the least probable of events is going to happen eventually. Which means that sooner or later, all the protections are going to fail – and at that point, it will be the same as if you hadn’t bothered. You’ll have to face whatever, if anything, comes next. And you’ve just made God spend a trillion years waiting…

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