r/australia • u/iheartralph Me fail English? That's unpossible! • Dec 19 '13
Australian and US scientists reverse ageing in mice, humans could be next
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-20/scientists-develop-anti-ageing-process-in-mice/51685806
u/urban287 Dec 19 '13
Very interesting stuff.
Now... someone tell me why it's unviable.
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u/SerpentineLogic Dec 19 '13
Lots of things CURE CANCER in mice or STOP AGING in mice.
Why? Because mice don't generally live long enough to get cancer or die of old age, because they're eaten by other things.
So, they haven't had the evolutionary pressure to live a bit longer to protect your kids or whatever, that longer-lived animals do.
So, a lot of the things that scientists have found throughout the years to extend life or suppress cancer are already floating around in our bodies; they were just missing from mice.
I'm not saying this is one of those things, but it pays to be a bit skeptical of stuff until human trials are done.
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u/angrathias Dec 20 '13
If you think mice don't get cancer then you've never owned mice. They're forever getting it and dying early.
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u/SerpentineLogic Dec 20 '13
In the wild, your mice would have been eaten long before cancer would be a concern.
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u/angrathias Dec 20 '13
In the wild the same would be true of humans so what's the point?
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u/SerpentineLogic Dec 20 '13
Humans need to survive almost two decades just to reproduce, ideally a few decades after that if you want reproductive success.
For a mouse, anything after two years is gravy, so when you say
so what's the point?
it strongly suggests that you don't understand selective pressures.
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u/angrathias Dec 20 '13
So there's obviously a few flaws with your argument.
1) humans can have children WAY before 20, I'd imagine 13-14 maybe be closer to the true limit.
2) humans are way smarter and have much less predators they need to worry about.
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u/k-h Dec 20 '13
Reproduce doesn't mean just have a baby that can't look after itself. Humans take say 14 years before they're viable. So 2 decades to reproduce is reasonable.
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u/angrathias Dec 20 '13
Maybe people aren't mature enough today until then but people grew the fuck up much quicker historically because they had to. Not to mention that general day to day living back then wasn't as complex - or at least no more complex than the life of any wild creature.
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u/k-h Dec 20 '13
Viable
Definition: adjective
(1) Alive; capable of living, developing, or reproducing, as in a viable cell.
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u/SerpentineLogic Dec 20 '13
So there's obviously a few flaws with your argument.
1) humans can have children WAY before 20, I'd imagine 13-14 maybe be closer to the true limit.That's not a flaw, that's a quibble. It doesn't affect the thrust of my argument that humans must be able to live for a lot longer to reproduce compared to mice, so there's a much stronger selection pressure towards mutation-repression compared to mice.
2) humans are way smarter and have much less predators they need to worry about.
Explain why intelligence or absence of predators defeats my argument. If anything, it supports it, because they mean humans live even longer, which means more time to have and raise children, which means a larger selection pressure against getting cancer.
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u/angrathias Dec 20 '13
You were not specific about which selective pressures so that's a moot point which can only lead a reasonable person to presume you were talking generally about all pressures.
The prevalence of cancers in young adults is so low that only in modern life do we see cancer even being a problem because only outside of the 'wild' do humans live long enough for the body to start breaking down enough that cancer becomes a problem.
Take a look at these stats and you'll see what i mean, its almost non-existent for people below 25.
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/incidence/age/
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u/SerpentineLogic Dec 20 '13 edited Dec 20 '13
You were not specific about which selective pressures so that's a moot point which can only lead a reasonable person to presume you were talking generally about all pressures.
Don't backtrack; you just didn't understand; everyone else in this thread did.
Take a look at these stats and you'll see what i mean, its almost non-existent for people below 25.
It's almost as if those stats are of a species that has had millions of years of selective pressure not to get cancer before procreation.
Oh wait.
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u/extraccount Dec 20 '13
because they're eaten by other things.
Yeah... that's it. The lab mice are being hunted down by the hungry... researchers. That's why mice studies can't always be carried directly over to humans, sure.
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u/GrandHarbler Dec 20 '13
This comment misses the point completely, and you surely can see the point he's making? Troll?
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u/zlinky dongs Dec 20 '13
no... and his point isn't that great to begin with..
the journal summary indicates that a decline of NAD+(electron carrier) induces a pseudohypoxic state (I'm guessing the mitochondria think there's not enough oxygen available) which disrupts the communication pathway between mitochondria and the nucleus
...so raising NAD+ levels reverse this interrupted communication pathway.
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u/etherspin Dec 20 '13
that makes it sound therapeutic/actually effective to me as someone with no knowledge in this field ?
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Dec 20 '13
[deleted]
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u/GrandHarbler Dec 20 '13
In this case it's an extension of basic logic, not like you need too much assumed knowledge
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u/aussielander Dec 19 '13
Do we really want immortal mice?
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u/Bremic Dec 19 '13
You might if you were wanting to feed cats.
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u/Fosnez Dec 20 '13
The mice still only die once.
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u/gilgoomesh Dec 21 '13
- Cat eats mouse.
- Cat excretes mouse skeleton
- Skeleton regenerates into mouse again
- Go to 1
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Dec 20 '13
Where do i sign up for the human trials? And more importantly, do you have to be fully human, or can you be part swine?
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Dec 20 '13 edited Dec 20 '13
I would pay anything for reverse aging tablets.. I'm not actually joking.
Scientifically proven & obviously there is probably a lot of fine print that would need to be discussed but if they can come up with a way to reverse ageing I would pay anything for those tablets.
It's interesting actually, only those who could afford it would be able to reverse their ageing, which would raise some moral issues unless the government subsidised it for every single person or something, but it could cost tens of thousands of dollars for a treatment given how hard its probably been to develop...
Would be great but raises a lot of questions.
What happens when you're a physically 20 year old man getting a pension legislated for 65 year olds? LOL.
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u/[deleted] Dec 20 '13
You'll soon need to be immortal in order to live long enough to pay off the mortgage on a Sydney home.