Category Archives: Longevity Medicine

There's nothing you can do right now that will have a greater immediate effect on your life expectancy than exercise and calorie restriction. The best thing you can do for future improvement is to help researchers raise funds to develop repair technologies for human aging. But no-one wants to hear that. Everyone wants a silver bullet now, and it doesn't exist: "Friends occasionally ask me how they might best live healthy, longer. They inquire because I went to medical school, work in biotech, and focus professionally on developing drugs to treat diseases of aging by targeting aging genes. My response seems to surprise them, because it does not center on pharmaceutical products. The current answer on how to increase healthy human lifespan is simple: 'Eat less, and exercise more.' ... Modern medicine has discovered an impressive number of lifesaving new drugs for devastating diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and infectious diseases. Nevertheless, for most of us, active lifestyles and less food will have a more profound effect than taking more medicines. Hard as it is, we should walk, run, and bike more, and reduce our food intake. The best way we can increase our chances to live healthy, longer is simple: eat less and exercise more."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/07/05/a_simple_hard_answer_to_long_life/

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A response to recent discussion of the Catholic hierarchy's views on engineered longevity: "Michael Anissimov and Aubrey de Grey call our attention to Pope Benedict's Holy Saturday address from 3 April of this year. In the address, the Pope presents perspective on immortalism, suggesting that radical extension of life as we currently know it is not a cure for death, but rather a cure for death must 'transform our lives from within' and 'create a new life within us, truly fit for eternity'. The Pope's message contains some ideas with which I disagree. For example, he questions the value of extending life hundreds of years and suggests it would be condemnation; does he consider us already condemned as a consequence of extending life well beyond the few decades that were available to our ancestors? Perhaps he does, as do many Catholics, embracing a doctrine of original sin and assuming life as we now know it to have no possibility of naturally improving beyond the consequences of that original sin. He reasons that immortalism would leave no room for youth, yet youth is precisely the goal of immortalism - not merely a perpetuation of geriatric hacks. He also reasons that immortalism would kill capacity for innovation, yet capacity for innovation has only improved as we've extended our lifespans. Finally, he implies that death itself is where we should look to find the beginning of the fullness of life. While I don't consider death the absolute end of identity, I consider it to be among the worst of hollow and meaningless contradictions to equate death with life."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://lincoln.metacannon.net/2010/06/pope-benedict-and-immortalists.html

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From Wired: "Blood drawn with a simple needle stick can be coaxed into producing stem cells that may have the ability to form any type of tissue in the body, three independent papers report... The new technique will allow scientists to tap a large, readily available source of personalized stem cells. ... Because taking blood is safe, fast and efficient compared to current stem cell harvesting methods, some of which include biopsies and pretreatments with drugs, researchers hope that blood-derived stem cells could one day be used to study and treat diseases. ... Three research groups used similar methods to prod certain immune cells in human blood to become induced pluripotent stem cells. Because they are reprogrammed adult cells, these stem cells share many of the same regenerative abilities as true embryonic stem cells but may not have as much versatility. ... Scientists' manipulations turned the stem cells in the new studies into several types of mature blood cells, including infection-fighting T cells. What's more, all the groups showed that a batch of the stem cells implanted into mice developed into the three main types of progenitor cells found in human embryos."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/stem-cells-from-human-blood-can-be-reprogrammed/

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Via ScienceNews: "In the new study, researchers looked at genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, in 1,055 centenarians and 1,267 younger people, all of European descent. The scientists found 150 genetic SNP variants linked to extreme longevity. Initially, the team identified only 33 SNPs found more often in people aged 90 to 114 years but not in a control group made up of people who will presumably live an average lifespan. ... biostatistician Paola Sebastiani [devised] a different statistical method to identify additional SNPs that would improve the team's ability to predict longevity. The team tested their predictions on a separate group of centenarians and controls. With the 150 SNPs, the researchers could correctly predict who was a centenarian 77 percent of the time. ... Now on one side, 77 percent is a very high accuracy for a genetic model, which means that the traits that we are looking at have a very strong genetic base ... On the other hand, the 150 SNPs can't explain why the remaining 23 percent of centenarians in the study have reached such ripe old ages. It could mean that those people have other, rare genetic variants or lifestyles responsible for their longevity or some combination of the two."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60772/title/For_most_centenarians,_longevity_is_written_in_the_DNA

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As the Smithsonian notes, "It won't be long before surgeons routinely install replacement body parts created in the laboratory. ... Anthony Atala works in the body shop of the future. ... he and his colleagues use human cells to grow muscles, blood vessels, skin and even a complete urinary bladder. Much of the work is experimental and hasn't yet been tested in human patients, but Atala has implanted laboratory-grown bladders into more than two dozen children and young adults born with defective bladders that don't empty properly, a condition that can cause kidney damage. The bladders were the first lab-generated human organs implanted in people. If they continue to perform well in clinical tests, the treatment may become standard not only for birth defects of the bladder but also for bladder cancer and other conditions. ... Regenerative medicine's once-wild ideas are fast becoming reality. Late last year, Organovo, a biotech company in San Diego, began distributing the first commercially available body-part printer. Yes, you read correctly: a printer for body parts. Using the same idea as an ink-jet printer, it jets laser-guided droplets of cells and scaffold material onto a movable platform. With each pass of the printer head, the platform sinks, and the deposited material gradually builds up a 3-D piece of tissue. Regenerative medicine laboratories around the world have relied on the printer to generate pieces of skin, muscle and blood vessels. Atala's lab has used the technology to construct a two-chambered mouse-size heart in about 40 minutes."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/97123514.html

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