User:BumblingBuffoon

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Greytide.

Life goals? I promised myself that I would at some point get out of my trash heap and go through college and university, looking into biology disciplines (probably genetics, and cellular biology) to find a way to prolong my life. As it turns out a lot of very rich people also don't like the idea of dying, who could know why? And have been dumping money into life-extension research for a long time now 1.

Most people have to specialize in their life and pick something that defines them, I am an artist, they'll say, an engineer, a doctor, and they have to spend ever increasing amounts of time to become those things. Time is everything, if we had more time, we could do everything. So it just seemed to me to be the biggest priority. The reality of the situation is that I will soon be thirty, and that's making me anxious, procrastination is terrible. Nothing fills me with more anxiety than running out of time, how about you?

Some bullshit about that

Telomeres are the holy grail right? Except when they haven't actually worked. If you have ever been interested in life extension for realzies, telomeres is one of the first things you'll see. The idea is that the hayflick limit (the amount of divisions a cell can undergo) is determined by how much telomeres that your cell's DNA has. Every division shortens the caps on the end of DNA, just a lil bit, and when they run out, the DNA becomes unstable leading to death or other painful mutations (and then death). What if we could hypothetically extend the telomere caps then? Well, as it turns out that isn't a new theory for the natural world, in fact, cancer does this quite swimmingly. There is telomerase, this enzyme essentially maintains telomere length, alright let's experiment on some rats (as we do) it can delay ageing, but it only delays ageing. I have never seen a report in nematode worms, fruit fly or mice that telomere extension by itself has ever been enough to indefinitely prolong life. The indefinite part is important, as it means something else must contribute to eventual senescence (death), thus no model that hopes to explain senescence solely using telomeres can hope to be correct.

Supplements

There was once a Chinese emperor who hoped to obtain immortality, and he was eventually sold mercury by a quack. Today's quacks like nutritional supplements, because they're cheap and easy to produce and thus easy to turn a profit on reselling. They do nothing.

Blood replacement

Young blood is the best according to these vampires, bonus points if they're a capitalist corporate CEO exploiting the blood of a proletariat underclass. More on parabiosis here.

Epigenetics

As a Christmas present I decided to include news about epigenetic research to show that the quest for the Holy Grail is still very much alive. [1] It is a newer model to determine biological age versus chronological age, based on DNA methylation, and some trials are proposed to reverse some of this ageing in future trials. It's good to see that the world is still interested in living forever.

Systematic organ failure and cascades

A bad liver leads to a cascading effect where it not filtrating toxins causes damage in another area of the body which then fails and causes the liver to suffer more as a result of the changes, a feedback loop of failures that progresses gradually over time. This is how I imagine many illnesses to occur. Scar tissue is an example of a change in the body that is permanent and results in an immediate closing of the wound but at the cost of not creating functional tissue. Some tissues are capable of regenerating more than others are, and in the human fetus, injuries are capable of healing without any scar formation at all. [2] Suggesting that given the correct cellular pathways are active that scars can heal (maybe, I'm not sure about the mechanisms, but cellular signalling pathways are essentially 'everything' that determines what cells do in their circumstances as far as I know). The reason that scar formation is important to address is that fibrosis is a known killer, which need be addressed in organs.

Sometimes it only takes a specific thing to kill someone, like a fat buildup in an artery that causes an aneurysm in the brain, this is usually due to cholesterol, as bodies age, the body loses its capacity to properly clear this cholesterol, but how does it lose its ability to clear cholesterol? Well the liver is the primary driver of LDL destruction and fibrosis of the liver impacts its ability to unclog the arteries, although it may not be the only reason that it occurs. For example, damage to the endothelial cells in artery walls can contribute to plaque buildup. Which brings us to how endothelial cells repair themselves, simplified, this process is helped by something called Klotho that is made by the KL gene, which interestingly seems to increase longevity of mice when it is over expressed. As we age, klotho protein expression goes down, which as a result leads to this cascading effect in some cases. [3] Why do these genes turn off? The answer is epigenetic signals, as we age our DNA and its methylation change, the first changes by DNA damage that can occur for example by radioactive decay sources and it can repair improperly. Basically, the rock gets thrown through our metaphorical window and we can't replace it. Epigenetic changes can be reversed however. DNA damage would require a genetic therapy introducing a transgene, that's assuming the cell isn't simply destroyed before that happens (hello cancer).

At some point epigenetic changes are implicated in our ageing process, and its not clear what to do about it. Knowing why they happen would be nice. Its easy to just say "environment" but it is so non-specific as to be unhelpful.