What if one's telomeres began to lengthen instead of shorten?

reply to post by winofiend


The future might not be as bad as you think! Telomere length is sort of correlated with bone mineral density, for reasons we don't quite understand, the longer the telomeres the stronger the bones. If your telomeres did lengthen, there's a possibility it could reverse or at least halt the detrimental processes of ageing.

I'm pretty sure that they have figured out how to do this because they say that people can live to be 800 years old. They also say that the first person to reach 800 has already been born. The only way that this is possible is if they have figured how to get the DNA to fix their telomeres. I wouldn't want to work till I was 795 years old Great way to fix it so the government has to pay back Social Security, use the lifespan of a few to make it so noone ever collects.

reply to post by rickymouse


That's based on projections and predicted breakthroughs.

The idea is that by the time someone born in 2000 is 80, there will be medical techniques and treatments available to keep them alive until 160. Then by the time they're 160, those techniques will have advanced so they can live to 300, then by the time they reach 300... And so on.

reply to post by Dispo


I've read some pretty technical articles on this and it does not seem to be related to better health care. They have discovered something new but of course, it will only be available to those with a lot of money or power. This breakthrough will not keep us from going insane or getting hit by a car though, it just keeps the body rejuvinated. A specialized diet will need to be followed to keep those people from going crazy.

reply to post by rickymouse



Many people want to live longer - I don't know what you mean about people going crazy. If someone were very wealthy, I doubt they'd be in a hurry to die anytime soon!

Originally posted by unityemissions
Not my point.

Cancer is inevitable if you live long enough.

And what if we had a cure to cancer? Then could we be immortal until an accident or another disease kills us?

Originally posted by HomoSapiensSapiens
reply to post by rickymouse

 

Many people want to live longer - I don't know what you mean about people going crazy. If someone were very wealthy, I doubt they'd be in a hurry to die anytime soon!

The age and diet related problems would still be there even if you lived longer. Telomeres do not keep you from getting dementia or genetically caused imbalances of brain chemicals. They also do not make you smarter, although wisdom comes with age I do know many older people that never wised up. The longer you live, the more chance of having a major accident that kills or cripples you.

If you are healthy and can get around it is nice to live longer. Being crippled or unhealthy makes it more of a curse. Another thing is that your good friends die and after a while it isn't fun to make new friends knowing they will die on you. Could get very tiring watching the same stupid mistakes being made over and over again in the USA also. Just think of the people who experienced the great depression having to watch it again. Now if you lived for eight hundred years, how many times would you witness the same stupid things happening with a different twist....and nobody would listen when you try to tell them.

a reply to: spaceknight

Right you are and with the current technological breakthroughs happening, it is entirely possible to even reverse aging...

There have been some experiments where they lengthened the telomeres on a skin graft culture, expecting it would become cancerous. Instead, most of what you could spot as 'aging' in a culture reversed, and it did NOT become a big tumor.

You can get some amazing results in mice, too, by replacing NAD+, thus allowing the nuclei to regain youthful control over mitochondria. And there are some "repair yourself" enzymes they're beginning to isolate from the blood of young mammals that also fix a lot of issues with older critters.

I think you'll see a lot of progress here shortly. Although I've also seen it calculated that if you were immortalized by fixing your telomeres and mitochondrial shortcomings, you'd still buy it before 400 from disease or accident.

Still, I'd be happy with being 30 all the way to the point I buy it at 120. It's being crippled up and weak for decades I don't look forward to.

I think we're glossing over the fact that nature selected against indefinite cell replication in pretty much all animals.

My guess is that the cumulative effect of coding errors with each cell replication leads to later in life production of genetically damaged offspring who are still viable. Miscoded genes would accumulate, and eventually you'd have two parents with multiple garbled genes in important places, and the species begins to have difficulty reproducing.

originally posted by: The Vagabond

Miscoded genes would accumulate, and eventually you'd have two parents with multiple garbled genes in important places, and the species begins to have difficulty reproducing.

Alas, the future holds that I turn into an immortal Sawney Bean.

Well, stop on by...for lunch.

not that hard. in general medicine is a skerrid of telomeres. not everyone. but enough to create back-pressure against a lot of research other than of course cancer research. really there are enzymes that lengthen telomeres naturally occurring in the body. thus there is a gateway for medical intervention. also if i am not mistaken RNA ringlets can be created that reprogram the telomerase expression in cells. these days we are learning how to insert stuff in specially charged microshells so they go into cells on their own. that would mean one problem that of there being millions of billions of sets of dna you need to change individually would be neatly solved. another aspect of senascense is decline of the mitochodria both numerically and in efficiency. another is accumulated environmental damage from radiation, or charged radicals. there are pathways for auto correcting these as well. in fact there is stuff in cruciferous vegetables that can keep you alive with several times the normal lethal dose of radiation. They are now giving these in concentrated forms to the astronauts i think.

When Geron corp first patented telomerase research they certainly were so interested in gerontology that they named their company geron corp rather than telomere-corp.

I'm 45 I'm a TA65 user, it works but it doesn't halt aging, I am benching more than anytime in my life I throw around 250 like a toy, my grey's are... 4 lol down from several hundred, my skin is like an 20 something Asian woman's arse cheek.

But....

Mitochondria carries it's own DNA which is one of several remaining problems, cartilage doesn't always have blood supply for stem cell rejuvenation, knees, spine. Other issues....

It's a step, you can be a comfortable Centenarian with continued lengthening of Telomeres.

But your still aging