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'Tanned' whales' sun response clues to human ageing
The way that whales react to sunlight can shed new light on the human ageing process, say researchers. Some species react by getting darker with UV exposure in the same way as humans get a tan. Others though, protect from themselves from sun burn by…
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thoughts on immortality.
every now and then you end up doing an experiment which takes up all of your time and there's no time left for socialising, eating, cleaning or blogging! the last two weeks were such a time- but we're back with a vengeance. so, question. lots of questions in fact: imagine humanity were immortal because of the efforts of science, if we just for this post assume that this is what ageing research is all about and to discover the fountain of youth and immortality is to succeed.
what do you think life as an immortal would be like? does an immortal organism need food? what about disease, injuries, reproduction? could the human mind cope with immortality? would the organism be in an immaculate state at all times or would we deteriorate over time?
would there be something like an annual MOT and service, like with a car? shops with spares limbs, internal organs, brains much like a pick-a-mix? or would there be clinics that grow spare clones from your DNA that are then used as supplies for personalised grafts, replacing faulty organs, broken limbs?
post your thoughts by hitting the submit button above!
of course i am not the first person to think about that- the subject is as old as humanity itself, and all along there have been reports of resurrected members of our species. in 1992, the authority on all things beautiful published a very interesting opus on the subject, which in my opinion successfully, and radically, addressed one possible outcome of immortality. It's of course Hollywood I am talking about and the movie is "Death Becomes Her" with Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. Below is a link to a five minute summary of the movie- beware! there are loads of spoilers in the clip if you haven't seen the whole piece.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXsnlzhsoS4
Check out this app, take a picture of yourself before and after and submit it to our blog (-:
Thank you!
Blue Death: The frontiers of ageing research.
This short film produced by the Wellcome Trust explains about why we study ageing, how we use a model organism in order to study ageing, and shows recent exciting findings from work in our lab.
An anthology of ageing theories
In 1951, Peter B. Medawar gave his inaugural lecture at the University College London bearing the title: “An unsolved problem in biology”. It was of course ageing which he referred to as the unsolved problem and comprehensively discussed in this lecture, and which since has been among the most influential early works on ageing. The central unsolved question about ageing at that time was why ageing happens in the first place. Other questions he addressed in this lecture dealt with molecular mechanisms of ageing, which were unknown at that time. Now, sixty years later, this critical discussion has come of age itself, and among the most renowned scientist in the ageing field there are a few which consider ageing no longer an unsolved problem.
The currently probably best accepted evolutionary ageing theory is the Disposable Soma theory which was proposed by Thomas Kirkwood in 1977. The crucial statement of this theory posits that oocytes and sperm, the reproductive cells, are maintained in excellent condition while the energy investment in maintenance and repair of the rest of the body, the somatic tissue, is carefully balanced against the cost for reproduction. Somatic cells will suffer an increasing load of damage to cellular components to an extent which eventually will impair proper maintenance after the organism has reproduced.
Now, sixty years after Peter Medawar's inaugural lecture at UCL there are still ongoing debates on what are the causes of ageing in the animal kingdom; whether they are the result of programmes similar to those which govern the development of a foetus to a young adult, or whether they are induced through Darwinian selection favouring a genetic make-up which only allows the fittest to survive. Yet most scientists currently believe that ageing is a consequence of the failure of appropriate maintenance on molecular, cellular and tissue levels, resulting from oxidative damage to proteins and DNA.
do these genes make me look old?
There's some science to be had from our two remarkably-young-looking-for-their-age men...
Why do some people age better than others? Why are some populations of people longer-lived than others (e.g. Okinawan Japanese or Ashkenazi Jews)? The weird thing about this as that these old people are not infrequently the ones who don't necessarily look after themselves like we think we are supposed to (e.g. see this article).
Clearly ageing is affected by our genes as well as our environment.
The effects of genes on ageing are dramatically illustrated by evolution: a mouse will live for only a few years, while a bowhead whale can live for 200 years, and it is thought that some animals could be immortal!
This means that ageing is not inevitable and that it evolves. This means we should be able to discover genes that make us age, which is precisely what was found in 1982 for worms, in 2001 for flies and in 2003 for mice. Remarkably, each of these discoveries involved a gene encoding a component of the insulin signalling pathway.
If insulin signalling is involved in ageing across the vast evolutionary distance from worms to mice, maybe it's also true for humans? Indeed, this seems to be the case. Population studies of centenarians point, amongst other things, to a correlation between extreme longevity and genetic variants of genes involved in insulin signalling (click for open source review).
We plan to explore this in our exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition...
Got any suggestions or discussion points to chat about at the exhibition?
Ageing Quotes - 1
"Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
Mark Twain
