http://www.nature.com/news/2010/1011....2010.635.html
Quote:
When mice are engineered to lack telomerase completely, their telomeres progressively shorten over several generations. These animals age much faster than normal mice — they are barely fertile and suffer from age-related conditions such as osteoporosis, diabetes and neurodegeneration. They also die young. "If you look at all those data together, you walk away with the idea that the loss of telomerase could be a very important instigator of the ageing process," says DePinho.
To find out if these dramatic effects are reversible, DePinho's team engineered mice such that the inactivated telomerase could be switched back on by feeding the mice a chemical called 4-OHT. The researchers allowed the mice to grow to adulthood without the enzyme, then reactivated it for a month. They assessed the health of the mice another month later.
|
Hmm. So they engineered them to produce little to no telomerase which led to progressively shorter telomeres. Then they introduce it when they're the equivalent of an 80 year old human. The problem I see here is that they started out with no telomerase. Did they carry out this experiment with normal mice that had normal quantities of telomerase to see whether they would exhibit the same benefits as the engineered mice?
That was my first thought. My second thought is that it would be hulluva expensive because the pharma industry never passes up an opportunity to make cash. Think how big it would be. No one wants to die. No one wants to see their loved ones grow old and increasingly hold a balance between chronically ill and just coping. They'd have us all over the barrel. Just like travel. We all want and need to travel and since oil is the most common fuel they can call the shots because they own the oil.
My third thought is that there's another way to live forever. Believe in god and in an afterlife. If you're wrong, it won't matter because you'll be too dead to know the difference. It's the most popular fountain of youth.
Another popular way to live forever is to not focus on yourself. Focus on society and civilization and humanity. If you treat those things as your identity and purpose, then your own death is not the death of your identity or your purpose. Until society or civilization or humanity dies, then for these people they will live forever.
I've often wondered what would it be like to copy myself with 100% accuracy. So sitting across from me would be my duplicate. He would be exactly as I was at the moment of the copying process. So I'd be looking, effectively, at me. He would probably be thinking the same things as me. He'd be looking at me and thinking something like: "That guy over there is probably thinking what I'm thinking!" The only difference between us would be that I know I'm the original, but other than that it's a matter of opinion. The question would arise: If one of us had to die at that moment, would it really matter? Because one would still remain...
Is the death of "me" really the death of me? Or is it only the death of an illusion? How do we know that we're really separate in the grand scheme of things anyway? Something leads me to believe we're all the same, just in different clothes. There're nearly 7 billion other people on this planet that have experienced things differently from me. My current philosophy tells me that if I had been them then I would have turned out exactly as they have. This means that I already have lived as them. So there's no need for me to wish I was someone else or wish I could live forever so that I could experience all that life has to offer. I have lived every life on this earth since the beginning of time and will live every life to come. Why do I say this? Because if I had been any other person in any other time or place, I would have lived my life exactly the same way as them. So why worry? Because I will die, but is death really the death of me or am I worrying about an illusion that does not exist?
Can we as people learn to appreciate what others have as opposed to what we have? I doubt life in this universe will ever be equal or fair. So is it possible to see ourselves in others such that the experiences of others can be appreciated by ourselves without prejudice or jealousy? If you're them, they're you, then yes!
A sublime way to explain this is that we're all the same beam of light broken up by a prism into different colors. This gives the illusion of different beams of light when in reality they all originate from a single source.