Future Watch #2 or Clinical Immortality and You
Cloning has a plethora of problems currently: increased size of those cloned, premature death and significant genetic deformations. I heard somewhere that for every one normal embryo twenty are discarded due to developmental problems. However, there is one particular problem that, when solved will change the face of this, our human endeavor.
A human cell can divided about 70 times before it dies. Each time it divides the protective tips of the chromosomes, called telomeres, are slightly whittled down. After the 70 divisions it can no longer divided successfully and dies off. No great sorrow, these are only cells after all.
However, when scientists take cells from a seven year old cow and produce a calf, the calf is born seven years old, genetically. The telomeres have seven years worth of wear already on them. Their life spans are appropriately seven years shorter. A solution to this particular issue requires ‘fixing’ the telomeres so that the worn down portions can be protected or built up. This is one of the hurdles that must be solved in order to make at least human cloning viable.
Interesting, but what is the point of all this blather? Just this, aging, in the traditional sense also involves telomeres being worn down due to a lifetime of cells dividing. After many iterations of cellular division, cells begin to make more frequent errors when dividing, causing among many things, tumors and cellular breakdown. This occurs in young people but due to our robust (and youthful) immune systems such infrequent deformed cells are simply destroyed. As we get older, and more of these cellular mishaps occur and our body is less able to handle the load.
But if you fix the cloning issue with telomeres, you have fixed the aging issue. It means not only eternal life (barring accidents and such) but it also eternal youth.
In fairness the relationship between cloning and telomeres lose isn’t clearly understood (certainly not by me) and current cloning studies have managed to produced clones mice that are not prematurely aged (and having undamaged telomeres) but it isn’t understood what that is the result of.
So what is the moral of this story? As ridiculous as it may sound, if people in our lifetime don’t achieve clinical mortality, I believe our children will. Of course this sounds all too fairy tale-ish but remember there was a day when you believed you’d never get laid and now look at you.
A human cell can divided about 70 times before it dies. Each time it divides the protective tips of the chromosomes, called telomeres, are slightly whittled down. After the 70 divisions it can no longer divided successfully and dies off. No great sorrow, these are only cells after all.
However, when scientists take cells from a seven year old cow and produce a calf, the calf is born seven years old, genetically. The telomeres have seven years worth of wear already on them. Their life spans are appropriately seven years shorter. A solution to this particular issue requires ‘fixing’ the telomeres so that the worn down portions can be protected or built up. This is one of the hurdles that must be solved in order to make at least human cloning viable.
Interesting, but what is the point of all this blather? Just this, aging, in the traditional sense also involves telomeres being worn down due to a lifetime of cells dividing. After many iterations of cellular division, cells begin to make more frequent errors when dividing, causing among many things, tumors and cellular breakdown. This occurs in young people but due to our robust (and youthful) immune systems such infrequent deformed cells are simply destroyed. As we get older, and more of these cellular mishaps occur and our body is less able to handle the load.
But if you fix the cloning issue with telomeres, you have fixed the aging issue. It means not only eternal life (barring accidents and such) but it also eternal youth.
In fairness the relationship between cloning and telomeres lose isn’t clearly understood (certainly not by me) and current cloning studies have managed to produced clones mice that are not prematurely aged (and having undamaged telomeres) but it isn’t understood what that is the result of.
So what is the moral of this story? As ridiculous as it may sound, if people in our lifetime don’t achieve clinical mortality, I believe our children will. Of course this sounds all too fairy tale-ish but remember there was a day when you believed you’d never get laid and now look at you.
posted by Yen at
10:48 AM
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