Longevity FAQ

From Laura Deming, you will find it here, essential reading for our time.  Here is one bit:

Senescence

at a glance: a fraction of your cells get older than the others, so we’d like to eliminate them

As you get old, so do your cells. But some of your cells get old in a way that is much worse than the others. You may have heard of a thing called telomerase. If you remember correctly, it’s the thing that keeps the end of your DNA long enough that your cells can still divide. When one of your cells runs out of telomerase, it can’t make many more copies of itself. If the cell sticks around, refuses to die even when it stops working, and starts secreting signals to the immune system, we call that a ‘senescent cell‘.

What happens when you get rid of these cells? Some animals that age faster than normal have a lot of these ‘senescent cells’ and are good experimental models in which to ask that question. In 2011, a group from the Mayo Clinic cleared out many of the senescent cells in one of those animal models, and found that the resulting mice were healthier in old age (among other things, they did not get cataracts and bent spines, which typically emerge in old age). In 2016, the same investigators found that getting rid of senescent cells in normal mice made them live a longer healthy lifespan. Knocking out senescent cells is tricky, because they don’t have many unique identifiers. Companies are working to either find things empirically that kill senescent cells, or figure out specific mechanisms by which to try to destroy them.

It starts off like this:

Hi! I’m Laura Deming, and I run Longevity Fund. I spend a lot of time thinking about what could increase healthy human lifespan. This is my overview of the field for beginners.

Does it end with you living to 129?  I genuinely do not know.

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