Re: Death by Ignorance

On Jun 26, 8:43 am, Sir Frederick <mmcne...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:24:12 -0700 (PDT), mg <mgkel...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Cost is always the issue. I always wondered what would happen if
medical science could give you a new 18 year old body when you reached
65 for instance, for a million dollars. Would we all spend our entire
lives working to save up that million dollars? I suspect we would.

What if the cost was near zero?
Here is an understanding on aging that is new.
Epigenetics is a hot new field.
Just get the old nanotech out and revert those
methylations back to 18 years old :

I can only guess since I'm not a scientist. I do believe we can do a
lot to reduce the incidence of disease and increase our lifespan.
Ultimately, though, I think mother nature has put a biological clock
in living organism that limits their lifespan even if they manage to
avoid disease and accidents. On one of the nature shows the other day,
for instance, they said that the hearts in all living organisms beat
approximately the same number of times before they die.

Doing some more pure speculation, I would think that we might be able
to program our bodies to do more repair work on our organs, just as
you can reprogram a computer. However, with a computer, you are still
dealing with the same hardware and with the body you are still dealing
with the same organs. Reprogramming might require more calories (not
necessarily a problem) and a different design of some organs (a big
problem) and ultimately there might be a limit to how much repair work
can be done. Presumably, if it was only a matter of doing more repair
work, mother nature would have selected that option a long time ago.

I read a sci-fi book years ago where people's mind's were put into a
computer at some point before they died. As a result they lived
forever and they would spend the millennias reliving other people's
lifes. The only time, they would know that they were in a computer was
when that life ended and at that point they would choose a different
life to live. Come to think of it, can we be sure we are actually
alive right now and not merely in a computer living someone else's
previous life? :-)


-------------------------------------------------------------http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080624174849.htm
Our Genome Changes Over Lifetime, And May Explain Many 'Late-onset' Diseases
ScienceDaily (June 25, 2008) —

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that epigenetic marks on DNA-chemical marks other than the DNA sequence-do indeed change
over a person's lifetime, and that the degree of change is similar among family members. The team suggests that overall genome
health is heritable and that epigenetic changes occurring over one's lifetime may explain why disease susceptibility increases with
age.

"We're beginning to see that epigenetics stands at the center of modern medicine because epigenetic changes, unlike DNA sequence
which is the same in every cell, can occur as a result of dietary and other environmental exposure," says Andrew P. Feinberg, M.D.,
M.P.H, a professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the Epigenetics Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
"Epigenetics might very well play a role in diseases like diabetes, autism and cancer."

If epigenetics does contribute to such diseases through interaction with environment or aging, says Feinberg, a person's epigenetic
marks would change over time. So his team embarked on an international collaboration to see if that was true. They focused on
methylation-one particular type of epigenetic mark, where chemical methyl groups are attached to DNA.

"Inappropriate methylation levels can contribute to disease-too much might turn necessary genes off, too little might turn genes on
at the wrong time or in the wrong cell," says Vilmundur Gudnason, MD, PhD, professor of cardiovascular genetics at the University of
Iceland director of the Icelandic Heart Association's Heart Preventive Clinic and Research Institute. "Methylation levels can vary
subtly from one person to the next, so the best way to get a handle on significant changes is to study the same individuals over
time."

The researchers used DNA samples collected from people involved in the AGES Reykjavik Study (formerly the Reykjavik Heart Study).
Within the study, about 600 people provided DNA samples in 1991, and again between 2002 and 2005. Of these, the research team
measured the total amount of DNA methylation in each of 111 samples and compared total methylation from DNA collected in 2002 to
2005 to that person's DNA collected in 1991.

They found that in almost one-third of individuals, methylation changed over that 11-year span, but not all in the same direction.
Some individuals gained total methylation in their DNA, while others lost.. "What we saw was a detectable change over time, which
showed us proof of the principle that an individual's epigenetics does change with age," says M. Daniele Fallin, Ph.D., an associate
professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "What we still didn't know was why or how, but we
thought 'maybe this, too, is something that's heritable' and could explain why certain families are more susceptible to certain
diseases."

The team then measured total methylation changes in a different set of DNA samples collected from Utah residents of northern and
western European descent. These DNA samples were collected over a 16-year span from 126 individuals from two- and three-generation
families.

Similar to the Icelandic population, the Utah family members also showed varied methylation changes over time. But they found that
family members tended to have the same kind of change-if one individual lost methylation over time, they saw similar loss in other
family members.

"We still haven't concretely figured out what this means for health and disease, but as an epidemiologist, I think this is very
interesting, since epigenetic changes could be an important link between environment, aging and genetic risk for disease," Fallin
says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Swedish Cancer Foundation, Icelandic Parliament, Huntsman General
Clinical Research Center, W. M. Keck Foundation, George S. and Delores Doré Eccles Foundation, Fulbright Foundation and the
Icelandic Student Innovation Fund.

The research was reported in the June 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Authors on the paper are Hans
Bjornsson, Martin Sigurdsson, Rafael Irizarry, Hengmi Cui, Wenqiang Yu, Michael Rongione, Fallin and Feinberg, all of Hopkins; Thor
Aspelund, Gudny Eiriksdottir and Vilmundur Gudnason of Hjartavernd, Reykjavik, Iceland; Tomas Ekstrom of Karolinska Institute,
Stockholm, Sweden; Tamara Harris and Lenore Launer of the National Institute on Aging, Bethesda, Md.; Mark Leppert of University of
Utah, Salt Lake City; and Carmen Sapienza of Temple University Medical School, Philadelphia, Pa.

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Adapted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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