IUBio

repair systems

Jurgen Kaljuvee kaljuvee at HOTMAIL.COM
Wed Jan 27 03:10:36 EST 1999


Damien Broderick wrote:

>BTW, my forthcoming book THE LAST MORTAL GENERATION (Sydney: New 
>Holland) 
>will go to printers in Australia next week, due out in February. Good 
>timing 
>from Geron and Shay & Wright... :)

To two optimists:

1. Damien Broderick:

Regarding your optimistic book title 'last mortal generation', I would 
be curious to know how you enforce perfect repair system control on all 
levels (transcriptional, translational, intracellular and inter-cellular 
molecular repair etc). 

As I pointed out at this newsgroup a year or so ago (and I think I 
received some sort of affirmative reply from M.West of Geron), Mike 
Fossel had one big shortcoming in his book 'Reversing Human Aging'. 
Namely, maintaining telomere length would allow adjacent cells to divide 
and by division replace the deficient apoptopic cells, but he did not 
realize (as far as I can remember) that it would be not easy to maintain 
those adjacent cells intact; they are constantly incurring damage which 
is repaired only partially at all levels (too allow for mutations, 
variation, and hence evolution).  So even if we can regulate telomerate 
in vivo, cellular aging would still occur, though hopefully at a lower 
rate. But your book title implies something else...

So how do you enhance repair systems to have 0 error rate?

2. Aubrey de Grey

In one of your recent postings, you assess that 'given the current rate 
of scientific discovery, I feel confident that lifespan would be 
prolonged in next 50 years' (excuse me if I strongly misquote anything; 
I was hoping to paraphrase to the best of my memory). I'm not going to 
ask how you estimated that (it's clearly a highly qualitative 
statement), but I would like to know what do you see as 2-3 most 
prominent challanges on the way there.  Clearly, the problem definition 
will change along the way, but what do you think are the next 2-3 
problems which need to be solved?

All in good spirits of exchanging knowledge, Jurgen Kaljuvee




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