Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Things are changing. That's no surprise; our universe is not a static place. Just in the course of my life, we've seen the creation of the commercial Internet, Space Shuttles, Mars rovers, the sequencing of the human genome, personal genomes on-demand, a vaccine that can prevent some forms of cancer, and much, much more. The future holds even greater promise.

Not only that, but people are living longer (that's one more thing science has done). I will likely live longer than my parents (though not by much). My son, though, his generation will likely live to be 120-150 years old, and they'll live most of their lives healthy, if groups like the Methuselah Foundation have anything to say about it.

So what changes might I see in my lifetime? What changes will you see in yours? What changes will my son see in his?

That's the question that the Edge's World Question Center wants to know: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

They asked that question of a sizeable number of eminent thinkers in a variety of fields and, naturally, they got a variety of answers. Interestingly, in addition to such luminaries as Gregory Benford, Robert Shapiro, Laurence Krauss, and Aubrey de Grey, they also have input from the likes of Alan Alda and Brian Eno.

Some of the posts are really insightful; some less so. But it got me wondering. What if more than one of their suggestions are correct? It's one thing to talk about advanced artificial general intelligences, or molecular-scale manufacturing, or synthetic biology. But what if we're talking about all of those things, at roughly the same time? It seems unlikely (barring the AI causing a Singularity and creating the other advances). But what kind of world might we live in if advanced AIs could create anything they wanted, including living organisms, at the molecular level?

There's a lot of promise, but also a lot of risk and questions. Read the answers on the Edge's site, but while you're doing so, keep in mind the risks of some of these predictions coming true. And, if it scares you a little bit, take a trip over to the Lifeboat Foundation website.

Joggers Live Longer, Healthier Lives

A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine has told us something we pretty much already knew: if you jog, or engage in any regular aerobic exercise, in middle or late life, you're less likely to have disabilities and will live a longer and healthier life. The study, conducted over 20 years from 1985 to 2005, included 538 study participants who were regular runners and 423 people in a control group who had never run. All participants were at least 50 years of age when the study began.

The data was compiled at the 8-year, 13-year, and 21-year marks and revealed—tada!—that the particpants who exercised had better aerobic capacity, better cardiovascular fitness, increased bone mass, fewer inflammatory markers, less physical disability, better response to vaccinations and even improved thinking, learning and memory. They also lived significantly longer. By the 19th year of the study, 34 percent of the non-runners had died compared with only 15 percent of the runners.

At the end of the study, the participants were assessed for ability levels in eight basic daily activities, such as walking, eating, and grip strength. The runners averaged one mild disability, while the non-runners averaged one-to-two disabilities and were more likely to have major disabilities.

None of this really comes as a surprise... we've seen studies for years telling us that if we exercise and eat right, we'll live longer, healthier lives. That's why I jog several times a week (I'll be completing my fourth half-marathon in October). And I hope to still be doing it when I'm in my 80s.

Foods That Keep You Healthy

Dr. Maoshing Ni of Yahoo! Health has written an article called 5 Healthiest Anti-Aging Snacks, which highlights foods that can help keep you healthy and fit. The gist seems to be that fruits, vegetables, and nuts are good for you, which of course we all already knew.

But Dr. Mao goes into details about why certain foods are good for you and how they benefit your body. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go get some fruit...

Tumor Suppressor Genes Affect Aging

On Friday the Mayo Clinic announced that its researchers had shown that—in mice, at least—a pair of tumor suppression genes had a significant impact on aging. Their findings were published in the online issue of Nature Cell Biology.

The researchers discovered that when the tumor suppression gene p16 was over-expressed, tissues in their mice models started aging rapidly. But when the p19 gene was overexpressed, it counteracted the effects of p16, retarding aging.

Whether these results will have any implications for humans is yet to be determined.

Clues to Why Exercise Helps You Live a Longer, Healthier Life

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have uncovered clues to suggest why living a healthier lifestyle will help you live longer. The answer, they say, is less insulin in the brain.

In their experiments, the researchers sought to understand the role of the insulin-like signaling pathway in extending lifespan. This pathway governs growth and metabolic processes in cells throughout the body. The pathway is activated when insulin and insulin-like growth factor-1 switch on proteins inside the cell called insulin receptor substrates (Irs).

In earlier work, the researchers had found that knocking out both copies of one of the Irs genes, Irs2, in mice reduces brain growth and produces diabetes due to pancreatic beta cell failure. However, in the new study, when the researchers knocked out only one copy of the gene, they found the mice lived 18 percent longer than normal mice.

Because reducing insulin-like signaling in the neurons of roundworms and fruitflies extends their lifespan, the researchers decided to examine what would happen when they knocked out one or both copies of the Irs2 gene only in the brains of mice.

Mice lacking one copy of the Irs2 gene in brain cells also showed an 18 percent longer lifespan, and the near complete deletion of brain Irs2 had a similar effect. “What's more, the animals lived longer, even though they had characteristics that should shorten their lives—such as being overweight and having higher insulin levels in the blood,” said Morris F. White, an investigator for HHMI.

However, both sets of Irs2 knockout mice exhibited other characteristics that marked them as healthier, said White. They were more active as they aged, and their glucose metabolism resembled that of younger mice. The researchers also found that after eating, their brains showed higher levels of superoxide dismutase, an antioxidant enzyme that protects cells from damage by highly reactive chemicals called free radicals.

White and his colleagues are planning their next studies to better understand how healthy aging and lifespan are coordinated by Irs2 signaling pathways in the body and the brain. White speculated that the insulin-like signaling pathway in the brain might promote age-related brain diseases.

Personally, I'll be most interested in seeing how this work meshes with the work being done on Sirtuin. Calorie Restriction methods have not been shown to be effective in humans yet, but there's no reason to think that they won't be. The research on brain insulin, on the other hand, is something that will have to be watched fairly closely. While mice may make an interesting model for early-stage testing, their brains are not that similar to ours and any type of alteration being done on the brain could have effects that would not be obvious in a mouse model.

LysoSENS Progress Update

I blogged recently about the Methuselah Foundation's LysoSENS project, one of their funded research efforts to help eliminate the deleterious effects of aging. What I didn't read closely enough was that the contest ended on December 31 (although I'm sure they are still accepting samples).

On their blog, they have posted an update including details of the top five samples they received. If you're interested in details of the progress being made in the fight against aging, check it out.

Grand Challenges

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has officially launched what they call a "worldwide brainstorming session" called Grand Challenges for Engineering. The purpose is to identify the major engineering challenges to be addressed during the 21st Century.

The project grew out of a brainstorming session to determine the greatest, highest-impact engineering feats of the 20th Century. Anyone can submit ideas (this means you) to the list, and many people already have. The list will be reviewed by a panel of experts including J. Craig Venter, Larry Page, Dean Kamen, Ray Kurzweil, and William Perry, among others. If you don't know who these people are, you should... go to the website and read their bios.

I haven't submitted my ideas to the list yet, but I will. First, I'm going to list some thoughts here:

• Mind-Machine Interface - Our knowledge and understanding of the human brain and the human mind have advanced more in the past 15 years than they had in all the time leading up to that time. We now have systems that can detect a person's thought patterns and behave according to a prescribed set of rules, systems that have allowed paralyzed people to operate machinery. Improvements in this technology will result in true cybernetics, replacement limbs, paralysis cures, and eventually devices that help the blind to see and the deaf to hear.
• Low-Cost Orbital Access - And by "low-cost" I mean around the current price of an airline ticket. Rockets are never going to reach that pricing level, and it's time to stop pretending that they will. There are, however, some means that will work. A space elevator, while massively expensive to design and build, would lower cost-to-orbit dramatically. And gravity control, while firmly in the realm of science fiction for now, would be an enabler of so many things I can't even list them in this post. The hurdles in both cases are mainly engineering challenges (though in the case of gravity control, there is some basic science yet to be done), and they are hurdles that can be overcome.
• Anti-Senescence - There are a limited number of causes of cell death, and we are close to understanding many of them. The challenges remaining are in both the realms of science and engineering, but they are no insurmountable. Understanding and being able to control cell death could lead to cures for cancer, Alzheimer's disease and many other diseases as well as rejuvenation therapies. Some people believe it may even be possible to eliminate aging as a cause of death.
• Clean, Reliable Power Generation - Most of our current means of generating electricity are destructive--coal, natural gas, and oil all create pollution in various amounts, and nuclear energy leaves us with large amounts of waste that will take eons to decay. Only renewable, non-polluting sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal will ease our energy demands without irreparable damaging the planet we live on. Solar power satellites beaming power as microwaves to ground receiver stations, supplemented by huge geothermal projects, could supply all of the energy we need to grow in the 21st Century.
• Asteroid Mining - Earth has a finite number of resources, and they're difficult to get to. A typical asteroid, meanwhile, has trillions of (2007) dollars worth of precious metals, and we could mine them without polluting our water sources here on Earth. The first organization that does so will truly open up the space market by making massive profits and will create a "gold rush" in space.
• Artificial Intelligence - True artificial intelligence is not that far away (although it's also not as close as some people would like to believe). There will be varying levels of it, ranging from slow-thinking, distributed neural network-based systems to very limited, task-specific (but portable) devices to handle your day-to-day chores, such as driving. Autonomous vehicles would virtually remove the human-error element from automobile and airplane travel, surgery, and commerce. Artificial intelligence will be used (even in the near term) to aid in product design, by means of evolving designs using genetic algorithms, allowing the rapid design of improved products.

These are just some of the (many) ideas I have for engineering challenges to be addressed in the 21st Century. In a way, it makes me sad that I'm not an engineer.

Hey Buddy, Wanna Be a Longevity Researcher?

I think I'm going to call this the "Hey Buddy, Wanna Be a Researcher?" series, and this is the third installment. In this case, I'm going to talk about the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit organization conducting research focused on remediating crucial but currently neglected aspects of the human aging process.

The Methuselah Foundation sponsors the M Prize, based on the successful X Prize programs, for extending the lifespan of an ordinary lab mouse. In addition, they are directly funding two research programs: LysoSENS and MitoSENS.

LysoSENS is where people like you and me have the opportunity to participate. The goal of the project is to reduce or eliminate the accumulation of some pathogenic material in the body. The researchers' means of reaching this goal is to search for enzymes capable of selectively degrading the respective target material in the environment.

So, you ask me, how can I help with that sort of research? It turns out that there are microbes in nature that are capable of breaking down many of these substances. If there weren't, then buried human and animal bodies would be causing massive polution to our soil in terms of cholesterols and other harmful substances. So we know that there are microbes that break down these substances in the soil in the form of decomposing plant and animal matter.

So the researchers are seeking candidate microbes by asking for the public (that's us) to send in samples that may contain these microbes. But they're not just looking for any common samples... they want exotic soils from diverse areas, not dirt from your garden or compost heap. So be creative... pick up a handful (50-100 grams) of soil from an unusual location and package it up. Ship it to the address below, and you can contribute to helping humans live longer and healthier lives.

Addresses to send your samples to:

By regular mail:

John Schloendorn
The Biodesign Institute
PO Box 875701
Tempe, AZ 85287-5701
USA

(The above address cannot receive FedEx / UPS shipments)

By FedEx / UPS:

K. Anderson / Schloendorn
The Biodesign Institute
1001 South McAllister Ave
Tempe, AZ 85287-5701
USA

(The above address cannot receive regular mail)