Increasing Human Lifespans What is one of the most popular scientific projects today? This is a hard question to answer I bet, since there are so many projects going on. You might think space travel is the most popular project and there is no doubt it is popular, but it just doesn’t touch lives the way anti-aging research does. It doesn’t even touch lives the way cancer research does or any of the other projects trying to cure disease. What is happening is the scientific community feels it now has a chance with the advanced tools it has to make a dent in health related issues. Just recently aging was considered a disease by many scientists. We never thought about it this way before, but when we give it a lot of thought it does have many of the features of a disease. It weakens us, allows other diseases to take hold, it destroys our brains many times and getting old has never been accused of being a good thing except for the fact many say it is better than dying. Even this is not always correct since some people suffer so much death is considered a relief by them. A one year study was recently conducted where a small group of people were given a mixture of three different drugs. Two of the drugs were for diabetes and one was a hormone. The idea was to help the thymus which is a gland in the chest. The thymus is responsible for building white blood cells. The scientists have found the thymus begins to shrink after puberty. They feel if they can affect this shrinkage it will help the blood cells and thus help our body to maybe fight aging. When they conducted and finished the trial they were astounded. What they found was some of the participants actually did more than have their aging slow down which had been the idea behind the test, they actually had their biological age reversed by 2.5 years. They caution us however not to get too excited since they only had a few people in the test. Some of the participants even developed more thymus tissue. All participants showed an improved blood-cell count. This could be the beginning of a new drug. The problem I have talked about in the past is the people who actually control things behind the scenes don’t want the population to live longer, they only want the rich and powerful to. They view over population and anti-aging drugs for us as a curse, just listen to how they harp on over population. This year, 2019 has seen a new group being formed. It is a nonprofit which was formed by 16 researches from Harvard, MIT and several other U.S. and European institutions. The goal is to reverse aging. They have a broad scope which is to make people healthier by discovering new ways to fight diseases. Some of these diseases are associated with aging. The new group is named the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research. The head of the organization has said, “ The academy has been formed because our field of aging and longevity research has reached a point of maturity where the leaders in the field believe that we can have — or will have — a big impact on the planet.” Some scientists think the answer to aging may be genetic. A gene was found over twenty years ago name telomerase. This is said to be the gene which gives immortality to cells. In 1965 they were able to take human skin cells and make them immortal in a dish in the lab. So far, they haven’t been successful in doing this in the human body. We have advanced since then using stem cells to fight certain diseases and thus extend the life of people who might have died otherwise. Is this really life extension. While it is for them, this is not what science thinks is fighting aging. Fighting aging means slowing down aging or reversing it. It is at least two genes are on when we are in the womb and when we are born, they are turned off. One of them is telomerase the immortal gene which was used in the dish to keep human cells alive and the second was thought to be a gene which repairs injury. If this is the case and we could reverse the switch on these genes, perhaps we could live a lot longer or forever, on the other hand what might be the side effects? There are so many different problems for humans as they get older. One is the creation of what is known as senescent cells. In the body they are created as somatic cells and when we get too many of them it is a problem. Our immune system destroys them, but a few remain and cause harm to us. They cause inflammation in our immune systems and the more of these cells we have, the worse the problem. It has been shown in mice if 25 to 50 percent of these cells are removed the mice live longer. One company has stated its goal of extending human lifespans to an average of 150 years old, effectively doubling the current life expectancy. The company is Juvenescience and they claim to have raised 165 million for research into aging. It was said the company has 12 different programs based on hard science which even include preventing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. One of the biggest businesses in the world is said to be antiaging by 2025 and the Bank of America has said by then it will be a 610 billion dollar business. There is an idea circulating about aging which came about after testing mice. It was said there were two groups of mice tested. Group A was given food and Group B was starved to a point. Supposedly the outcome was the thinner mice lived past their average lifespans. This has never been proven for humans. I am not talking about comparing obese people against thin people, but average weight people against thin people. We are learning more about our bodies every day. Not only are these discoveries related to labs, but also to the invention of new medical devices. As our machines become more powerful, we discover things we never knew. The Chinese are working on a new brain scan machine which will be far more powerful than the current one. This could lead to new discoveries about the brain. It seems the future could lead to longer life spans if this is allowed to happen for the masses.
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