Updating Magic Universe
No, they can’t predict how long you’ll live
Excitement today in the media about the discovery of human genetic peculiarities associated with living to an exceptional old age leaves me sniffy. At the close of the story in Magic Universe called “Immortality: should we be satisfied with 100 years?” I recall:
On the day of his assassination, at what was then the ripe old age of 55, Julius Caesar declared, according to Shakespeare:
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, / It seems to me most strange that men should fear; / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.
The veteran soldier would be bemused by 21st-Century hypochondria. In defiance of common sense and medical economics, the generation with the best life expectancy in history is obsessed with longevity.
Although overpopulation is said to be a great global problem, health educators insist that it is one’s duty to abjure motorbikes and butter and to live as long as possible. Yes, even though longevity may bring physical or mental incompetence so severe that it will cost more to keep you zimmering than to feed an entire African orphanage. As for the fear of death, if Christopher Columbus had been as bridled by cautious officials as astronauts are, his flotilla would not have quit the mouth of Spain’s Rio Tinto.
In the absence of significant disease, ageing sets a natural limit to the human lifespan. According to [Leonard] Hayflick it is about 125 years. Very few people lived past 75 until the 20th Century. But by 2000, 75 per cent of the inhabitants of the most affluent countries were doing so. The greying of the populations took actuaries and the medical profession by surprise.
The increase in human longevity slowed down in the closing decades of the 20th Century. Life expectancy at birth in affluent countries may level out at 80-90 years by the mid-21st Century. As the ageing process makes everyone more vulnerable to disease and gross degeneration, further prolongation of life may require medications yet to be invented.
They are not necessarily a good idea. Foreseeable problems range from tyrants who refuse to die to simply losing the carefree pleasures of retirement if young earners should decline to carry the economic burden of the elderly. Hayflick asked, ‘Would the least imperfect scenario be a future society in which everyone lived to their 100th birthday in good physical and mental health, then to die on the stroke of midnight?’
As Magic Universe relates earlier, Hayflick is the US microbiologist who around 1960 falsified a 30-year-old assertion by a French Nobel prizewinner that ordinary animal cells grown in a lab culture would thrive indefinitely. The natural lifespan of cells in culture, through a few dozen divisions at most, came to be called the Hayflick limit. In 1971, Alexey Olovnikov in Moscow speculated that every time a cell divides the telomeres, the DNA tie-strings at the very ends of the chromosomes, get slightly shorter, and this conjecture was fully verified 20 years later by the Canadian-born biochemist Calvin Harley and his colleagues.
Meanwhile, Thomas Kirkwood at Newcastle pointed out that burdening an animal with the genetic resources that might delay ageing is pointless if it is going to die young, because of the hazards of life. There is a trade-off between youthful vigour and provision for later life. Kirkwood called his idea the disposable soma theory, and evidence in its favour accumulated in the decades that followed.
Any update belongs before the closing section that I’ve quoted, because that still represents Hayflick’s opinion and my own.
Today’s update
Long life runs in families, and the genetics began to emerge in 2010. After comparing DNA from more than a thousand centenarians with a similar sample from the general population, Thomas Perls and his and colleagues at Boston University reported that they had found “genetic signatures” of exceptional longevity. These took the form of clusters of misprints in the DNA called “single-nucleotide polymorphisms” or snips, and 90% of centenarians could be grouped into one or another of 19 different clusters. Besides predicting exceptional longevity with 77% accuracy, using 150 snips, the team found variations between the clusters in the onset of age-associated diseases.
About these results from Boston, Kirkwood at Newcastle commented:
“They are not suggesting that they can screen the genes of you and me, for example, and tell us the chance we will live to 100. This would be a tall order indeed, given that only a quarter of what determines the length of human life is genetic. … From what we know already, it is rather unlikely that genetic screens will ever be able to forecast how long an individual will live.”
References for the Update
N. Calder, Magic Universe, pp. 423-428, Oxford UP 2003
Perls ref.: Paola Sebastiani et al., “Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans”, Science Express, 1 July 2010.
Tom Kirkwood, The Independent (London), 2 July 2010
ADDITION 3 July. I really should take the opportunity to put in a brief but more significant update, about the role of telomerase. It also gives me a diagram for the blog, and it reassures me in my lifelong self-imposed task of reporting Nobel-prizewinning discoveries long before the prizes are handed out.
Big Cheer for CryoSat-2
30/06/2010Pick of the pics and Climate Change: News and Comments
Let’s Hear a Big Cheer for CryoSat-2
An early result from ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission detects a “scoop”, or drop, near the edge of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf, probably due to melting at the base of the 400-metre thick slab of floating ice. There are also clear indications of the variable thickness of sea ice in the adjacent ocean. The vertical scale appears to be very different over the shelf and over the sea.
Thank goodness that the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite is at last commissioning in orbit. Duncan Wingham of University College London, leader of the project, released the Ross Ice Shelf image yesterday at ESA’s Living Planet Symposium in Bergen.
The mission had a difficult history, with the original CryoSat being lost on launch in 2004, and CryoSat-2 going into an incorrect orbit in April of this year. But now we can expect much more accurate radar measurements of ice altitude over land and ice shelves, and of “freeboard” in the case of sea ice, which is a measure of its thickness. Perhaps we’ll soon begin to get the hard facts about “polar melting”. They’re long overdue.
For another take on “polar melting”, see my history of the Greenland ice sheet at https://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/warming-of-greenland/