Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough?
by lalaland1125 on Monday May 11, 2020 @01:06PM
(#23144374)
I would be very careful about trusting research on supercentenarians. There is a substantial amount of evidence (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/06/are-superc...) that a significant number of "supercentenarians" are simply pension/tax frauds taking up the names of dead people to keep collecting pensions.
Entirely possible! Hadn’t heard that critique but makes sense and something to control for.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough?
by CerealFounder on Monday May 11, 2020 @01:14PM
(#23144461)
Yup, your "hot take" is the core of "Lifespan" by Dr. David Sinclair.
Seems likely this is a gradient, not a binary thing, so perhaps someone with a beneficial mutation would just live a little longer. There’s not a ton of evolutionary pressure at the old age side of the spectrum, you’re not reproducing a lot, so it may not get picked up.
Wilder speculation: it could be that indeed this has been happening and is why humans live about 2x as long as chimps and gorillas.
Personally I think it’s quite unlikely that in humans single genes would have large deltas on age. There are maybe a few hints from supercentenarians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_into_centenarians) that telomerase and other genes have some effect, but the “one gene for aging” in humans is elusive. As a result, it’s hard to predict how all this would play out evolutionarily.