I’d unironically love to have a pet rat that lives longer than a few years.

A good idea for a startup might be a pet shop where you can buy all kinds of weird genetically altered mice! Or custom order!

Heh Heh Heh. There's even "optically transparent" mice:

https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/2014/august/transparen...

"We're not sure what's eating our fields, but it smells like rats...!"

Thank God! Finally, mice you can't see!

and then we can have pets stuck forever at shelters!

... :( I'll see myself out.

If it's your pet I'd guess you don't need the unironically? Anyway - new word for me!

I don't think it's the correct word here though, given the meaning of the word; people similarly mix up jealousy and envy.

Just get the right turtle or parrot? Mammals might be more difficult, though.

Can't wait for this to escape in New York City. Ageless undying sewer rats - what a utopia haha.

Interestingly, their lifespans would probably be affected very little.

> GzmK does not affect steady-state immune aging or aged immune responses after challenge

Virtually all old mice die of cancer, especially in the lab. If GzmK doesn't mitigate immune system aging, GzmK-null mice are still going to die of cancer, for little or no change in lifespan. (But presumably an improved healthspan due to reduced soft tissue and bone aging.)

> Virtually all old mice die of cancer, especially in the lab

Is this related to them being cloned? Did anyone try to get some random mice or is that too taboo?

No, even wild mice or rats are cancer magnets. If you have a pet rat, it will likely die of cancer.

This is a huge problem for medical research. Imagine that you conduct a safety test of your compound on mice, and 25% of the test group die of cancer within 1 year. That's bad, right? Well, the control group also has 20% cancer rate.

> Virtually all old mice die of cancer, especially in the lab

Bret Weinstein did research on this topic which suggested that this is caused by lab mice having extraordinarily long telomeres which cause them to be good at cell repair but bad at limiting neoplasm growth due to delayed apoptosis. The result of this combination would be that lab tests on potential damage done by preparations on these mice is less valid 'cause they are better at repairing such damage than the average mammal due to those long telomeres. It also means nearly all these mice succumb to cancer. They're not normal mice, at all.

The reserve-capacity hypothesis: evolutionary origins and modern implications of the trade-off between tumor-suppression and tissue-repair

Bret S Weinstein 1 , Deborah Ciszek

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11909679/

This paper examined captive wild mice, which they caught themselves on school grounds, and noted that "mice in both feeding groups died from various causes, chief among these a range of cancers":

> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2006...

So I think that even wild mice are prone to immune aging and cancer development.

> Virtually all old mice die of cancer, especially in the lab. If GzmK doesn't mitigate immune system aging, GzmK-null mice are still going to die of cancer, for little or no change in lifespan.

Would introducing the cancer-reducing TP53 genes found in elephants[1][2] to mice help with this? Or would they likely just be too incompatible, with the species difference being too large?

[1] https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/08/12/can-elephants-g...

[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2456041

maybe this is your joke, but we've actually done it many times, even reversed aging... only to find it doesnt work on humans.