Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

Re:Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured hum... by TTPrograms on Friday January 23, 2015 @05:39PM (#8937802)

Well arguably we haven't evolved to survive past reproductive years - life expectancy past 40 is only about 150 years old. That's much too short of a time for evolutionary effects to have an impact.

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Re:Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured hum... by nostromo on Friday January 23, 2015 @05:56PM (#8937900)

You're misreading the statistics a bit. The biggest gains in life expectancy have been at birth. There have been old people for a lot longer than the last 150 years.

Even Aristotle knew about menopause. And Plato lived to be 80.

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Re:Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured hum... by darkmighty on Friday January 23, 2015 @10:01PM (#8938668)

You have to remember a significant time in human evolutionary scale is probably something like 10k-100k years. Looking at wiki page for life expectacy at the Paleolithic [1] (even at 15 years) shows it lines right up with woman menopause.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

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Re:Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured hum... by FeeTinesAMady on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @12:38AM (#8951412)

Life expectancy is a mean value, and it's skewed by people dying young. So the life expectancy at the Paleolithic doesn't mean that people didn't survive past menopause: it means that a lot of people died young.

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