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by reasonattlm
2725 days ago
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From the SENS point of view [1] a number of the Hallmarks are downstream consequences of the causes of aging; e.g. epigenetic alterations are a reaction to molecular damage. Attempting to use those hallmarks as a place to intervene is doomed to achieve marginal benefits at best. You can't cure an age-related disease by patching over its late consequences. Aging is a spreading tree of cause and consequence, emerging from a few root cause forms of damage. Intervene at later branchings in the tree, and you cover ever fewer downstream harms. It would be like trying to prevent a complicated iron sculpture from collapsing by propping up a few pieces here and there rather than by de-rusting/rustproofing the whole thing. Intervention as close to the root causes as possible is the only effective way forward, given how challenging it is achieve anything in medical biotechnology. At the time the Hallmarks of Aging was published, it was noted for completely failing to reference any of the existing SENS literature, despite including some of the SENS line items such as senescent cell accumulation. The Hallmarks - and the related Seven Pillars of Aging [2] that seems to be less well promoted - would clearly not exist without more than a decade of aggressive advocacy within the scientific community for SENS and the treatment of aging, but the Hallmarks authors chose to behave as though that prior work never happened. [1]: https://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research [2]: https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2014/11/the-seven-pillar... |
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We have evolved to acomodate these senescence mechanisms in various way, so shouldn't we expect that halting them should have unforeseeable consequences that evolution couldn't have prepared against? Shouldn't we expect the genome itself to have embedded within it some notion of the organism's age ? (as opposed to a limited development to a mature, final state that could go on forever in the absence of celular ageing)
I'm thinking, for example, at the limited number of female gametes available at the start of life. There was never a need to evolve regenerating gametes so the reproductive lifetime of an immortal woman is still limited. How many such innate limitations could there be in a genome after a billion years of evolution from mortal organisms?