Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To Quotes
"Imagine a planet about the size of our own, about as far from its star, rotating around its axis a bit faster, such that a day lasts about twenty hours."
"Now that life has formed—as fatty-acid soap bubbles filled with genetic material—they begin to compete for dominance."
"What remains is a thick, yellow crust covering the lake beds. It is an ecosystem defined not by the annual waxing and waning of the waters but by a brutal struggle for survival."
"It’s a wonder we survive thirty seconds, let alone make it to our reproductive years, let alone reach 80 more often than not."
"But we do. Marvelously we do. Miraculously we do. For we are the progeny of a very long lineage of great survivors."
"If you are taken aback by the notion that there is a singular cause of aging, you are not alone."
"Aging research today is at a similar stage as cancer research was in the 1960s."
"We do not die to make way for the next generation."
"By the time an average yeast cell expires, it is surrounded by 33 million of its descendants."
"Our ability to control all of these genetic pathways will fundamentally transform medicine and the shape of our everyday lives."
"The Information Theory of Aging starts with the primordial survival circuit we inherited from our distant ancestors."
"In the same way that genetic information is stored as DNA, epigenetic information is stored in a structure called chromatin."
"Epigenetic noise causes the same kind of chaos. It is driven in large part by highly disruptive insults to the cell, such as broken DNA."
"Indeed, the potential for a humble yeast to tell us so much about ourselves—and do so quite quickly relative to other research organisms—was a big part of the reason I decided to begin my career by studying S. cerevisiae."
"Because of the fact that nuclear transfer works in cloning, we can say with a high degree of confidence that aging isn’t caused by mutations in nuclear DNA."
"What emerged from those initial results in yeast, and another decade of pondering and probing mammalian cells, was a completely new way to understand aging, an information theory that would reconcile seemingly disparate factors of aging into one universal model of life and death."
"If you can give something, you can take it away."
"Bristlecones are, after all, our eukaryotic cousins. About half of their genes are close relatives of ours. Yet they do not age."
"Scientists call this 'negligible senescence.'"
"Bristlecones are outliers in the biological world, but they are not unique in their defiance of aging."
"Under the right conditions, these tiny cnidarians have demonstrated a remarkable refusal to age."
"What matters is what these biological equivalents of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s backward-aging Benjamin Button teach us: that cellular age can be fully reset."
"Whether this shark’s cells undergo aging is an open scientific question; very few biologists had so much as looked at S. microcephalus until the past few years."
"Evolutionarily speaking, all of these life-forms are closer to us than yeast, and just think of what we’ve learned about human aging from that tiny fungus."
"That bowheads have been selected for exceptional longevity among mammals should perhaps not be surprising."
"Can these long-lived species teach us how to live healthier and for longer?"
"We share 12,787 known genes, including some interesting variants in a gene known as FOXO3."
"Hidden within the sometimes byzantine way scientists talk about science are several repeating themes: low energy sensors (SNF1/AMPK), transcription factors (MSN2/DAF-16/FOXO), NAD and sirtuins, stress resistance, and longevity."
"I first encountered FOXO/DAF-16 in yeast, where it is known as MSN2, which stands for 'multicopy suppressor of SNF1 (AMPK) epigenetic regulator.'"
"Regular exercise 'is a commitment,' says Benjamin Levine, a professor at the University of Texas."
"The mice he was talking about were 20 months old. That’s roughly the equivalent of a 65-year-old human."
"Because the sirtuins had been activated, the mice’s epigenomes were becoming more stable."
"The way doctors treat illness today 'is simple,' wrote S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois."
"Over the course of those two days, nineteen presenting scientists from some of the best research institutions in the world moved toward a provocative consensus."
"The connection between death and aging is so strong that the inevitability of the former governed the way we came to define the latter."
"In 1825, the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz, a learned member of the Royal Society, tried to explain this upward limit with a 'Law of Human Mortality,' essentially a mathematical description of aging."
"Aging brings us to the precipice. Give any of us 100 years or so, and it brings us all there."
"The final years of my mother’s life serve as a good example."
"If hepatitis, kidney disease, or melanoma did the sorts of things to us that aging does, we would put those diseases on a list of the deadliest illnesses in the world."
"There are three large hospitals within a few minutes walk of my office."
"There is nothing more dangerous to us than age."
"The belief that aging is a natural process is deep-rooted."
"The United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year fighting cardiovascular disease."
"That’s why the current solutions, which are focused on curing individual diseases, are both very expensive and very ineffective."
"WHY TREATING ONE DISEASE AT A TIME HAS LITTLE IMPACT ON LIFESPAN."
"I believe the blame lies with M. superstes and the survival circuit."
"As we saw in the ICE mice, when you disrupt the epigenome by forcing it to deal with DNA breaks, you introduce noise, leading to an erosion of the epigenetic landscape."
"The Waddington landscape is a metaphor for how cells find their identity."
"It doesn’t take any money to eat this way. In fact, it saves money."
"With so much horsepower under the hood, we just have to fire up the engine and take it out for a spin."
"Different functions peak at different times for different people."
"Aging does all this, and in doing so it fulfills every category of what we call a disease except one: it impacts more than half the population."
"According to The Merck Manual of Geriatrics, a malady that impacts less than half the population is a disease."
"There is nothing wrong with using the hallmarks to guide interventions."
"Before most people could even fathom the idea of mapping our genome, before we had the technology to map a cell’s entire epigenome and understand how it bundles DNA to turn genes on and off, the developmental biologist Conrad Waddington was already thinking deeper."
"There had to be something more than genetics at play: a program that controlled the code."
"The final resting place is known as the cell’s 'fate.'"
"We used to think this was a one-way street, an irreversible path."
"Why would we choose to focus on problems that impact small groups of people if we could address the problem that impacts everyone—especially if, in doing so, we could significantly impact all those other, smaller problems?"
"There’s no good reason why we have to say that something that happens to 49.9 percent of the population is a disease while something that happens to 50.1 percent of the population is not."
"Culturally, everything worked out just fine."
"I invested in coats, sweaters, and long underwear and spent a lot of time indoors."
"Exposing your body to less-than-comfortable temperatures is another very effective way to turn on your longevity genes."
"Homeostasis, the tendency for living things to seek a stable equilibrium, is a universal biological principle."
"Calorie restriction has the effect of reducing core body temperature."
"Sirtuins are switched on by cold, which in turn activates protective brown fat in our back and shoulders."
"Senescent cells are often referred to as 'zombie cells,' because even though they should be dead, they refuse to die."
"Inflammation is so central to the development of age-related diseases that scientists often refer to the process as 'inflammaging.'"
"The idea of vaccines would have sounded crazy to most people before Edward Jenner's experiment."
"Once you recognize that there are universal regulators of aging in everything from yeast to humans."
"Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle."
"What’s likely is that researchers will continue to identify molecules that are better and better at promoting both a reduction of epigenetic noise and a rejuvenation of cellular tissue."
"Senolytics are small-molecule drugs designed to specifically kill senescent cells by inducing the death program."
"With all of that fresh in mind, the idea of living much past his 70s wasn’t very interesting to him."
I’m outpacing my friends," he said. "They’re complaining about feeling old.
"A life expectancy of 50 and beyond was simply not a reality for most of our evolutionary history."
"We’re plagued by senescent cells, which might as well be radioactive waste."
"These days, he runs around like a teenager."
"The selfish genes we discussed earlier, called LINE-1 retrotransposons, and their fossil remnants, make up about half of the human genome."
"The idea of microorganisms before Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first described the world of the 'small little animals' he saw under his homemade microscope in 1671."
"Aging is an increase in entropy, a loss of information leading to disorder."
"Without sufficient NAD, the sirtuins don’t work efficiently."
"Every day I’m asked by members of the public, 'Which is the superior molecule: NR or NMN?'"
"If zombie cells are so bad for our health, why doesn’t our body just kill them off?"
"Rapamycin, the Easter Island longevity molecule, is what’s known as a 'senomorphic' molecule."
"If senolytics work, you could take a course of a medicine for a week, be rejuvenated, and come back ten years later for another course."
"We have eliminated some [childhood diseases] almost entirely."
"But there is another option, just a bit further upstream, that could be even better."
"As I write this, a group of mice that were put on NMN late in life are getting very old."
"If, however, it turns out that mares and women can become fertile again, it will completely overturn our understanding of reproductive biology."
"Once you understand that those regulators can be changed with a molecule such as NMN or a few hours of vigorous exercise or a few less meals."
"Vaccines are the single most effective medical intervention in human history in terms of saving and extending lifespans."
"That doesn’t mean TOR inhibition is a dead end, though."
"The success of STACs, AMPK activators, and mTOR inhibitors are a tremendously powerful indicator that we’re working in an area of our biology that is upstream of every major aging-associated disease."
"The discovery of the molecules I have described here can be credited to a lot of serendipity."
"We’re getting better and better at staving off childhood diseases and have eliminated some of them almost entirely."
"We are a family of scientists, after all."
"We live longer—and evolution hasn’t had a chance to catch up."
"It could all be unrelated to the molecules he’s taking."
"Yes, although genes play a back-seat role to the epigenome, it does seem that some people are genetically primed for longevity at the digital level."