From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Apr 18 2003 - 21:16:14 MDT
On Fri, 18 Apr 2003 ABlainey@aol.com wrote:
Re: Progeria gene discovery
> This is great news and of great personal importance to myself and family. One
> of my daughters friends died recently from Progeria. Very sad and a great
> loss to all that knew her.
Alex, you (and your friends) have my sympathies. You may want to review
the "Aging Gene" messages (4 or 5 or so) over the last couple of days
in the Javien Forum or the ExI archives. They provide some very useful URLs.
> Although the number of children born with this syndrome is very low
> (currently around 30 worldwide) I would agree that "it does need shootin" as
> it is a major step towards switching off the clock for all of us.
I would question the number of 30 -- I've seen varying numbers
but they seem to be in the range of 1 to 8 per million children.
While the discovery of the gene will certainly help point out
some mechanisms by which aging *can* occur -- that is not the
same as knowing how/why aging occurs in the majority of people.
Lenny Guarante (a reasnably informed MIT researcher in the biology
of aging) pointed out in one article that it may only shed
limited light on "natural" aging.
But at least now we have the damn gene!
Though it appears to have gotten deleted from my story for /.
(http://science.slashdot.org), my comments were approximately
as follows:
We have the genome.
We have the 2 accelerated aging syndrome genes.
We have at least 100+ DNA repair genes (a significant majority).
We have most of the genes responsible for cancer (tumor promoting
and tumor suppressing genes).
If we (as a species) can't nail this process (aging) clearly
against the wall in this decade then we probably deserve to be
displaced by an unfriendly AI.
Robert
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