While not all countries celebrate Halloween, it's clear from looking at numerous cultures that humans have a longstanding fascination with such fantastic creatures as ghosts, ghouls, zombies, and vampires. I decided to draw upon this theme for this October edition of the Hourglass Longevity Blog Carnival because of how many modern medical advances and investigations seem to tread upon the same psychological and emotional territory that our notions of monsters and the macabre do.
How so, you ask? Well, it doesn't take much digging into human history to uncover the fact that we've always had a tendency to create monsters (zombies, ghosts, vampires, etc.) where we can't see what actually lies beyond some horizon of our present knowledge.
In recent years, we've been banging up against many such horizons, what with news stories about face transplants, transgenic organisms, cryonically suspended athletes, and xenografting making the rounds.
Maybe this stuff isn't scary to everyone (personally I think it's all pretty darn interesting), but it's definitely making a lot of people think, and is also bringing up a lot of really tricky scientific, philosophical, and ethical questions.
So, in the spirit of exploring fringes and facing frontiers, I present to you (in no particular order):
The Hourglass IV Longevity Blog Carnival - October, 2008 Entries!
1.) One of the things medical science constantly deals with is the fact that what looks obvious isn't always what matters most when it comes to health.
At Brain Health Hacks, neuroscientist Ward Plunet discusses visceral fat and how important it is to your longevity:
Over the last 3-5 years you have probably come across the importance of visceral fat to your health. Visceral fat is not the fat you can pinch at your belly – that fat is subcutaneous fat. Visceral fat is inside the abdominal wall. It is the fat that is thought to be responsible for chronic inflammation (as measured by CRP, IL-6, and TNF-alpha levels), and is thought to be a major contributor to metabolic syndrome/diabetes along with cardiovascular diseases (CVD).
2.) Calorie restriction is probably the most well-known mechanism for prolonging the healthy lives of numerous animals, from fruit flies to mice to monkeys. Whether or not it will ultimately lead to impressive lifespan gains in humans, some pioneering folks are walking that road -- sometimes straight into the wilderness.
Matt at A Predicated Life discusses a self-experiment with alternate-day fasting and speculates on how it might have helped his knee pain:
...So, with some information from the crazy doctor in Palo Alto, and a little bit of gumption, I did the alternate day fasting thing two years ago, along with taking resveratrol. Within two weeks, my knee was fantastically better, and I didn’t have any problems again until going mountaineering in the Three Sisters Wilderness a little over a month ago.
3.) Hacking the chemical composition of various species in an effort to determine why some live much longer than others is one of the more intriguing research efforts going on today -- and could turn out to be one of the most promising. Along these lines, the ever-prolific Reason (of Fight Aging!) offers up three submissions to this Carnival:
- In Your Longevity and the Composition of Your Mitochondria, we are reminded of the role of mitochondria in both producing energy for the body, and in generating (unfortunately) Reactive Oxygen species which contribute toward bodily damage:
Eventually damage accumulates and cascades to change the surrounding cellular environment very much for the worse. This process is an important root cause of degenerative aging.
Nevertheless, there is plenty in the way of intriguing research going on revealing many a clue about species longevity. Folks interested in longevity, zoology, or both will likely be familiar with our friend the naked mole-rat and its apparently atypical internal membranes which may help account for its impressive lifespan. But Reason quotes from a study on primates that may hit a bit closer to the mark as far as potentially revealing information that will help humans:
...the rate acceleration in the simian lineage is accompanied by a marked increase in threonine (Thr) ... his Thr increase involved the replacement of hydrophobic AAs in the membrane interior [and] analysis reveals a statistical significant positive correlation between Thr composition and longevity in primates.
- In My Project 10100 Submission: Mitochondrial Repair, we are introduced to Google's 10100 Project, and presented with a description of a possible worthwhile contribution, based on the fact that:
...Everyone has mitochondria, and mitochondrial degeneration is a universal condition, bringing myriad forms of suffering and pain. We got rid of tuberculosis and smallpox as soon as we could, so why not this? Repair of mitochondrial DNA damage is a very plausible near-future win for everyone, given where the science is today. We can make it happen.
- The last entry from Reason offers up a reminder about how what we do now could drastically affect our future health, so regardless of what else you do -- Try Not To Stab Yourself Repeatedly!
4.) Everyone has their own way of coming to terms with aging and different people are at different stages on that path. At Psique, Laura L. Kilarski wrestles with her personal demons regarding fear and aging. She writes:
...it is precisely this that i am so afraid of. not death, not disease; but being forced to slow down because the body and the brain are getting old. sure there are exceptions, but these remain rare. and i feel this issue is not addressed enough in general. it's always about a cure for this or that, but aging in and of itself is considered a normal part of life. and i don't know, maybe it is, maybe it has to be.. - but isn't it scary as hell?
5.) One effect of voyaging (via scientific research and development) into the realms within and between our cells is the gradual de-mystification of aging and other processes. Just as monster-mysteries often turn out to be quite mundane once the layers of myth and mystery are peeled back, so do many "mysterious" processes within our bodies turn out to follow common-sense rules of physics and biology.
At Ouroboros, life-sciences post-doctoral fellow (and Hourglass carnival originator) Chris Patil provides a set of links to his liveblogging of the recent Cold Spring Harbor Labs conference on The Molecular Genetics of Aging:
I. Genetics of simple organisms.
IIa. Genome stability, damage and repair
IIb. Telomeres
VI. Senescence, apoptosis and stress
VII. Stem cells
X. Environmental interventions
6.) And, finally, my own post on bioartificial and other replacement parts -- Livers and Kidneys and Hearts (Oh My!) - Bioartificial Benefits in Emerging Longevity Medicine touches on the potential for tissue engineering to provide aging, ill, or injured humans with safer, more robust replacement organs.
Next month's carnival will be hosted at Psique on November 11. Thanks very much to everyone who submitted entries, and again to Chris Patil for starting this whole thing!
Postscript:
In putting together this Carnival, something never far from my mind was the notion of that point at which something ceases to be considered monstrous or strange and is assimilated into the realm of the ordinary, or acceptable, or even welcome. I can only imagine how odd and disturbing the idea of transplanting organs must have seemed prior to it actually being done -- and yet nowadays, if you tell someone you're planning on donating a kidney to your sick cousin, you're likely to be told, "Oh, how nice!" as opposed to, "Ugh! What is wrong with you?"
Furthermore, zombies, ghosts, and Frankenstein's monster all seem to suggest complex ruminations over what exactly comprises personal identity -- is it our bodies? Our brains? Is our sense of who we are rooted in our DNA, in particular functional modes of our minds, or something else entirely? And what parts of these can be removed or replaced while maintaining a continuous sense of self?
Then we have creatures like vampires (which are often "immortal", though vulnerable in various ways), and the super-powered mutants of many a comic book. Often in our stories, these and other "abnormals" are at once feared or presumed cursed, and envied for the way they cross boundaries thought immutable to humanity.
Similarly, speculations about impressive longevity gains or other boundary-pushing advances seem to intrigue some while frightening others -- which is understandable considering that nobody knows what is ultimately going to be possible when it comes to altering, maintaining, and fine-tuning bodies over time, nor what the implications of any of this will be.
One thing seems clear, though -- and that is that many of the "monsters" we write about in fearful terms and speak in hushed whispers about over campfires, are us. More to the point, perhaps, they are exaggerated potential versions of us that in our current state, we cannot easily imagine existing as -- but which we are going to have to start learning to live with peacefully, as the horizons of what is possible expand, pushing the edges beyond which dragons lie ever outward every year.
2 comments:
very nice job. I really like your introduction and postscript.
Ward: Thank you. This is the first time I've ever done a carnival, so it's good to know it didn't come out awful!
Post a Comment