Medical English Fri. 5-6 Team 2 陳辰睿 楊麒翰 王怡婷 陳佳玉

1. Why are some people hesitate about developing therapies to prolong life 2. The relation between technology progressing and ending age 3. The truth about aging 4. The aging mechanism in the cell

Why people are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging?

 They will be hesitate, vacillate, and do not actually develop these therapies to prolong life because of…

 A choice to prolong life  A choice to have a low birth rate, or a high death rate  A choice to decide to live or to go  If we do not develop therapies about prolong life as soon as possible, we'll be denying people in the future an indefinite life span.  That is immoral.

Can we catch up with delaying aging?

 Just suppose… …that we required, today, the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already 55(Call this “robust human rejuvenation( 回春 )”, RHR)  How long can people in different ages can live when the therapy that end aging?

 There are two kinds of “invention” 1.Basically important breakthrough 2.Gradually improve the ‘breakthrough’  These two are quite different:  The breakthrough is unpredictable when it could be created ;and like stairs, discontinuous.  Improvement could be really quick and gradually happened after the breakthrough.

 Human wants to fly: at least thousands of years ago.  First powered flight:1903  First transatlantic flight:1927  First commercial jetliner:1949  First supersonic airliner:1969

 Treatment that extend healthy life by ~30 years will be the cusp: recipients will mostly survive to receive treatments giving a further 30 years, etc.  That means, if people can get benefit from the first “breakthrough”, they can catch up advanced improved technology prolonging their ages (even end aging). Even that time they are middle-aged.  They can be in front and the pace of the improvement would faster than they aging.

General ideas about fighting aging

 Accumulation of damage  Defects in self-repaired mechanism MetabolismDamagePathology

Maintenance MetabolismDamagePathology Gerontology Geriatrics

The aging mechanism in the cell

 Nerve, formed before our birth  Can not divide to produce new cell  Accumulate damages  Those dividing cell can not divide infinitely  Renewal is limited Damage accumulate  aging time

 The gene become shorter and shorter  aging of the cell  its gene will someday be passed incorrectly.  Why germ cell can give rise to a new life and can divide almost indefinitely?  telomerase  lengthening of telomeres in germ cells special nucleotide sequences Repeating

 Lipofusion:  yellow to brown pigments in long-lived cells  neurons of the CNS and cardiac muscle cells  Membrane bound  Containing undigestible remnants

Know more about molecular biology and biochemistry  Some day we may know how to cope with aging Our future is unlimited!