RE: [DIYbio] Re: Prospects of anti-aging research

Stem cells and aging: the current thinking is that the dominant effect of
reduced stem cell activity and failing tissue maintenance is due to changes
in the niches that support and control stem cell activity. They become
damaged or otherwise change their behavior in response to rising levels of
cellular and molecular damage. Stem cells themselves do also become damaged,
but that seems to be a small effect in comparison to the niches, as you can
get stem cells from old individuals to behave the same as stem cells from
young individuals by changing the environment they find themselves in.

See:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/03/an-introduction-to-the-stem-cell-
niche-what-is-it-really.php

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/01/another-run-at-making-old-stem-ce
lls-act-as-though-young.php

The explanation for this behavior is that is an evolved response to reduce
risk of death by cancer (due to that damage in the stem cells) at the cost
of failing tissue maintenance, a part of the parcel of mechanisms that make
us longer lived than other mammals of our size.

So if you want to fix stem cells you need to fix aging in general (such as
through SENS or similar, see http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes )
so as to restore the youthful niche behavior by removing the damage that
they react to - or at least figure out how to reprogram or override the
chemical signals from the niches, of which there are numerous different
varieties, poorly understood still. But that second approach would just be
patching over the problem, and likely no more effective than any other
modern medicine that follows that line of attack.

Replacing damaged stem cells with pristine stem cells is almost the easiest
part of the problem: it's pretty clear to see how to get to that point from
where we are, and it's been done already for some stem cell types. So it's
just a long slog to get to be able to do it for all of them, given the
number of different types of stem cell there are.

Reason

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