It is Faintly Ridiculous to Propose that Human Life Span Cannot be Increased by Altering Metabolism

Today's open access commentary is, I think, an overreaction to present challenges in engineering greater longevity via metabolic manipulation. I would be the first to say that altering the operation of metabolism is not a good path forward, at least if the goal is to engineer greater healthy longevity in our species. Cellular metabolism and its intersection with aging is ferociously complex and poorly understood in detail. Those details matter greatly: there are many feedback loops and switches based on protein levels that will change from beneficial to harmful for reasons that only become apparent after years of painstaking research. The best-studied mechanisms that link cellular metabolism to individual and species longevity have been under investigation for decades, and are still at a point at which related interventions are haphazardly beneficial and poorly understood. Further, those best studied mechanisms, linked to the response to calorie restriction and other stresses, cannot greatly increase life span in long-lived species. They work quite well in short-lived species. That is well demonstrated: calorie restriction itself boosts mouse life span by as much as 40%, and certainly does not do that in humans. Thus we should not be looking to altered metabolism as a path that can add decades to the healthy human life span in the foreseeable future. Arguing that this line of development is hard, and that all of the specific approaches examined so far appear to ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs