If de Grey had been serious, he would have funded the Fruit Fly Prize (1 month lifespan) instead a preposterous Mouse Prize (3 year lifespan) where it takes eons to measure progress!-melajara,kurzweilai[/quote]
All it would take is extensive genetic tweaking with the changes that occurred in Michael Rose's flies to thoroughly break that record
[quote]
Michael Rose, a population geneticist, used artificial selection to produce fruit flies with a life span of 50 days- 1994 book-link[/quote]
Some other MORE RECENT[2011 article] comments suggest Rose has done well, since then, by now at least for average lifespan quadrupling it, exceeding even previous records
[quote]
Similarly, gene expression changes are the major explanation for the results reported by Dr. Michael Rose, who claims to have quadrupled the average life span of fruit flies merely by selective breeding.
“The idea that aging is just a cumulative process of damage is fundamentally incorrect,” Rose commented when I spoke to him about his work. As a coauthor of the new book Does Aging Stop? from Oxford University Press, Rose points out that some organisms already cease to age late in life. “We have fly populations where 40% of the cohort stops aging,” he says....-link[/quote]
The thing is from what I hear evolution mostly conserves protein structure and mainly tends to change gene regulation. Drugs and nutraceuticals can change gene regulation, as can dietary interventions such as calorie restriction, obviously within limits, but already humans are quite long lived lasting decades free of disease, the jump from that to agelessness might require either extensive further changes in regulation or just a small tweak to reach agelessness.
My belief is that neurons are likely near ageless cells if kept in an appropriate environment(that is if accompanied by nonaging glia and nonaging vasculature), so the body does seem to have the key to agelessness of cells built in.
[quote]
"a mouse is fully worn out after 3 years when it takes 30 years to tear down a naked mole-rat."-melajara,kurzweilai[/quote]
Not all of the mouse is designed to break down
[quote]
In a new study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mouse brain cells implanted into rats survived as long as the rats did, double the average mouse lifespan.-link[/quote]
And they say the neurons could likely live even longer with the exact same genes if they were transplanted into even longer lived hosts.
Now look at that the neurons are one of the most metabolically active cells of all the cells, and most of their energy goes towards their function, if I'm not mistaken. Despite this intensive use of chemical energy, which should result in side-products of metabolism, the cells can handle it, and even without any genetic change they can live more than double the original mice host lifespan.
Think about that for a second most cells do not need to perform functions as energy intensive as neurons, and even neurons themselves can last for over double the lifespan of the host. That is the mouse genome already has a genetic program that is able to allow its cells to last at the very least twice as long as mice last yet mice don't last that long. If that doesn't smell of programmed aging I don't know what to tell you. It is clear the mouse has the genes to protect cells even with extensive metabolic activity(metabolic activity related mainly to function) in such a way as to double the lifespan of the component cells, yet it doesn't do so for the rest of the body.
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