11 replies to this topic

[uslessHAcker]

Yesterday this idea came to me from nowhere.  What if we could engineer viruses to such an extent that they were harmless and did useful tasks in body.

 

They could be programed to meet all the SENS targets.  Each specific SENS target would be completed by different strain of virus.  Each strain would have specific off trigger in case of malfunction.

 

This morning i did a google search on this idea and looks like there is already some work done with GMO viruses that target cancers.

[John Schloendorn]

Yes I think you're exactly right.  A good search term for it is "gene therapy".  If somebody could figure out how to make gene therapy work on a clinically relevant whole-body scale, then it should be relatively straightforward to implement most of SENS.  

[uslessHAcker]

Gene therapy deals with inserting new gene into the cell.  There might or might not be compatible human genes that reverse aging.

 

This idea i was proposing would be little different. There would be no need for modification of human genes as this virus would live in human body and would do some maintenance task and would not interfere with anything else.

 

 In gene therapy one would have to understand what exactly this gene does in a cell and that could be hard to predict. If it was making something wrong it would be hard to correct its behavior.

This approach would have different challenges.

With this approach virus would do just one task, like lengthening telomeres or dissolving junk chemicals in a cell.  Big challenge would be to design that virus to do exactly that.

 

 

[corb]

Viruses don't have the complexity needed for those tasks, they have some properties which are useful for medicine though, and will probably be used in gene therapies as John already said.

 

Red blood cells and stem cells can be reprogrammed to do some of the things you mentioned, there has been some experimentation done with those showing some promise.

 

[xEva]

this virus would live in human body and would do some maintenance task and would not interfere with anything else.

This view is based on a misconception that is also very characteristic of SENS -- and that's why, imo, they are not taken seriously by the scientific community. There is no such thing as a virus or bacterium, or any other collection of foreign DNA with its own agenda, that "would not interfere with anything else".

By definition, it will interfere with the immune system that has been evolving for billions of years in the face of all sorts of invasions with the sole purpose of preserving organismal integrity. Even bacteria have immunity against viruses, not to mention unicellular eukaryotes, that's how old it is.

You want to turn that off? It's equivalent to trying to remove a building block sitting at the very base of a house, with everything else not only sitting on top of it but also interconnected with it. It's just not practical. It would be easier to design an organism from scratch.

[uslessHAcker]

It would not be turning off immune system. There are viruses that have found ways to evade human immune system without compromising it. Like herpes virus which is being looked at as potential anticancer agent. 

http://en.wikipedia....ic_herpes_virus

 

As for virus not being complex enough to do helpful tasks in a cell. I suspect that if it can help itself by entirely replicating then it should surely be able to help the host cell if it was modified to do so.

 

Look at virus as nature made nano machine. Its ready made framework that works in human body.  All there is to it is to understand how it works and how to make it work for us. 

[xEva]

It would not be turning off immune system. There are viruses that have found ways to evade human immune system without compromising it.

This is a good illustration of what I meant above. Consider this: all foreign DNA surviving in a body long enough is controlling host's immunity in some way (without such a control the immune system simply takes it out in no time). It is both naive and misinformed to think that, if the immune system manages to control a virus most of the time, then it must be 'harmless' and that such a control comes at no cost to the host. How bad such infections can turn out becomes plainly obvious when the immune system is down for whatever reason.

 

Look at virus as nature made nano machine. Its ready made framework that works in human body.  All there is to it is to understand how it works and how to make it work for us.

Absolutely all of biology, on all levels from micro to macro, is 100% nature-made nano-machines.


The problem with your and SENS' "engineering" approach to biology is that you guys adopted the centuries old analogy of a body as a machine without adapting it to modern understanding.

Though a body is a machine, it is not a mechanical type of a molecular machine with well-defined flow of energy and information. In this machine everything is interconnected --not only within itself but also with its immediate environment-- and tweaking one small part here has unforeseen consequences on N parts there. That's what makes the whole notion of achieving a specific goal by tweaking a few genes here and a few genes there untenable. Michael Rose tried to advance this idea long ago, but I'm afraid it did not quite take hold, certainly not on these boards.

Edited by xEva, 29 July 2014 - 10:32 PM.

[uslessHAcker]

You say:

In this machine [human body] everything is interconnected --not only within itself but also with its immediate environment-- and tweaking one small part here has unforeseen consequences on N parts there.

 

Might as well be true, but wouldn't such considerations prohibit any kind of medical intervention?

When we talk about reversing aging, minor disruption of immune system would be lesser evil in the same way as chemotherapy or radiotherapy is appropriate cure for cancer.

 

I also mentioned off switch in my first post. If we could design virus to do specific tasks, we probably could design it to die in presence of some specific drug.

 

Its not question about if we should its question about best way and how to achieve it.

 

 

 

Edited by uslessHAcker, 29 July 2014 - 10:52 PM.

[niner]

The problem with your and SENS' "engineering" approach to biology is that you guys adopted the centuries old analogy of a body as a machine without adapting it to modern understanding.

Though a body is a machine, it is not a mechanical type of a molecular machine with well-defined flow of energy and information. In this machine everything is interconnected --not only within itself but also with its immediate environment-- and tweaking one small part here has unforeseen consequences on N parts there. That's what makes the whole notion of achieving a specific goal by tweaking a few genes here and a few genes there untenable. Michael Rose tried to advance this idea long ago, but I'm afraid it did not quite take hold, certainly not on these boards.

 

I agree that the body is an insanely complicated Rube Goldberg Machine-like entity where some of the parts have multiple functions, many of which we no doubt have not even figured out yet.  Despite this, we have a lot of medical interventions that work.  And a lot that kind of work, but not very well.  This latter point speaks to the difficulty of modifying a highly interconnected machine.  Difficult, but not impossible.  We've done it many times in the past, we are still doing it, and we will do it in the future.  Some of those interventions, with any luck, will be SENS-like. 

 

I think the SENS guys would be surprised to learn that they had adopted a centuries-old view of the body, and were lacking in modern understanding. 

[corb]

Hmm, well it seems the thread took an "interesting" turn.
First of let's start with this - no one actually puts live viruses inside people for therapeutic reasons and that's probably going to remain the case. Viruses are being used to reprogram cells which are then injected into the host. Cells including T cells btw, the ones serving your immune system - there was a quite popular case of reprogrammed T cells fighting off leukemia in the recent years wasn't it?
Our immune system is neither perfect, nor all that smart or hard to evade, which is the reason why we still can die from a viral infection to this day, the reason cancer (caused by a virus maybe for added irony) will probably kill you someday and probably the reason albeit indirectly for aging in the first place.

 

 

In this machine everything is interconnected --not only within itself but also with its immediate environment-- and tweaking one small part here has unforeseen consequences on N parts there.

 

Do you think you can make tweaks to an automobile's fuel intake for instance and not affect the whole system? Please keep the ignorance to a minimum if you're going to post in a science related forum.

 

Sure, it's not an easy task to make tweaks to a complex machine like a human. On the other hand, we know it's possible to keep a person alive by directly affecting his system even with crude methods like hooking them up to over sized fishtank water filters aka hemodialysis machines (among other brutish so called medical procedures) so there's obviously quite a bit of wiggle space as it comes to directly affecting your body and it's workings. So even if a tweak affects some other part negatively, it's always going to be about gains weighted versus loses - as is the case with hemodialysis, sure there's a danger of sepsis and people going through with it get headaches and other negative reactions. But it's preferable to the alternative.

There really isn't any other approach, to medicine. Theres engineering and then there's snake oil.

 

[xEva]

I think the SENS guys would be surprised to learn that they had adopted a centuries-old view of the body, and were lacking in modern understanding.

SENS guys substituted the focus on molecular pathways for real understanding how the body works even on the long-understood and well-established level of macro-physiology -- just like the discussion above with the OP illustrates. Similarly, de Grey's original proposal re lipofuscin removal involved the introduction into the cells of live modified bacteria (sort of like mitochondria he claimed). It is only in the latest lipofuscin paper sponsored by SENS that the real scientists cautiously aim at merely utilizing the enzymes derived from such bacteria -- in contrast to Michael Rae pooh-poohing this sort of 'enzymatic therapy' here on these boards.

I'm afraid that the focus on molecular pathways and nano-technology is what misleads many people into thinking that SENS have modern understanding of biology. They don't. And neither do some people who support them heartily, as illustrated, again in this very thread, below:

 

In this machine everything is interconnected --not only within itself but also with its immediate environment-- and tweaking one small part here has unforeseen consequences on N parts there.

 
Do you think you can make tweaks to an automobile's fuel intake for instance and not affect the whole system? Please keep the ignorance to a minimum if you're going to post in a science related forum.
...
There really isn't any other approach, to medicine. Theres engineering and then there's snake oil.

Edited by xEva, 30 July 2014 - 06:33 PM.

[corb]

@corb: your comment shows that you don't even understand the problem, likely because you have not heard of it before, which would not be surprising if SENS is your only source of info.

There really isn't any such problem is my point.
It's not like SENS pioneered genetically modified (reprogrammed) cell cultures.

From stem cells to targeted cancer treatments, all rely on this mechanic and those are considered mainstream medical research now.

 

edit: I don't even know what exactly you are against at this point, I began my post with that exact line that no one will use viruses or bacteria for therapeutic reasons, there really isn't any need to, we have more than enough structures that are already in the body which can be tweaked and modified instead.

Edited by corb, 30 July 2014 - 06:59 PM.