To preserve their traditional way of life, indigenous societies around the Arctic are allowed to capture and kill a limited number of bowheads each year. Although they were initially suspicious of outsiders, the hunters eventually agreed for the scientists to sample some of the tissue collected from their kills. Even once they had collected the material, the team still faced the extraordinary task of building the genetic sequence.
Given the enormous volume of data, the task was akin to shredding hundreds of thousands of copies of Moby Dick and then pasting the individual sentences back together into a meaningful order. The result is a series of leads that might just pave the way for future medicine. Of particular interest, they saw notable changes on a gene called ERCC1. This gene is known to code for a molecular toolkit that can patch up small areas of damage to the genome.
Given their size, bowhead whales should all develop cancer before they reach adulthood - yet they can live for two centuries Credit: Alamy. The team also found changes to a gene called PCNA, which is involved in cell proliferation. It codes for a protein that acts as a kind of clamp, holding together the molecular machines that cause DNA to replicate.
Bowheads have duplicated regions of the gene, and their mutations seem to help it interact with other parts of the toolkit involved in DNA repair. The team hypothesise that this single change could promote healthier cell growth without the damage that comes with age. If you can see that certain genes are particularly active, then you know that it too might be playing an important role in ageing. The findings are attracting attention from some of the most important figures in medicine.
Once over that threshold, there are many potential ways that these findings might improve treatments. Gladyshev suggests that we could see whether diet or exercise programmes could help to shift the body to match the longevity signature of the whale. In this way, the bowhead whale could offer immediate guidance for the best ways to life longer.
The ultimate goal is to program the body so that cancers cannot form in the first place Credit: Science Photo Library. Alternatively, these long-lived creatures could inspire some more radical treatments. After these initial tests, the next hurdle will be to find a way to create the same changes in the enormously complex human body, perhaps with drugs that mimic the effects of the genes. In some cases, you could genetically engineer organisms like yeast to churn out the relevant proteins in large vats that could then be purified for human use, or to find drugs that mimic the effects.
In the future, gene therapy could even allow us to tweak the DNA in living people; in an instant, we could benefit from the helpful mutations that took millions of years for the bowhead whale to evolve. Clearly, there will be trials ahead. Although we are relatively closely related in evolutionary terms, what works in a whale, or naked mole rat, may have limited or no benefit in the human body. Even so, he welcomes this new approach to looking to nature for answers to medical issues.
De Magalhaes and Gladyshev are under no illusions about the arduous journey — but they remain hopeful. Back then life-threatening infections were just a fact of life. Today, antibiotics are taken for granted as the most basic healthcare. In Depth Medicine. The secrets of living to years old. Share using Email. Natural selection is the key mechanism in evolution.
If humans are to live longer than anyone has before then medical science will have to up its game. All living organisms use the same chemical building blocks and the same cellular organisation. That is why it is said that we share 50 per cent of our genetic material with a banana plant. Ageing is common to almost all creatures but occurs at vastly different rates and in different ways.
Interventions have already been demonstrated that substantially extend the lifespans of yeasts, worms, fruit flies and small mammals. Successful techniques include genetic manipulation, calorie restriction and therapy with drugs that slow ageing. Researchers are getting a better understanding of the ageing process and thus the ways in which it could be slowed, halted or even reversed. Some off the wall solutions to extending lifespan have been described.
These include freezing the dead to be reanimated in the future, head transplants and uploading to a computer. More mainstream approaches, all in their infancy, probably have a better chance of prolonging human life. These are the application of technology to replace and enhance human functions, regeneration and stem cell therapy, and genetic manipulation.
Medical innovations have already saved the lives of millions of people. My working lifetime saw the introduction of CT and other imaging, non-invasive surgery, and endoscopy made possible by fibreoptics and cameras on microchips. In the UK more than , cataract replacements are performed each year inserting an artificial lens into the eye. The near future will probably see the wide application of smart health monitors, brain stimulators, replacement organs grown in the laboratory or in donor animals, artificial intelligence to diagnose and treat disease, and nanomedibots in the bloodstream programmed to search out and destroy harmful viruses and cancers.
A human foetus in the womb can regenerate a damaged fingertip. After birth the capacity for repair and regrowth is rapidly lost.
Across the animal kingdom there is a huge range in the ability to regenerate tissues and organs with some adult animals retaining the ability to regrow limbs, heart muscle, brain and spinal cord. Stem cells may provide the answer to regeneration. These cells contain all the genetic information to become any other type of cell. During development the embryonic cell differentiates and turns into the specialised cell that is its destiny. We now know that these specialised cells can be rejuvenated back into pluripotent stem cells with the potential to turn into almost any other cell.
These cells could be used to replace those lost or damaged and be used to build new organs without the risk of rejection. They are being investigated to replace or renew damaged tissue in brain and spinal cord, in the heart, to replace teeth, restore vision and transplant new pancreatic cells to produce insulin. With a few exceptions, each and every one of the 30 trillion cells that are your body contains a full set of DNA.
This genetic material contains all the information needed to build and maintain an individual. Most of his post-prison novels were written from a position of chronic anxiety and financial bankruptcy, which — along with a neurological condition we now know as Geschwind Syndrome — fed into his manic-driven narratives.
There was a shift from the Romanticism of his early fiction, as his books became darker, reflected in a convulsive prose which began to explore the deeper recesses of the human heart and mind. There was an almost primal force to his writing, claimed Joyce, which made Dostoevsky so modern.
Particularly in the realm of mass politics, in its portrayal of humans as creatures forever slaves to their animal instincts. Written some 50 years before the Leninist Revolution, such ideas are presented in the class-based utopian ideals of Verkhovensky and Stavrogin, leaders of a cell of revolutionary conspirators who devote themselves to a single idea, despite the tragedy it brings to the provincial town they descend on.
Dostoevsky used the novel to suggest that it is such ideologues, with grandiose ideas about ways to improve humanity, who we should be most wary of. Especially those who justify any means to serve their beliefs.
Like his prison accounts, Demons becomes, paradoxically, a meditation on freedom. Indeed, in his pre-prison years as a young radical, Dostoevsky believed, like Verkhovensky and Stavrogin , that, given the right kind of social organisation, freedom would no longer be required. Dostoevsky invariably gave his loudest voice to characters whose ideas least reflected his own.
Whether or not there was any direct influence, the similarities are striking. Dostoevsky thought that such demagogues — with unyielding ideas built upon supposedly self-evident axioms — were destined to become figureheads of a dangerous new kind of religion. Tagore feared the deification of the nation, with its messianic leaders.
Dostoevsky censured the revolutionary left. Tagore reserved his fiercest criticism for the nationalist right. But both pointed to an irrationality in mass politics when seemingly rational ideologies are taken to their logical conclusions. Especially in times of uncertainty, when they can so easily take on a life of their own. As in India, where the politics of Hindutva is fast becoming the animating ideology of the Indian Republic.
Both spent their lives struggling with huge political and social changes put in motion since the Petrine reforms, in Russia, and the advent of British colonialism, in subcontinental India.
Both would turn to the medium of art as their vital means of expression. Yet they retained a streak of Romanticism at their heart. His views also chimed closely with those of Tagore, who also believed writing several decades later that art, which transcends borders, could point towards certain universal moral ideals.
Tagore went further, in his essay The Realisation of Beauty , to suggest that the purest, most unifying art form was music and you need only recall the solidarity shown via online performances last year to appreciate why , as his own songs undoubtedly proved, in , and again during the War of Liberation, when they were used to sing an ever-more divided Bengal into a nation.
Morality both binds and blinds. Yet we continue to see the rise of a politics of collective identity and exclusionary group belonging; bullying tribalisms and cancel cultures which reject the need for context or nuance let alone the virtues of kindness, tolerance or forgiveness ; and extremisms on both sides of the political divide. One thing such phenomena share is their failure to see what brings us together.
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