Will Gene Therapy Extend Lives?
At the age of 21, I have a lot on my mind. Something I don’t find myself thinking about too often is death and disease. Recent studies show that I should have a good 54 years or so left. That’s a decent chunk of time…but is it possible to stretch our lives longer than we already have?
According to the article “Reprogramming Biology”, we will eventually have the technology available to prolong our lives. The article makes the analogy that we will to improve our bodies like we improve our computers. Anytime we want to update a computer we can simply upload software. Soon, when our body needs an update, we will inject ourselves with healthy cells. For example, researchers are exploring the use of gene therapy as a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension, which causes deadly high blood pressure.
During gene therapy, a sample of damaged cells is taken from an organism and genetically modified to produce healthy cells. These cells are then placed in an environment where they reproduce. After they accumulate, the cells are injected into the host and return to their proper tissues. The possibilities of this therapy seem endless as stem cells can be taken from the body and theoretically turned into anything.
Trying to imagine these procedures as an every day occurrence is difficult. Aren’t the costs of genetic research and procedures astronomical? Not everyone seems to think so. This is what the author of "Reprogramming Biology", Ray Kurzweil, believes:
"Information technologies, including biological ones, double their price performance and capacity in less than a year. Sequencing DNA, for example, has come down in price by half annually, from $10 per base pair in 1990 to under a penny today.7 The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has more than doubled every year.This rate of doubling means that we will increase the capability of these technologies by a factor of 1,000 in less than a decade and by a billion in 25 years."
The concept of living longer is controversial. Can we live too long? If gene therapy becomes as popular as Kurweil believes, we will be facing a different problem as well - overpopulation. With overpopulation comes deficiency of resources. The results of extending our lives could be devastating to the world.
It seems possible that gene therapy will become a popular, affordable health treatment in my lifetime. We'll have to wait and see how this will affect life expectancy, but it seems like I might be here for awhile.
-APentowski
posted by PWH @ 10:06 PM
15 comments
15 Comments:
While the prospect of a prolonged life is rather fascinating, I find myself asking the question of whether we indeed know enough to make such a promise. I don't like to be skeptical, for I am not an authority on the subject. But in the past, for example, we sold certain drugs or medicines as "the cure" for the corresponding ailments...only to find later that they carried unexpected side effects. Are there "side effects" to gene therapy? Moreover, do people present moral and ethical concerns with regard to this issue?
Posted by J543
This topic is absolutely fascinating. The article mentioned some incredible examples of stem cell therapy that I had not yet heard about such as the scientist who was able to cure type one diabetes in lab rats. (I hope this will be available for humans soon.) However, my question, when reading this article is what kind of stem cells are being used for this research, embryonic or adult? Are we able to use adult stem cells for these therapies? ( because I have a feeling that very few of us will benefit from these treatments if the only method is to use embryonic stem cells.)
That is a very interesting topic, and it seems to be a field of research that holds a lot of promise. Unforunately however, it seems like one of the biggest obstacles in the way of gene therapy is government regulation. Do you think that gene regulation will be a big factor in the next presidential election? My guess is that it will be difficult to gain government approval of embryonic stem cell research if it involves the killing of an embryo. Is research focusing more on using adult stem cells to circumvent this issue?
Eric Marks
This seems to be a very fasinating idea. However, I think that gene therapy might come into a number of road blocks in the process and may not be around for a number of years for a number of reasons. Things to take into consideration which such things as gene therapy include the currently ever growing population as it is. Imagine if people started living longer and the population continued to grow. This could cause an even larger shortage of food in countries who do not have enough, among housing problems, etc. Also, some government officals already feel that technology should be held at a standstill with stem cell research, that I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't have to take a large movement to allow such gene therapy to be a common occurance in everyday life. I feel this post was very thought provoking and hope to see more about gene therapy soon.
strambe6
It's hard to imagine that people would have the possibility of prolonging their lives with just the simple task of injecting stem cells into their bodies. I more or less have the same questions as 'j543'. Are there known side effects to gene therapy? If gene therapy does indeed extend our lives, will it play a factor in overpopulation? Interesting blog by the way.
- posted by nguyean7
This blog brought up an interesting topic; however it didn’t seem to provide that much information about the biological aspect of gene therapy and the problems scientists might have with it. There are many issues that need to be figured out first before “cells can then be placed in an environment where they reproduce.” Scientists need to fully understand how to get cells to differentiate into the cells they need them to be, specifically so they won’t become random cells for an unnecessary organ, for instance, and then just develop into a tumor when they get placed back into the body. Another problem that gene therapy could present would be if they did figure out how to reproduce the correct cells, the body might reject them as foreign cells. Gene therapy may have a lot of potential but many things need to be figured out before we can start saying that it will lengthen the lives of the general public.
Meghan Lemay
Lemaym6
This is a fascinating new subject! I was a little confused by your explanation, however. It was unclear whether it is the patient's own malfunctioning cells that are genetically modified and "fixed", or are new stem cells specialized into that particular type of cell that the person needs? You alluded to both, so I was curious exactly how it works. But the potential for this kind of treatment is exciting, and covers a huge breadth of illnesses, diseases, and effects of aging. One thing that might make your blog entry more understandable for readers would be if you included more examples of how this kind of gene therapy could be used, and explained in more depth what kinds of cells would be potentially replaced. Thanks for posting on such a relevant topic.
posted by vinceca4
catherine vincent
As a student taking the Psychology of Aging, I was happy to find a topic that is relevant to what I am studying now. If the technology to manipulate gene and culture wanted cells from the stem cell could actually become popular, it would be one of the greatest invention in human history.
According to Gompertz equation (Sacher, 1977), the age span of a species is determined, supporting the “programmed aging theory.” For example, butterflies have a life span of 12 weeks, and humans have a life span of 120 years. A cell loses its ability to reproduce over time, which is called “replicative senescence.” (Whitbourne, 39) Telomerase theory comes with this concept; as the telomerase decreases, genes are less protected and changes may occur in gene expression, which can produce malfunctioning of cell and organ system.
Gene therapy would extend human life span, including life expectancy, if it can be realizable. However, it would be difficult to collect old cells in our body (since we have billions of them), and cells might not be able to adjust and do their job just by injecting them.
It’s a challenging task, but the effort and processes for the gene therapy would benefit human health in the near future.
Thank you for an interesting blog!
I enjoyed it!
Posted by clearsky83
Very interesting blog topic. I really enjoyed your detailed view on gene therapy, but with science aside there are still a for moral questions at hand. Would it be ethically correct to mess with the human life span? With so many lives being expanded would overpopulation become an issue? With any new "cure" there have to be some form of side effects. Are there any expected side effects or risks that come with using the old body cells?
This topic is really fascinating and could cause endless questions and conversation. Very nice choice of topic and well written blog!
This was a very interesting read. Being able to prolong life by adding new cells into the body seems very futuristic so it is crazy to think that this can happen in our lifetime. I thought it was very fascinating to compare prolonging life to updating computers by adding software. Can it be possible to use this technique to help everyone who has certain health issues such as high blood pressure?
History has shown us that with time, great strides and discoveries are standard in the fields of health and technology. We have all witnessed inventions like the MRI, X-Ray’s, dialysis machines, and countless others revolutionize health care and our standard of living. As this article stated, gene therapy is the future and while some people are skeptical I think it’s safe to say that with consistently improving science, something like gene therapy is not only probable but inevitable. It’s really interesting how the price of genetic processing has decreased by so much. It just goes to show you how fast paced the fields of health and science are.
sharafn6
The possibilities to extend or better life qualities are remarkable! I find this article to extremely interesting in that it may be something that directly influences the future of our generation. One question i had when reading this was what kind of controversies this type of study and therapy have brought up. It seems like every scientific study done now encounters some kinda of issues and i believe that this one would not be an exception as it has to do with some complex processes. It may also be interesting to find out what kind of problems this type of therapy might have within the human body. Is this type of therapy really meant to be discovered? Is there a possibility that it may just cause more problems than cures?
HEH
It's quite amazing to think that we may be able to prolong life even more so than the life expectancy is these days. I am agreement with stem cell reasearch, especially for cures to diseases. Yet i wonder a little to what it would be like to "update" our bodies. Its quite interesting to read about it, hopefully I will be able to see more literature about this sooner rather than later.
It's exciting to see how rapidly the science of medicinal cures is changing. Though gene therapy is a relatively new method of treatment, people have already predicted that it will replace surgery and painful treatments like chemotherapy within my lifetime. In several cases, surgery and chemotherapy can cause more harm than good, and will probably be viewed as archaic a treatment as leeches in the next 100 to 200 years.
The most amazing aspect about gene therapy has to be its unlimited potential. In the article "Reprogramming Biology," everything from studies on weight control and diabetes to parkinson's disease and cancer is discussed.
Yet, I hope we don't try to take advantage of this treatment before we fully understand it. I would like to see gene therapy become something common in my lifetime, but manipulating genes can be dangerous and unpredictable when little is known about cell differnetiation and replication.
solomon6
the article sounds interesting. I however wonder if there are confounding variables other than naps which could lead to the prolonging of life?
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