There is a culture where 98 percent of the people eat red meat, 50 percent of the people are obese and 45 percent of people smoke cigarettes. Yet they have incredible longevity.
All of those lifestyles are against modern clinical guidelines but an alarming number of these people are centenarians - they lived to be over 100 years old, even living the bulk of their lives before the advent of modern cancer diagnosis and medicine. In the 21st century, almost all of us know centenarians, but when the topic of
lifestyle comes up, as it frequently does, the answers are confounding. Though we want to know how centenarians stayed healthy for so
long, they can't really tell us, they can only tell us what they have done. Their responses are as
varied as the human condition. Some drink alcohol, some won’t touch the stuff,
some have eaten bacon and eggs for most of their lives, some swear by
vegetables. Some smoke, most don’t.
Centenarians seem to have as many
distinctions as they have commonalities, almost as if living long is just luck, a genetic fluke. Yet it turns out they do have something in common, they just couldn't have told you what it is because science is really only beginning to figure it out.
(and that common thing is...at the end)
While you read those words, and while I wrote them, a powerful
chemical mixture was coursing throughout our bodies. Scientists call it adenosine triphosphate - ATP. Imagine a world where almost every country uses the dollar as their currency. That is what ATP is, an energy currency. Our brain cells need energy just like our muscles do but not everything needs the same amount. With all of the various levels energy needed to keep so many different parts of our bodies going, it would be chaos if they all had their own energy sources and time was spent converting from one to the other.
Instead, our bodies, with all of the various parts shapred throughout evolution, handles it all. Some biological functions need more energy currency than others but they all use the same bank teller - and that is mitochondria. Mitochondria do the biological heavy lifting of energy generation. The food we eat - our nutrition - is actually poorly suited to our bodies, so nature has given us the perfect way to change low-energy food into high-energy currency for life. However, when things go wrong, they go really wrong.
Everyone has heard of cyanide, for example. It has long been a staple of murder mysteries because it works rapidly. Cyanide kills so quickly because it binds to a copper atom in the cytochrome oxidase enzyme, which is a vital point in our energy production. When that process is blocked by cyanide, ATP stops and we are dead within minutes.
Mitochondria keeps ATP moving where it is needed, every hour of every day. Mitochondria are a vital part of the process that turns food like pasta into sugars such as glucose and fructose and fats into fatty acids and glycerol and they can all become ATP and be used wherever they are needed. This process of burning food to create energy is called cellular respiration. One tiny molecule of glucose, for example, is transformed into 30 molecules of ATP and it begins zipping its way throughout our bodies to keep you reading and me writing..
All of this energy is created on the go and ATP is created just for that purpose. After it is used, ATP goes back into being adenosine and alpha, beta and gamma phosphates - salt - until it is needed again. It will be recycled and recreated so many times each day by mitochondria that it will be generated in an amount equivalent to our total body weights.
Yet at any given time our bodies only contain 8 ounces of it. It's a wonderful system but it's easy to imagine that with so much reliant on such a fragile process, if anything at all goes wrong the consequences are substantial. That is why the race is on to solve one of the biggest mysteries in biology and to find out if perhaps we have been treating symptoms rather than diseases.
Aging itself might be one of those diseases.
Aging and death is the one identical future we all share. The older we get, the more we think about mortality, our life has unfolded behind us and we know that what is left ahead is short - and it is likely to be beset with prescription medications, a slow spiral downward to infirmity and possibly a convalescent home. But it may be that aging is not linear, like a parchment that just unfolds, and science is all about breaking the laws of nature. Why not
(this will become a hook when I talk about the linear versus circular mitochondrial genomes)
And we may be able to head off an alarming number of diseases that science has discovered are mitochondrial dysfunctions - it is not a big motivation to exercise at the gym each day knowing that we could easily get Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, for example. There are 200 disease that have a basic in what is called mitochondrial dysfunction. That means that beyond the surface level, things like smoking and obesity, in some people cells are just going bad. It is why some people 'age slower' than other. In the past, it would just be dismissed as 'good genes' without any real understanding of what that means.
The story of mitochondria
is not a story of arcane biology and medical jargon. It has scientists
squaring off against each other to discover the secrets of biological energy in
the 1800s and then again in the 1940s. It is a story that also has dirty tricks, theft, sabotage, and a little
bit of serendipity.
It has chemists and biologists staring at things like
cauliflower and _____, trying to put together the solution to one of nature's most
important mysteries.
If ATP is self-perpetuating, it means everything is. In the late 19th century, the early tissue scientist Richard Altmann wrote that he believed that the most important and vital functions of life were granules
He called them "bioblasts" but today we know them as mitochondria. Of them he said, "Omne granulum e granulo"
If you are between 85 years of age, your chances of dying from heart disease are 2,000 times that of a 24 year old. Yet what does that National Institutes of Health say is the biggest risk factor for heart disease? Cholesterol, which is only linked to a 3 times greater risk of heart disease.
References:
Evolution by Association : A History of Symbiosis: A History of Symbiosis
By Jan Sapp Department of Science Studies York University
The Cell: Outlines of General Anatomy and Physiology
By Oscar Hertwig
X is 107 years old. Like many octogenarians, the topic of
lifestyle comes up often. People want to know how they stayed healthy for so
long because mortality is something that impacts us all. The responses are as
varied as the human condition. Some drink alcohol, some won’t touch the stuff,
some have eaten bacon and eggs for most of their lives, some swear by
vegetables. Some smoke, most don’t.
Like humanity itself, octogenarians seem to have as many
distinctions as they have commonalities.
While you read these words, and while I wrote them, a tiny
chemical mixture was coursing throughout our bodies.
In 1946, a chemist at Shell Oil became intensely interested
in radiation, like much of the world was. The United States had just ended the
Second World War with atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one was sure
what would happen next.
with 35 patents to his credit had been spending his time
getting a medical degree also. After conm
His name is Dr. Denham Harman and he is 96 years old.
Harman drank little and has never smoked cigarettes. He
jogged until age 82 and still walks every day, yet he did not attribute his
health and longevity to any of those things. He has long believed it is just a
function of biology, and he has devoted his career to solving it.
In 1946, while at Shell, he was intensely interested in
radiation, like much of the world. The United States had just ended the second
World War with atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one was sure what
would happen next.
Age remains the looming issue we all dread. We don’t worry
that we will get old, barring an accident or an unlucky roll of the cancer
dice, we will certainly all get old. The problem is that people are uncertain
what that will mean. The Baby Boom – a term originally created for the surge in
births the year after soldiers returned from World War II in 1945, but more
recently extrapolated out to children born until 1964 – is retiring as one of
the best educated and wealthiest in world history. But they know economics;
when they were born,[i]
there were 42 workers per retiree, now there are fewer than 3.
Living longer is no longer the concern, living better is,
because no one assumes that health care is going to be affordable. People want
to proactively take control of their health.
In the last X years,
longevity has increased substantially , going from Y in 19__ to Z now.
Yet they are not living healthier. Prostate and breast
cancer has not gone down, age-related macular degeneration still strikes people
starting at age 60, and
A seminal 1996 study of almost 3,000
Danish twins born in 1900 and earlier found that 20% of their longevity could
be genetic.[ii]
No surprise there but was a surprise was that the genetic factors were more
pronounced as age increased. Another study in ______ found that people who
lived longer had better mitochondria.
Everyone knows about mitochondria. In Sacramento
International Airport, waiting for a flight to Los Angeles, I saw my neighbors
were on the same flight. They asked about my next book and I mentioned
mitochondria and began give the 15 second overview of what it is and my
neighbor interrupted and said, ‘ATP and all that, wasn’t that done 35 years
ago?’
Indeed it was. Dr.
Peter Mitchell received a Nobel Prize in for his work on the hypothesis of in
1978.
A month later, at a local cigar store, I sat down to watch a
baseball game and I was asked what I was working on. I mentioned mitochondria
again and a fellow who opens a
construction company said, ‘sure, the energy factories in our cells’.
Everyone knows something about mitochondria. But for being
so well-known, there have been a lot of mysteries that have eluded researchers
– and the big ones are on the verge of being solved
When it comes to energy transport, even biochemists begin to
yawn.
Time is, physicists will tell us, relative. But we can’t
make time an abstract. Every minute of every day we are being bombarded by
high-energy cosmic rays
Why do we age? How do we stop it? Science journalist Virginia
Hughes, writing at the Only Human blog on the National Geographic website,
discussed
We know the pattern and we think we understand it. We are an
organism in a long chain of evolution. Once we reach an age where we should
have propagated the species, we die, usually after a period of existential
angst and a mid-life crisis.
Yet evolution tells us that her laws are made to be broken.
Some species not only do not die after reproducing, they are more likely to
reproduce and less likely to do the older they get.[iii]
(Hypericum
cumulicola is a rare species that is endemic to the Lakes Wales Ridge in central Florida.)
Credit:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/08/why-do-we-age-a-46-species-comparison/ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2013/12/strange-shapes.jpg
About
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12789.html
Aging is the ultimate ‘killer app’
But in a 20__ paper, researchers found a commonality among
octogenarians that had been pursued by scientists like Denham for 50 years.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9807E6DA1F3FE03ABC4B53DF…
MAN'S 'POWER' UNIT IS REPORTED FOUND; Mitochondria, in
Living Cells, Keep Fires of Life Going, Chemists Are Told
Permissions
Special to THE NEW
YORK TIMES. ();
September 03, 1948,
, Section , Page 21,
Column , words
[ DISPLAYING ABSTRACT ]
WASHINGTON, Sept. 2
-- The discovery that the tiny, rod-shaped bodies in all living cells, known
Mitochondria, serve as the power plants in which the body burns fats and sugars
to keep the fires of life going, was described here today before the meeting of
the American Chemical Society.
[i]
Social Security Administration http://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
(accessed 10/9/2014)
[ii] Herskind, Anne. McGue, Matthew. Holm, Niels. Sørensen, Thorkild. Harvald, Bent. Vaupel, James, (1996) The heritability of human longevity: A population-based study
of 2872 Danish twin pairs born 1870–1900. Human
Genetics. Volume 97, Number 3 (1996), 319-323. doi:10.1007/BF02185763.
