Fight Aging!

I thought I would direct your attention to a nice article on current scientific interest in microRNAs:

One of the medical marvels of stem cells is that they continue to divide and renew themselves when other cells would quit. But what is it that gives stem cells this kind of immortality? Researchers report in the journal Nature that microRNAs - tiny snippets of genetic material that have now been linked to growth regulation in normal cells as well as cancer growth in abnormal cells - appear to shut off the "stop signals" or brakes that would normally tell cells to stop dividing.

As soon as you're down in the depths of cellular mechanisms, you run into links to both cancer and aging:

In a commentary, Dr. Paul Meltzer of the National Human Genome Research Institute said microRNAs "are now definitely linked to the development of cancer."

...

And now that the researchers have found that too few microRNAs are bad for stem cells, they want to see what an abundance of microRNAs will do. Perhaps the right recipe can give even ordinary cells a touch of "stem-cellness."

"We are right now testing that, by overproducing microRNAs in the daughter cells that have begun to differentiate," Ruohola-Baker said. "Maybe this would also help aging stem cells. Maybe you can keep them dividing by using more microRNAs."

Other recent work demonstrates that helping aging stem cells would certainly be a good thing insofar as health and longevity are concerned. Human cells are basically finite state machines on a number of different levels. The only difference between an embryonic stem cell and an adult, differentiated cell lies in the state of the inner machinery (give or take a few gross oversimplifications). The more we understand, the more we can do - we are presently in the very earliest days of a medical revolution, but at the far end of the path of complete cellular control we will have cures for all diseases ... and for degenerative aging itself.