![\"IMG_3587\"](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/IMG_3587.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThey appeared on my doorstep a few days ago, from Australia. No card, no clue. They’re pretty awesome, but they’re also a bit suspicious: I keep remembering that giant wooden rabbit rolling up to the door of the Frawnsh Castle in Holy Grail. Who knows what pathogens or circuitry could be lurking behind these endearing wooden beasties?<\/p>\n
Anyone?<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
A paper came out in Aging<\/a> last month, offered a bit of hope to those of us who don’t want to, you know, die. Eva Latorre et al<\/em> have managed to “reverse aging” in human skin cells. I put that in quotes because it may not quite be true, despite the fact that one of the actual researchers used those words<\/a> in a commentary on the subject; the actual paper states that the treatment<\/p>\n “has a senostatic, rather than a senolytic or a proliferation-inducing function in the majority of senescent cells in the culture.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, it doesn’t reboot old cells into full-on mitosis mode; just makes them more metabolically youthful (and the paper leaves open the possibility that maybe they would<\/em> have started proliferating again but for the “higher mutational load” of older cells). So at the very least, we’ve got senescent cells acting young. They regain functions lost to age and entropy: notably, alternative splicing\u2014 that trick whereby a single gene gets repurposed in different sequences for the synthesis of multiple proteins\u2014 reattains its youthful vigor. If the process ports to other cell types, Latorre et al<\/em> cautiously speculate that their technique<\/p>\n “may have therapeutic potential in the future for extension of health span and treatment of age-related diseases\u2026 treatment may be able to retard, as well as partially reverse senescence.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We’re talking life extension here, folks. We’re talking another hopeful step on the road to immortality. And they did it all with hydrogen sulfide.<\/p>\n “Judge me by my size, do you? Humph! And well you do not! For my ally is The Farts!””<\/p><\/div>\n That surprised me. I’d always assumed H2<\/sub>S was a bad<\/em> thing for us eukaryotes: poisonous, corrosive, and flammable, a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism that smells like farts[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>. But it turns out it exists in our own bodies, turns out we actually produce the stuff ourselves. It’s beneficial in small quantities; they call it a “gasotransmitter” (along with, believe it or not, carbon monoxide). Apparently H2<\/sub>S helps protect stressed cells from damage. It even has anticancer properties.<\/p>\n Naturally, the paper’s got a fair bit<\/a> of attention in<\/a> the popular science<\/a> press. There’s one thing that none of those articles have mentioned, though. This is not the first time hydrogen sulfide has proven useful in a medical\u2014 even in a life-extension\u2014 context. Way back in 2005, Blackstone et al<\/em><\/a> exposed mice to 80ppm H2<\/sub>S and reduced their metabolic rate by 90%, with no ill effects. So now we have a simple compound, endogenously produced, which is instrumental both in extending life and in suspending animation.<\/p>\n Or, if you want to be lurid about it, in conferring “immortality”<\/em> and inducing an undead state<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/a>