A drug already safe for humans reduces disease-linked early features of Alzheimer’s in a lab model of the disease, say neuroscientists.
  • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    22 小时前

    Interesting. I had no idea genetic damage was linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Thought it was chance/inherent genetics, a bit like cancer is.

  • dudeface@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    1 天前

    Hope our descendants enjoy paying for life long drugs to prevent a number of diseases (fingers crossed anyway)

    • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      23 小时前

      If you’ve ever had someone close to you develop alzheimers, especially family where it was then more likely that you would develop it, you would have no problem paying for drugs to prevent it for life. It’s probably the cruelest thing that can happen to a person in life.

        • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
          33·
          1 天前

          Natural selection is driven by pressures that affect reproduction chances. Like a genetic mutation that makes you sicker

          In nature it’s what cleans the genetics of a species of disease over time, preventing infinite accumulation of negative mutations

          • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
            72·
            1 天前

            That’s a little simplistic and forgets one thing: natural selection only cares until you’re old enough to procreate, biologically, and there’s nothing it will do for humanity after that age.

            So yeah, natural selection is totally cool with you dying of a splinter at 16.

            Sorry to bust your eugenics bubble.

            • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
              31·
              23 小时前

              That’s almost true. I said natural selection only impacts odds of reproduction but there’s a few things that occur after reproduction age in a population that have been studied to be naturally selected tooo

              Behaviours of gays and the elderly are selected for to an extent because they help raise children in the tribe/community/group whilst not affecting reproductive pressures

              Improving survival odds through nurturing children/others leads to groups with those genes doing better, which selects for those genes via natural selection

              If the older members of the group are fitter and can help gather food/hunt then those genes are selected for too through increased survival of their offspring

      • sunbeam60@feddit.ukEnglish
        4·
        1 天前

        Have you considered that natural selection also applies to being smarter so we can invent better drugs?

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
        7·
        1 天前

        It’s not dying, we just reached the top of the food chain.

        Then we got all sciency and improved health and quality of life at advanced age. And improved survival rates at birth/youth.

        Now we practice capital darwinism in order to keep our numbers in check. We make sure the poor have worse access to healthcare and quality diets. We let generations of institutionalized racism decide who has to be poor.

        And then…we changed the world. If your great-great-grandma were transported to the modern dlay at age 25, she wouldn’t survive. The world is completely foreign to everything humanity has ever known.

        No wonder we have obesity epidemics in a world where addictive calorie-dense and nuttitionally-void food is readily available and cheaper than anything that grows out of the ground.

        No wonder we have ADHD and Autism when there’s an overabundance of stimuli constantly surrounding us.

        • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
          3·
          1 天前

          You just described the death of natural selection in this context, we’re no longer selecting for genetics to minimise disease

      • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        22 小时前

        That’s not true, though. There’s nothing to corrupt. The human genome is 41% fruit fly, 60% banana and 8% virus simultaneously. Hugh Mann Georg, whose genome is 131 billion percent human is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

        Plus natural selection isn’t solely random by nature, nor is it independent of humans. It doesn’t magically go away, even with sci-fi gene technology, since people would naturally select genes that they find attractive, make them superhuman, or won’t give them some nasty disease. Humans deciding that they want a gene that gives them breasts all-year round because they find them attractive is no different to humans selecting for the trait over generations, for much the same reason.

        • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
          1·
          22 小时前

          negative genetic muntions and diseases don’t exist because bananas are sortof similar to humans

          Okay good argument I’m convinced science is entirely misguided