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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, there is little choice for any such study to be done on anything else but mice, because of their short natural lifespan.

Even if there were human volunteers willing to test on themselves various cocktails of chemicals, such a study would take many centuries.

Also on monkeys any study would take much too long.

So until aging in mice is well understood, any tests on monkeys or humans are pointless.

It is unlikely that the aging mechanisms differ in an essential way between mice and humans. If the aging in mice were understood, finding how it functions in humans would need far less work than for discovering how it functions in mice.

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The problem wasn't that the study was done on mice, it was that this piece of information out was left out of the title. I agree with the OC that its deliberatively deceptive, unless of course this article was in 'The Journal of Mice' in which case it would be ok.

Your last point needs to be emphasized more. The core mechanism of aging is likely to be very similar across species as aging affect all tissues, organs, etc.

I think so too. And particular drugs that work in mice might not work in humans, but what those drugs tells us about aging in mice will help us understand aging in humans.

AFAIK, the question of why our lifespan is so different from other mammals is still open. And one quite possible answer is still that our aging happens by a slightly different mechanism.

The lifespan of humans is not completely different from other mammals.

The lifespan of humans is less than twice that of our closest relatives, and probably there is no coincidence in the fact that about the same ratio exists between the maturity age of humans and that of apes.

Aging in humans does not seem to have any qualitative difference, it just happens slower, like also the maturity.

So, compared to the most similar animals you can find, we still age half as fast. That's pretty unusual if you ask me.

Besides, the apes in general age in an unusual way. All take too long to mature compared to their lifespan, and all have too long a lifespan compared to their size (the mammals have a rough correlation between lifespan and size). Yes, we are merely at the extreme of that weirdness, not in a new category of weirdness. But it still means we are different from mice in some way.

It is unlikely that the aging mechanisms differ in an essential way between mice and humans.

[citation needed]

A citation is needed for the contrary statement.

Aging has appeared hundreds of millions of years ago in the ancestors of all multicellular animals and it manifests in the same way in most of them.

There is no known reason for aging in a way to be replaced by aging in some other way, like e.g. respiration through gills may be replaced by respiration through lungs, especially when we discuss some closely related mammals which have not diverged significantly in their way of life.

There are a few animal groups where more significant alterations in aging appears to have occurred, e.g. which have an unusually long lifespan, but whatever has changed seems to be restricted to those small groups.

There are no great divisions between animals where you could say that one group has a modified aging, like they might have a modified digestive system, enabling them to use a different food.

So until a contrary proof, the most plausible supposition is that aging happens in the same way in all multicellular animals, with minor differences, caused e.g. by more efficient cellular repair mechanisms in some of them, or by a "programmed death", i.e. suicide, which happens in many animals after reproduction, or in some colonial animals before a season when there will not be food for all of them.

Yes, and the closer the evolutionary relationship, the closer you would expect the biochemistry to be.

A result in yeast might not apply at all. a result in fish might be something worth investigating. A result in mice has a good likelihood of applying to humans. A money study would be a close match.

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