The Long View

originally posted Feb 2011

A tribe in Ecuador is impervious to cancer and diabetes. How does that help us?

NPR reports on the existence of a tribe in Ecuador that never gets diabetes and very rarely gets cancer. Valter Longo, gerontologist at the University of Southern California, was studying genes responsible for the development of cancer, and had already increased the lifespan of a yeast colony tenfold by disabling genes and feeding the colony fewer calories. The two genes he was researching, RAS2 and SCH9, have mutated in a population of Ecuadorian dwarfs, giving them nigh-immunity to cancer, and apparently complete immunity to diabetes.

The Ecuadoreans affected are a very limited population, as anyone who has one or the other of the two genes in a normal state lives a normal life, both with regards to height and susceptibility to cancer and diabetes. The obvious question then is: Are we going to have to shorten the height of the human race in order to lengthen its lifespan? “No,” says Dr. Longo, “the results suggest that after we grow to normal size we could either use dietary or pharmacological interventions to decrease specific growth factors, to divert energy from cellular growth and reproduction to protective systems. This switch could be reversed when needed,” for reproduction, to fight disease, or to heal physical damage. Essentially, this would mean that our bodies would run on lower power, diverting energy from non-essential functions to avoid the possibility of cancer.

As you’ll recall, Longo’s experiment with the yeast had two parts: knocking out genes, and lowering caloric intake. It appears that if humans want to use a similar method, a decrease in caloric intake is not optional. A breakthrough of this magnitude would have serious implications for agriculture, foodservice, and pharmaceuticals, and would likely receive a lot of resistance from groups that stand to lose a lot of money in a post-cancer, low-calorie world. And maybe that’s not actually as nasty as it sounds—don’t we want a treatment that could change the entirety of human existence to undergo serious scrutiny?

Here’s a thought, though, on the matter of surviving on fewer calories for longer times: It might also have a seriously positive unintended consequence. That is, ending world hunger.

What do you think? Is this something we’ll see in our lifetimes? Valter Longo guesses that twenty or thirty years from now we might be able to knock out these genes. Is that too optimistic?