Open Longevity
A. Blagodatsky, A. Rzheshevsky, A. Egorova, O. Borisova: "Open Longevity. How aging works and what to do about it." Review
Anna Petrenko, "Biomolecule"
The book "Open Longevity. How aging works and what to do about it" pursues a noble goal: to show that aging can be fought and that scientists already guess in which directions to take steps. From it you will learn about "sterile aging", "digital healthy lifestyle" and "molecular domestication". However, it was not possible to successfully tell the general public about the struggle for longevity in the book — read in the review why.
"I can name a hundred reasons why we are moving so slowly. I will focus on one thing: people do not believe that they can live up to the technologies of radical life extension, and do not believe that anything can depend on them. And it's easier not to think about anything related to death at all. It's easier to die, because it's somehow calmer to follow the usual course of things."
«Open Longevity. How aging works and what to do about it" is a collective work of the authors and illustrators of the Open Longevity project, where they tell about the latest scientific research in the field of aging at different levels: from aging of long-lived molecules in the body to the most promising geroprotectors.
"Most of the theories of aging that exist today are of a limited fragmentary nature, describing some separate factor and highlighting it as the main one. This state of affairs, of course, greatly complicates the fight against aging and often leads to a dead end. A good theory of aging should be consistent and describe to the maximum all the processes known today related to aging. We propose to consider aging as a complex "tangle" of interrelated biological processes, in violation of any of which the rest also break down. Thus, each of the factors involved in aging and at the same time all of them at once are the "main" causes of aging."
I would like to note that scientific journalists who wrote for Biomolecule also took part in the creation of the book. The authors of the book Alexey Rzheshevsky and Olga Borisova took part in the contest "Bio/Mol/The text", and they also wrote about aging. Georgy Kurakin became the scientific editor of the book, and Svetlana Bozrova became the editor-in-chief.
The publication is divided into several parts. The introductory and concluding chapters are written by Mikhail Batin, the head of the Open Longevity project, launched in 2016 (although he is not listed in the authors, his presence invisibly accompanies the reader throughout the book), where we are talking about the project itself and the problems of studying aging / longevity. In other parts of the book, multi-level aging processes are considered: from the aging of the intercellular matrix to epigenetic changes. First, we will talk about inflammation and aging, then about the aging of the cell matrix, mitochondria and mobile genetic elements.
"Who do you think can hide under these picturesque names: Magellan, Attila, Penelope, Tourist, Charlie, Sleeping Beauty, Emigrant, Aurora, Transsib, Sailor, Tramp, Piggyback? Members of some criminal group and their fighting friends? Perhaps, somewhere in a parallel universe, it is. But in our case, these are the proper names of mobile genetic elements (MGE, which in eukaryotes are represented by transposons), which were given to them by the scientists who discovered them."
After that, the authors will talk about some promising molecules that could be used to stop aging, and talk about what the future of the fight against aging is and what can be done to ensure longevity in general. The reader will also get acquainted with other projects related to Open Longevity, for example, Boston Matrix, Open genes, Life Dynamics, Marduk. The glossary and an impressive list of references complete the book.
The book was conceived as the first volume of several devoted not to aging from a scientific point of view, but to longevity. This is the key point — the publication tells not about the fight against aging, but about the fight for longevity. And it is, the authors write, possible from the point of view of science. This issue should be addressed not only by scientists, but also by the state, and companies as sponsors, and scientific groups in terms of joining efforts, and in general, everyone, regardless of age or occupation.
To do this, the authors have collected in Open longevity several vivid examples of individual body systems that change their work over time.
"Thus, a healthy lifestyle cannot completely prevent the internal aging processes of elastin. They are associated with the modification of elastin fibers by lipids, as well as their calcification and enzymatic degradation. Lipids, calcium and carbohydrates are part of the human diet, and elastin accumulates more and more damage with age. As a result, human life expectancy is limited by the period of preservation of the elastic properties of the circulatory and respiratory systems, which is approximately 100-120 years."
However, it is unfortunately impossible to say that the authors managed to create a work that will attract new supporters of actively promoting the idea of longevity. On the one hand, the book really tells a lot in detail and professionally. We can even say that within the selected topics, the authors tried to express the maximum available information. But, on the other hand, when reading, there is no understanding of the whole picture, perhaps partly due to excessive details. The book provides detailed molecular descriptions of processes without a break (largely based on the newest publications), but in the end there is a feeling of reading a textbook designed not even for people with medical and biological education, but only for those of them who graduated from university with a red diploma and are already motivated to understand the topic. Even the glossary does not help much to understand the material.
"Another mechanism of crosslinking formation has been discovered quite recently and involves the initial spontaneous cleavage of the asparagine residue in the protein with a stepwise cleavage of the C-terminal succinimide, which ultimately leads to the formation of anhydride. The nucleophilic "attack" on this anhydride by the lysine side amino group leads to the formation of a covalent isopeptide bond."
The "fault" in this is not only a huge number of terms, but a very uneven presentation from a stylistic point of view. The chapters are written by different authors with different approaches to the material and different "voices": the reader sees a lyrical digression, then faces a very frequent parcelling of the text out of place ("Age-related changes in the epigenome are so clearly correlated with the number of years lived that modern biologists operate with such a concept as "epigenetic clock" — the location of marker epigenetic modifications in a set of key genes. By which it is possible to determine the biological age of the organism very accurately. Whether it's a laboratory mouse or a human"), then plunges into extremely hardcore molecular descriptions. In addition, the book could use a couple more editorial readings to harmonize the chapters with each other and get rid of annoying little things that spoil the impression of the book. Then suddenly the length of DNA in one cell becomes 1.5 s m (it is usually assumed that this value is more than two orders of magnitude greater); then the names of researchers are given only in Russian, then suddenly their English spelling is given; then the same terms / abbreviations are introduced several times by different authors. On one of the pages, the slightly paraphrased text is repeated twice:
"Kennedy divides all potential geroprotectors into two levels based on the reliability of the results of their preclinical and clinical trials. The upper level includes the most reliable drugs, and more detailed studies are needed for the lower level drugs. Kennedy divides all potential geroprotectors into two levels: the upper one (the most reliable in terms of the reliability of the results of preclinical and clinical trials) and the lower one (for which more detailed studies are needed)."
In addition, philosophical arguments at the beginning and at the end of the book are very out of the general body of the text, seem to be debatable and require at least a separate conversation, supported by sources. It would also be interesting to discuss why longevity is needed at all and what impact an increase in life expectancy can have on humanity from cultural, historical and other points of view.
Separately, I would like to mention the artistic design of the book by Victoria Chernikovich, Arkady Erlich and Natalia Ri. Perhaps the whole book is one big illustration, because the text is given by the collage principle and is constantly interspersed with both abstract or philosophical, and quite molecular accurate detailed drawings. This approach makes the book truly unique and makes it much easier to read, despite (or maybe because of) a certain psychedelicity of the images. But for convenience, perhaps the authors should have made a continuous numbering of the drawings.
Summing up the review, we can say that this book is a good attempt to collect some reference on longevity and aging, but it is also suitable mainly for fans of reading encyclopedias (and lovers of beautiful design). For less advanced readers, there are other publications that are more friendly to perception (for example, the book by Polina Loseva, about which Biomolecule also wrote).
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