subject: Growth Hormone Will Extend The Outer Boundaries Of Human Survival. [print this page] Maximum Life Span Maximum Life Span
The big question is whether growth hormone will extend the outer boundaries of human survival. Many scientists contend that the maximum life span is not immutable. With advancing technology, such as the ability to engineer the genes at will. They will push back the frontier to 150 years and beyond interventions like human growth hormone will allow us to live long enough so that the new interventions that will achieve the next leap in life span will be on board.
But although the evidence is very preliminary, there are some strong indicators that growth hormone may not only extend the quality of life but the quantity as well. At present, the only practical way to test a life span intervention is to use a short lived animal species, preferably a mammal, which bears some resemblance to the human situation. In 1990, two researchers at North Dakota State University attempted to answer this question. They gave IGF-1 infections to a group to twenty-six mice that were seventeen months old, or more that three-quarters through their average life span of twenty-one months. The animals were showing signs of aging and members of the original colony of sixty mice had started to die off.
A control group of twenty-six mice that were the same age received placebo infections of saline solution. After thirteen weeks, sixteen animals, or 61 percent in the control group has died, while all but two, or 97 percent, of the growth hormone treated animal were still alive! In other words, the vast majority of the treated animals had already lived longer than the life expectancy for that species.
At this point in the experiment, the researchers sacrificed four animals from each group to look at their immune function. The remaining mice were kept alive untreated for another four weeks. During this time, the control group had completely died out, while only one mouse from the hormone treated group died. The scientist resumed human growth hormone therapy for another six weeks until they had exhausted their supply of growth hormone and were forced to end the experiment. Sacrificing all the animals. Only one mouse died during this period of the study. This means that out of the original group of 26 treated mice, only four mice died of natural causes.
This left 18 mice who were still alive 22 weeks after treatment had begun, while the entire control group had perished entirely after 16 weeks. The results, say the researchers, suggest that long term growth hormone therapy prolongs the average life expectancy of the hormone treated mice significantly.
