This is obviously unsustainable for any long term effect, and there are wild issues to consider with regards to the morality of doing this with human beings, but should the science advance to the point where we can grow genetically compatible functional organs, what harm would there be in having young custom grown organs attached to you, offloading everything that can be offloaded (pumping blood, secreting hormones and fresh stem cells, taking in extra oxygen, filtering out wastes, all of the things that your body has to work to do on its own)?ĭo you think we would live longer, healthier, younger and more beautiful lives or would we become monsters permanently attached to backpacks stuffed to the brim with biological horror? We know, for instance, that connecting the circulatory system from an older animal to a younger one will cause the body of the younger animal to spend energy healing the cellular damage of the older one and can cause the older one to become younger by the markers we measure cellular age. That makes me wonder how much of the physiological lifecycle we can offload the external processes and how much effect would that have on a human being? My advice, however, is to not take it for antiaging until the science is done on humans, specially at high doses. This appears to be due to a misunderstanding of why serum taurine levels are elevated during cardiac failure (which is from taurine leakage from cells).' There is a notion that taurine causes heart damage, which is currently unsupported (and contrary to a fair bit of evidence). Higher doses have been tested and well tolerated, but not enough evidence is available to suggest lifelong safety of said doses. 'The observed safety limit, the highest dose for which one can be relatively assured that no side effects will occur over a lifetime, has been suggested to be 3g of taurine in supplemental form (in addition to food intake) a day. Based on the available evidence, it’s suggested that 3 grams per day can be consumed indefinitely without risk of side effects.' The highest dose used in a human trial was 10 grams per day for 6 months, and the longest human trial was 12 months and used a dose of 0.5–1.5 grams per day. 'Serious adverse effects have not been reported with taurine supplementation. However, there will not be one optimal treatment regimen for all mice or for all humans.īy the way: A 16 oz can of Monster contains 2 grams of taurine. Given much previous work my guess, and tacitly, those of the authors, is that taurine supplementation will be beneficial for many genotypes of mice and even humans.

Having pointed out the downside of this work, I am glad to see this study and will treat it as a promising pilot. In this case the authors did extend to other models to support their claims but these supplementary components do not test longevity directly.

N = 1 studies are just barely worth discussing in HN with respect to humans. I wish high profile journals-Science and Nature and Cell-would demand that submissions include at least several genotypes of mice. A robust finding like that would impress me so much more. My hope is that taurine supplementation would work just as well using 120 UM-HET3 mice. Like humans, the UM-HET3 mice are genetically diverse (they segregate for about 11.5 million sequence variants). Taurine may be effective at extending lifespan and healthspan of C57BL/6J mice but will it work as well using genetically diverse mice such as the UM-HET3 mice? Imagine a clinical study of longevity using 120 clones of you or me. Solid study, but the core results are based on a single genotype of mouse - C57BL/6J.

Taurine deep sleep