Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Category: History
A talk at The Royal Institution.
Does your dog really love you? Can dogs understand human emotions? And what’s the history of dogs and scientific research?
Jules Howard, author of the book Wonderdog, speaks for nearly an hour about the cognition of these incredible animals.
P.S. Jeannie is certain I have posted something similar not too long ago. If that is the case then my apologies.
A fascinating article in The Conversation.
I was very short of time yesterday so my apologies for going straight into this post. Plus, it is a post that talks about the learning process for dogs and, as such, looking more thoroughly will discover more material.
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Canines go to college in this class that seeks to give shelter dogs a fresh start
Associate Professor of Psychology, Saint Francis University
Published August 24th, 2023
What prompted the idea for the course?
When I was growing up, my love for animals led me to volunteer at animal shelters. But it wasn’t until I started teaching psychology that I found another way to support the well-being of shelter animals. During my first year of teaching a psychology course about learning, I realized that the course’s content could be used to train shelter dogs.
Since some shelter dogs display problematic behaviors, such as fearfulness, destructiveness and disobedience, they are less likely to get adopted. I wanted my students to use their knowledge, passion and care to train shelter dogs and improve their chances of finding a permanent home.
What does the course explore?
The course teaches students how to apply behavioral analysis and modification techniques toward the training of shelter dogs. Students work with dogs on learning to follow cues such as “sit,” “down,” “stay” and “come”; perform tricks such as “high-five,” and “roll over”; and complete agility courses made of tunnels, hoops and weaving poles.
The course also explores the emotional, psychological and physiological benefits of the human-animal bond, such as reduced stress, by integrating the dogs into educational and therapeutic environments. For instance, the students train the dogs to sit by them calmly for the entire duration of a lecture. This skill may be important for future adopters who work within an educational setting or need their dog to accompany them into the classroom.
The students also train the dogs to visit our clinical educational facility, the Experiential Learning Commons, which was built as a mock hospital. Within our simulated emergency room, intensive care room, patient room, maternity room and exam room, students train the dogs to walk next to simulated patients’ wheelchairs, sit by patients’ beds and provide them with affectionate and nurturing companionship.
Finally, the course instructs students on how to apply for grants for nonprofits, with the idea being to secure funding to support animal shelters.
Why is this course relevant now?
This course creates a collaborative and reciprocal partnership between a university and the community in which it is located. Focusing on the care for shelter dogs, it allows for faculty, students and a shelter’s staff and volunteers to exchange knowledge and resources. As such, it uses an instructional approach known as community engagement.
What’s a critical lesson from the course?
Working alongside our animal shelter community partners, and under the direction of my co-instructor, talented dog trainer Megan Mills, students learn that they can make a true and visible impact on society, one dog at a time.
What materials does the course feature?
Michael Domjan’s “The Principles of Learning and Behavior”
Cynthia K. Chandler’s “Animal-Assisted Therapy in Counseling”
“Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy,” edited by Aubrey H. Fine
What will the course prepare students to do?
Students will learn to use psychological learning principles to work effectively with shelter dogs – and this knowledge can later be translated to other domains of their lives. I believe that by training shelter dogs and learning to write nonprofit grant proposals, my students will develop into ethical and responsible citizens – both locally and globally.
Shlomit Flaisher-Grinberg, Associate Professor of Psychology, Saint Francis University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Further to my introduction I want to explore the links in the article for I’m sure they have a great deal more to say about dogs.
The more that we explore what dogs mean to us humans the more I find out about the incredible qualities of Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris.
Jesse Anderson’s dog.
Back in mid-May I received an email from Jess. It said:
Paul, as of about two years ago I’ve been writing my life story. I wanted my kids and grandkids to know what it was like when I was a kid. Some of my best memories are times spent with my dogs. This is one story I wrote about Koko’s last hunt.
It was a lovely story and I have no idea why I have left it so long before publishing it. But here it is!
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Koko
By Jesse Anderson
When I was just a young boy, I was gifted a puppy that was a Chesapeake/setter cross. Because of his chocolate color, we called him Koko. Koko was my constant companion thru everything I did as a kid. When I was old enough to hunt, he was my bird dog, and a good one he was.
My family was a very poor one. Our house was about 750 square feet, and there were eight of us living in it. There were four boys in the same bed, and there was still room for Koko.
It just got too crowded in that little house, so in my junior year I went to the old barn and took over one of the calf sheds, turning it into my very own bedroom. It would be my very first one! I made a bunk, covered it with straw, swept the dirt floor and put an old rug on it, then hung some of my paintings on the walls. It was far from perfect, but Koko and I thought it was incredible. He slept, with me, inside my sleeping bag on the straw. No one was allowed inside unless they were invited.
With six kids and a disabled father, it took a lot to keep things going. We all worked in the fields, even at a very young age. When hunting seasons started, it was my que to get out there and put as much game in the freezer as I could. My mother had worked for a meat packing company, and when they bought new equipment, they gave us the old freezer. I tried my best to keep it full.
Koko and I were tied at the hip. When we hunted, even with others, he was always aware to my presence. Anytime a bird was shot, it was always brought back to me. I could control him with nothing more than a hand signal. Some of the best times I had, as a kid, were out in the field with that dog. He was my very best friend.
As he grew older his hips started going bad. One morning I got my shotgun out and headed for the car. He could hardly get up, whimpering as he tried. I decided to leave him behind, thinking it would be the best for him. I was very wrong.
For the entire day he sat in front of the window, waiting for my return. When I got home, I walked into the house with my days harvest, only to be met at the door by Koko. He stood very still, staring me right in the eyes, for a long time. Then he just turned and walked away. He said everything he wanted to say. I just felt terrible. I had let my best friend down. After that, if I knew his hips were bad that day, and some were worse than others, I would sneak out the back bedroom window before I left.
I went into the Army shortly after I graduated from High School. After basic, I came home, bringing one of the recruits from Guam with me. He got to see this wonderful dog in action. Again, I had to leave, this time being stationed in Alabama. A year later the Army thought I should be in Germany. I, once again, came home on leave. By this time, old Koko was completely deaf, couldn’t smell a skunk, and his eyes were failing. It really hurts me to see my dogs get old. That’s the only real fault they have.
I decided that I had to take him out for the last big hunt. I owed him that much after all the years we had together. I had to pick him up and put him in the car, but he knew we were going hunting, and the look on his face was incredible! Don’t tell me that a dog can’t smile. That smile said it all!
When we got into the field, he knew he couldn’t hear, and after every ten or twelve steps, he would look at me to see if he was doing what I wanted. A big rooster pheasant flew up and I shot it. Koko didn’t even hear the shot. When he looked up to get directions, I guided him right to the bird. You have never seen a happier dog in your life. He laid that bird at my feet and looked me right in the eye and had the hugest smile on his face. I knelt down to him and cried such happy tears, hugging him the entire time. I was so happy that I was able to bring such joy into that old man’s life.
That would be the last time I would see him. Germany kept me for another year and a half, and his age caught up to him. I was notified thru the mail that he had died. The vision that has stuck with me my entire life, and now I’m 76, is the look on that old dog’s face the day we had his last hunt. It could not have been planned better. JESS
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What a beautiful account of Koko.
Jesse is just a couple of years younger than me so I resonate with him. I still miss Pharaoh, my German-Shepherd, and he died in 2017. Dogs are incredible companions.
Jesse has his own website that is here. I share with you a little bit about Jesse from his website.
Born in Nampa, Idaho, Jesse Anderson has been doing artwork most of his life. There wasn’t a time, as a youngster, that he wasn’t sitting and drawing whatever his fancy was at the moment. He was given his first set of oil paints at age 11. In High School he was encouraged by his art teacher, Dorothy Long, to pursue art as far as he could go and they stayed in touch for the next 40 years. After high school, Jess went directly into the U.S. Army. Upon learning of his art abilities, Uncle Sam saw fit to put him in charge of the Battalion Training-Aids Department (aka, the art department). Following his discharge in 1968, he enrolled in Boise State College in hopes of getting a degree in Commercial Art. The College would only allow ONE art class the first year, and it was beginning drawing. This was not what he was looking for as the next step in his art career so he dropped out. Before leaving college, he met Cheryl, his wife of over 50 years. With Cheryl working as a bookkeeper to keep the bills paid, he enrolled in the “Advertising Art School” in Portland, Oregon where he graduated top of his class. He started his own commercial art business and his dream of making a living as a full time artist was in motion.
Perfect!
It is a rare family that is not touched by cancer.
My father died at the age of 55 from lung cancer. That was December 20th, 1956 and while he did not smoke he did have his regular cigar every Sunday afternoon. I suspect he may have smoked from time to time in his office. It was a tragic time for me and Elizabeth, my younger sister. Speaking personally I did not fully understand the personal implications until shortly after the 50th anniversary of his death: December 20th, 2006.
Tony is a keen blogger and he writes under the blog name of Wellness Secrets of a SuperAger. His latest post is 5 Things You Can Do to Prevent Cancer. I have pleasure in republishing Tony’s post below. Please read it!
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5 Things You Can Do to Prevent Cancer.
We all know that steering clear of tobacco is a crucial way to reduce your cancer risk. But there’s a lot more than you can do.
RUSH family physician Joyce Chen, MD, and clinical dietitian Kristin Gustashaw explain how we can make better choices to protect our health.
You may not realize it, but aging is a risk factor for cancer. The longer your cells are turning over, the more likely miscopying can happen. Though we can’t control aging, we can control the speed at which we age. “We know, in theory, we can kind of age ourselves faster or slower, depending on how much insult we give our bodies,” Gustashaw says.
Chen explains: “Lifestyle is key. So when you are concerned about cancer from external forces, it’s important to realize that you can actually do something about a lot of them.”
Here are some key lifestyle changes you can make to reduce your cancer risk.
Choosing not to use tobacco is one of the most effective forms of cancer prevention.
And it’s not just lung cancer that’s preventable either. By not smoking you can also prevent the following types of cancer:
Traditional cigarettes pose the biggest threat. But e-cigarettes, or vaping, also pose a risk of cancer. With cigarette smoking, the nicotine and tar can cause cancer. With e-cigarettes, you’re still getting the nicotine in your lungs but without the smoke and tar of regular cigarettes.
Since e-cigarettes are still relatively new to the market, the long-term health effects remain unknown, but they’re still potentially problematic.
“The vapor you’re breathing in has chemicals and particles, especially the flavored ones, that can damage or scar your lungs,” Chen says.
“It’s one of those lifestyle factors that I tell my patients, ‘We’ll do all we can as a provider to help you quit or at least cut down, but if you haven’t started, don’t start.’ Because once you start, it’s hard to stop; it’s an addiction.”
With alcohol, the main cancer mechanism is how it breaks down in our bodies. The ethanol in alcohol is metabolized through acetaldehyde, which is a poisonous byproduct and a known carcinogen.
After you drink, the alcohol is metabolized as acetaldehyde. It doesn’t stay around in our bodies for long because it gets further broken down into less toxic compounds, and then it’s eliminated in our bodies. That means the more you drink, the more you increase your risk for developing cancer.
“Acetaldehyde is a carcinogen that causes the cancer,” says Chen. “So when you’re drinking large quantities of alcohol then you’re going to build up acetaldehyde. And that buildup can accumulate in your saliva, your stomach acid and your GI tract.”
Alcohol also has a solvent property, which means it allows other carcinogens to get into our cells and wreak havoc. So, for example, if you smoke and drink alcohol together, alcohol’s solvent property helps harmful chemicals in tobacco get into the cells that line your mouth, throat and esophagus — putting you at a higher risk of developing oral cancers.
Nutrient absorption, specifically the vitamin folate, can also be affected by alcohol. Folate tells our body to stay healthy so alcohol inhibits its ability to pass that message on to the body.
“Alcohol also acts as an irritant to our bodies, specifically to the cells lining our mouths, throats and stomach cells,” says Chen. “When exposed to that irritant, your cells try to repair themselves, which could lead to your cells making mistakes and mutations that lead to cancer.”
Maintaining a healthy weight is another opportunity to reduce your risk for cancer. That means your diet plays a large role in cancer prevention.
A recent study in The Lancet Public Health revealed that younger adults (ages 25 to 49) in the U.S. are at an increased risk of developing obesity-related cancers. The study also reports that because of the obesity epidemic over the past 40 years, due in part to poor diet, younger generations have weight issues for a longer period of time than previous generations. This indicates that in the future, cancer may be more prevalent in this generation as they age into older adults.
According to Chen, carrying excessive weight is associated with increased risk for the following cancers:
In addition to a healthy diet, exercise can also help you maintain a healthy weight and keep cancer at bay.
In fact, a recent study published in Cell Metabolism found that exercise can reduce your chances of getting cancer by improving your immune system, lowering the risk of recurrence and slows cancer progression by reducing tumor growth and lessening the harsh effects of cancer treatment on the body.
Reducing your stress is key if you’re looking at trying to avoid or outlive cancer.
Yet another lifestyle factor you can control that prevents cancer is limiting ultraviolet (UV) ray exposure. Whether it’s natural UV exposure from the sun or artificial UV exposure from tanning beds, both put you at risk for skin cancer. UV exposure causes gene mutations that can cause cancer.
A tan is a result of your skin cells being damaged. There are also spray tans and lotions that don’t give you exposure to UV radiation but have other concerns. There’s a color additive in the spray tans and lotions called dihydroxyacetone or DHA. While DHA is FDA-approved for external application to the skin, with spray tans you could be inhaling some of that ingredient.
The FDA states that it shouldn’t be inhaled or applied to areas that are covered by mucous membranes. Mucous membranes are your lips, mouth, your nose, around your eyes and your face.
“Protect yourself in a spray booth by using eye protection like goggles, nose plugs or put lip balm on beforehand and try to keep your mouth closed to not inhale that ingredient. That would be a safer way to get that sun-kissed glow that everyone wants,” Chen says.
Also, don’t be fooled into thinking that a spray tan offers protection against the sun. Just because you think you’re getting a so-called base tan, you still have to use sunscreen.
With UV exposure, certain tanning salons might propose that it’s the UV rays that help your body get vitamin D. But UVB are the UV rays needed for the body to produce vitamin D.
“The majority of tanning bulbs are actually UVA rays so you’re not getting vitamin D from a tanning bed,” Chen explains.
Like alcohol, UV exposure also builds up over time. So, for example, if you start young and go frequently to tanning beds, that will put you more at risk for skin cancer.
Gel manicures can also pose UV exposure risk that increases your likelihood for cancer. UVA rays are used to dry or set the polish. But once again, it’s dose cumulative. If you regularly get gel manicures and you started in your teenage years, you may have a greater risk for developing cancer because you’re exposing your hands to UVA rays more often.
Chen recommends giving your nails a break by not getting this type of manicure week after week.
One of the best things you can do to help prevent cancer and other diseases is to see your primary care physician regularly.
“Try to prevent cancer by getting your routine care, your routine immunizations and your proper screenings,” says Chen. “It’s great that you are healthy, but preventive care/well visits are important because a lot of conditions, especially cancer, can be treated properly if we catch it early.”
All in all, your best strategy for cancer prevention, particularly for the external agents you can control, is to limit your exposures — or avoid them, if at all possible.
Gustashaw also cites the importance of stress management. “How you manage stress is associated with longevity. Stress itself is not directly associated with an increased risk of cancer, however, stress can often lead to unhealthy habits such as making unhealthy food choices, overeating, smoking, drinking and not exercising,” she says.
Gustashaw adds: “Reducing your stress is key if you’re looking at trying to avoid or outlive cancer and to live longer and healthier overall.”
Plenty of other opportunities for cancer prevention behavior also exist. A study from JAMA Internal Medicine found that participants with the following four lifestyle factors had approximately one-third less risk of developing cancer compared to those who had none of those lifestyle factors:
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So there we are. It is a long post but so important to us all.
Hoping to be back to normal!
July 20th was my last post. Here are some of my own photographs taken while Maija, my daughter, Marius, her husband, and Morten, their son were with us. That was after Alex, my son, had come to see us in June.
Here is Morten, who spent hours caressing and fondling Brandy, our largest dog.
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His other passion was exploring for gold. We have Bummer Creek flowing through the property. It is called ‘Bummer’ because as the locals would have it there is no gold to be found. But that didn’t stop Morten spending time looking for gold!
And this is Maija (photo slightly out of focus).
The next photo shows Maija and Morten strolling along the creek.
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Above a shot showing Marius and Morten looking for the illusive metal!
I close with the Morten and Marius hoping to see a trace of gold in the gold-pan, and Maija looking on.
My next post will be on Tuesday.
An essay from The Conversation aimed at our youngsters but highly relevant to us all!
I sense we are living in very strange times. As an extract from recent essay from George Monbiot said:
Above all, our ability to adapt to massive change depends on what practitioners call “metacognition” and “meta-skills”. Metacognition means thinking about thinking. In a brilliant essay for the Journal of Academic Perspectives, Natasha Robson argues that while metacognition is implicit in current teaching – “show your working”, “justify your arguments” – it should be explicit and sustained. Schoolchildren should be taught to understand how thinking works, from neuroscience to cultural conditioning; how to observe and interrogate their thought processes; and how and why they might become vulnerable to disinformation and exploitation. Self-awareness could turn out to be the most important topic of all.
Thinking about Thinking
That is why I want to share a recent post from The Conversation with you.
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Carlton Basmajian, Iowa State University
If humans went extinct, what would the Earth look like one year later? – Essie, age 11, Michigan
Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if everyone suddenly disappeared?
What would happen to all our stuff? What would happen to our houses, our schools, our neighborhoods, our cities? Who would feed the dog? Who would cut the grass? Although it’s a common theme in movies, TV shows and books, the end of humanity is still a strange thing to think about.
But as an associate professor of urban design – that is, someone who helps towns and cities plan what their communities will look like – it’s sometimes my job to think about prospects like this.
If humans just disappeared from the world, and you could come back to Earth to see what had happened one year later, the first thing you’d notice wouldn’t be with your eyes.
It would be with your ears.
The world would be quiet. And you would realize how much noise people make. Our buildings are noisy. Our cars are noisy. Our sky is noisy. All of that noise would stop.
You’d notice the weather. After a year without people, the sky would be bluer, the air clearer. The wind and the rain would scrub clean the surface of the Earth; all the smog and dust that humans make would be gone.
Imagine that first year, when your house would sit unbothered by anyone.
Go inside your house – and hope you’re not thirsty, because no water would be in your faucets. Water systems require constant pumping. If no one’s at the public water supply to manage the machines that pump water, then there’s no water.
But the water that was in the pipes when everyone disappeared would still be there when the first winter came – so on the first cold snap, the frigid air would freeze the water in the pipes and burst them.
There would be no electricity. Power plants would stop working because no one would monitor them and maintain a supply of fuel. So your house would be dark, with no lights, TV, phones or computers.
Your house would be dusty. Actually, there’s dust in the air all the time, but we don’t notice it because our air conditioning systems and heaters blow air around. And as you move through the rooms in your house, you keep dust on the move too. But once all that stops, the air inside your house would be still and the dust would settle all over.
The grass in your yard would grow – and grow and grow until it got so long and floppy it would stop growing. New weeds would appear, and they would be everywhere.
Lots of plants that you’ve never seen before would take root in your yard. Every time a tree drops a seed, a little sapling might grow. No one would be there to pull it out or cut it down.
You’d notice a lot more bugs buzzing around. Remember, people tend to do everything they can to get rid of bugs. They spray the air and the ground with bug spray. They remove bug habitat. They put screens on the windows. And if that doesn’t work, they swat them.
Without people doing all these things, the bugs would come back. They would have free rein of the world again.
In your neighborhood, critters would wander around, looking and wondering.
First the little ones: mice, groundhogs, raccoons, skunks, foxes and beavers. That last one might surprise you, but North America was once rich with beavers.
Bigger animals would come later – deer, coyotes and the occasional bear. Not in the first year, maybe, but eventually.
With no electric lights, the rhythm of the natural world would return. The only light would be from the Sun, the Moon and the stars. The night critters would feel good they got their dark sky back.
Fires would happen frequently. Lightning might strike a tree or a field and set brush on fire, or hit the houses and buildings. Without people to put them out, those fires would keeping going until they burned themselves out.
After just one year, the concrete stuff – roads, highways, bridges and buildings – would look about the same.
Come back, say, a decade later, and cracks in them would have appeared, with little plants wiggling up through them. This happens because the Earth is constantly moving. With this motion comes pressure, and with this pressure come cracks. Eventually, the roads would crack so much they would look like broken glass, and even trees would grow through them.
Bridges with metal legs would slowly rust. The beams and bolts that hold the bridges up would rust too. But the big concrete bridges, and the interstate highways, also concrete, would last for centuries.
The dams and levees that people have built on the rivers and streams of the world would erode. Farms would fall back to nature. The plants we eat would begin to disappear. Not much corn or potatoes or tomatoes anymore.
Farm animals would be easy prey for bears, coyotes, wolves and panthers. And pets? The cats would go feral – that is, they would become wild, though many would be preyed upon by larger animals. Most dogs wouldn’t survive, either.
An asteroid hit and a solar flare are two of the ways the world could end.
In a thousand years, the world you remember would still be vaguely recognizable. Some things would remain; it would depend on the materials they were made of, the climate they’re in, and just plain luck. An apartment building here, a movie theater there, or a crumbling shopping mall would stand as monuments to a lost civilization. The Roman Empire collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, yet you can see some remnants even today.
If nothing else, humans’ suddenly vanishing from the world would reveal something about the way we treated the Earth. It would also show us that the world we have today can’t survive without us and that we can’t survive if we don’t care for it. To keep it working, civilization – like anything else – requires constant upkeep.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Carlton Basmajian, Associate Professor of Community and Regional Planning, Urban Design, Iowa State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Returning to that George Monbiot essay and his closing paragraphs:
Meta-skills are the overarching aptitudes – such as self-development, social intelligence, openness, resilience and creativity – that help us acquire the new competencies that sudden change demands. Like metacognition, meta-skills can be taught. Unfortunately, some public bodies are trapped in the bleak and narrow instrumentalism we need to transcend. For example, after identifying empathy as a crucial meta-skill, a manual by Skills Development Scotland reports that: “Empathy has been identified as a key differentiator for business success, with companies such as Facebook, Google and Unilever being recognised as excelling in this area.” I’ve seldom read a more depressing sentence.
Schooling alone will not be enough to lead us out of the many crises and disasters we now face. Those who are adult today must take responsibility for confronting them. But it should at least lend us a torch.
Thinking about Thinking
We live in a very strange world now. One truly wonders how those who are younger will respond to the demands.
One of the few things that is common to us all!
Death!
Hate to say it but it is the great leveller. Some believe in some form of afterlife but not me (nor Jeannie). But how we all get to that final state is far from being simple or straightforward.
That’s why I am republishing, with permission, a recent article in The Conversation.
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Ellen Quarles, University of Michigan
Assistant Professor in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.
You likely know someone who seems to age slowly, appearing years younger than their birth date suggests. And you likely have seen the opposite – someone whose body and mind seem much more ravaged by time than others. Why do some people seem to glide though their golden years and others physiologically struggle in midlife?
I have worked in the field of aging for all of my scientific career, and I teach the cellular and molecular biology of aging at the University of Michigan. Aging research doesn’t tend to be about finding the one cure that fixes all that may ail you in old age. Instead, the last decade or two of work points to aging as a multi-factoral process – and no single intervention can stop it all.
There are many different definitions of aging, but scientists generally agree upon some common features: Aging is a time-dependent process that results in increased vulnerability to disease, injury and death. This process is both intrinsic, when your own body causes new problems, and extrinsic, when environmental insults damage your tissues.
Your body is comprised of trillions of cells, and each one is not only responsible for one or more functions specific to the tissue it resides in, but must also do all the work of keeping itself alive. This includes metabolizing nutrients, getting rid of waste, exchanging signals with other cells and adapting to stress.
The trouble is that every single process and component in each of your cells can be interrupted or damaged. So your cells spend a lot of energy each day preventing, recognizing and fixing those problems.
Aging can be thought of as a gradual loss of the ability to maintain homeostasis – a state of balance among body systems – either by not being able to prevent or recognize damage and poor function, or by not adequately or rapidly fixing problems as they occur. Aging results from a combination of these issues. Decades of research has shown that nearly every cellular process becomes more impaired with age.
Most research on cellular aging focuses on studying how DNA and proteins change with age. Scientists are also beginning to address the potential roles many other important biomolecules in the cell play in aging as well.
One of the cell’s chief jobs is to maintain its DNA – the instruction manual a cell’s machinery reads to produce specific proteins. DNA maintenance involves protecting against, and accurately repairing, damage to genetic material and the molecules binding to it.
Proteins are the workers of the cell. They perform chemical reactions, provide structural support, send and receive messages, hold and release energy, and much more. If the protein is damaged, the cell uses mechanisms involving special proteins that either attempt to fix the broken protein or send it off for recycling. Similar mechanisms tuck proteins out of the way or destroy them when they are no longer needed. That way, its components can be used later to build a new protein.
The cross-talk between the components inside cells, cells as a whole, organs and the environment is a complex and ever-changing network of information.
When all processes involved in creating and maintaining DNA and protein function are working normally, the different compartments within a cell serving specialized roles – called organelles – can maintain the cell’s health and function. For an organ to work well, the majority of the cells that make it up need to function well. And for a whole organism to survive and thrive, all of the organs in its body need to work well.
Aging can lead to dysfunction at any of these levels, from the sub-cellular to the organismal. Maybe a gene encoding an important protein for DNA repair has become damaged, and now all of the other genes in the cell are more likely to be repaired incorrectly. Or perhaps the cell’s recycling systems are unable to degrade dysfunctional components anymore. Even the communication systems between cells, tissues and organs can become compromised, leaving the organism less able to respond to changes within the body.
Random chance can lead to a growing burden of molecular and cellular damage that is progressively less well-repaired over time. As this damage accumulates, the systems that are meant to fix it are accruing damage as well. This leads to a cycle of increasing wear and tear as cells age.
The interdependence of life’s cellular processes is a double-edged sword: Sufficiently damage one process, and all the other processes that interact with or depend on it become impaired. However, this interconnection also means that bolstering one highly interconnected process could improve related functions as well. In fact, this is how the most successful anti-aging interventions work.
There is no silver bullet to stop aging, but certain interventions do seem to slow aging in the laboratory. While there are ongoing clinical trials investigating different approaches in people, most existing data comes from animals like nematodes, flies, mice and nonhuman primates.
One of the best studied interventions is caloric restriction, which involves reducing the amount of calories an animal would normally eat without depriving them of necessary nutrients. An FDA-approved drug used in organ transplantation and some cancer treatments called rapamycin seems to work by using at least a subset of the same pathways that calorie restriction activates in the cell. Both affect signaling hubs that direct the cell to preserve the biomolecules it has rather than growing and building new biomolecules. Over time, this cellular version of “reduce, reuse, recycle” removes damaged components and leaves behind a higher proportion of functional components.
Other interventions include changing the levels of certain metabolites, selectively destroying senescent cells that have stopped dividing, changing the gut microbiome and behavioral modifications.
What all of these interventions have in common is that they affect core processes that are critical for cellular homeostasis, often become dysregulated or dysfunctional with age and are connected to other cellular maintenance systems. Often, these processes are the central drivers for mechanisms that protect DNA and proteins in the body.
There is no single cause of aging. No two people age the same way, and indeed, neither do any two cells. There are countless ways for your basic biology to go wrong over time, and these add up to create a unique network of aging-related factors for each person that make finding a one-size-fits-all anti-aging treatment extremely challenging.
However, researching interventions that target multiple important cellular processes simultaneously could help improve and maintain health for a greater portion of life. These advances could help people live longer lives in the process.
Ellen Quarles, Assistant Professor in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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I was born in London towards the tail end of 1944. I was the product of an affair between my father and mother. I came before my younger sister, Elizabeth, born in 1948. Then my father died on December 20th, 1956 and eventually my mother remarried my stepfather but he died in 1979 and then my mother died in 2016.
Elizabeth is still alive and so is my step-sister, Eleanor. I also had two half-sisters, Rhona, Corinne, born of my father and his first wife, but they are long dead.
But my family still continue and with a bit of luck I have a few years left; I shall be 80 in November, 2024.
When the music stops it will have been a fabulous life!
And speaking of music:
Thank you, Alan!
Photos taken by Alex Handover on his recent trip to Merlin.
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There you go, folks, just nine photographs but what a keepsake of Alex’s visit.
Jean had another fall yesterday!
You all know that Jeannie has Parkinson’s Disease but it is not without its shocks.
Yesterday, at about 3.30 am there was a crash in the kitchen. Jeannie had tripped up and fallen down. She was laying very awkwardly all crumpled up. I came into the kitchen immediately, saw her on the floor, saw that she was in agony but couldn’t lift her up without hurting her more. So I called an ambulance.
It came from Asante Hospital in Grants Pass.
I followed the ambulance in our car shortly thereafter. Jean was admitted to the emergency room.
After Jean had been given an x-ray and pain meds later on she was transferred to Room 350 in the main hospital. I was told that she needed surgery on her right hip, maybe a hip replacement, and she will be in overnight.
I had returned home before noon to let the dogs out and to have some breakfast! Then I went back to Jeannie.
I stayed with her until nearly 3pm. Jean was due to have surgery at 4:45 pm.
What the longer term implications are I do not know. I sincerely hope the surgery is successful and Jean returns home.
Another day with this terrible disease!
P.S. In the early evening it felt so lonely. I cuddled the three dogs many times but it still felt as though my world had been turned upside down. I am writing this before 6pm so do not even want to think of being on my own in bed. The dogs are acutely aware of Jean’s absence and are doing their best to comfort me. Wonderful Brandy, Oliver and Cleo!
What a wonderful relationship it has been.
(This post was drafted back in 2020 and, for whatever reason, never got published, until today! Pharaoh, of course, is no longer with us)
Years ago if I was ever to own a dog, it had to be one breed and one breed only: a German Shepherd Dog.
The reason for this was that back in 1955 my father and mother looked after a German Shepherd dog called Boy. Boy belonged to a lovely couple, Maurice and Marie Davies. They were in the process of taking over a new Public House (Pub); the Jack & Jill in Coulsdon, Surrey. My father had been the architect of the Jack & Jill.
As publicans have a tough time taking holidays, it was agreed that the move from their old pub to the Jack & Jill represented a brilliant opportunity to have that vacation. My parents offered to look after Boy for the 6 weeks that Maurice and Marie were going to be away.
Boy was the most gentle loveable dog one could imagine and I quickly became devoted to him; I was 11 years old at the time. So when years later it seemed the right time to have a dog, there was no question about the breed. Boy’s memory lived on all those years, and, as this post reveals, still does!
Pharaoh was born June 3rd, 2003 at Jutone Kennels up at Bovey Tracy, Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor. As the home page of the Jutone website pronounces,
The Kennel was established in 1964 and it has always been the aim to breed the best German Shepherd Dogs for type and temperament. To this end the very finest German bloodlines are used to continue a modern breeding programme.
and elsewhere on that website one learns:
Jutone was established by Tony Trant who was joined by Sandra Tucker in 1976. Sandra continues to run Jutone since Tony passed away in 2004. Both Tony and Sandra qualified as Championship Show judges and Sandra continues to judge regularly. Sandra is the Secretary and a Life Member of the German Shepherd Dog Club of Devon.
Turning to Pharaoh, here are a few more pictures over the years.
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The next picture of Pharaoh requires a little background information.
For many years I was a private pilot and in later days had the pleasure, the huge pleasure I must say, of flying a Piper Super Cub which is a group-owned aircraft based at Watchford Farm in South Devon. The aircraft, a Piper PA-18-135 Super Cub, was originally supplied to the Dutch Air Force in 1954 and was permitted by the British CAA to carry her original military markings including her Dutch military registration, R-151, although there was a British registration, G-BIYR, ‘underneath’ the Dutch R-151. (I wrote more fully about the history of the aircraft on Learning from Dogs back in August 2009.)
Anyway, every time I went to the airfield with Pharaoh he always tried to climb into the cockpit. So one day, I decided to see if he would sit in the rear seat and be strapped in. Absolutely no problem with that!
My idea had been to fly a gentle circuit in the aircraft. First I did some taxying around the large grass airfield that is Watchford to see how Pharaoh reacted. He was perfectly behaved.
Then I thought long and hard about taking Pharaoh for a flight. In the Cub there is no autopilot so if Pharaoh struggled, or worse, it would have been almost impossible to fly the aircraft and cope with Pharaoh. So, in the end, I abandoned taking him for a flight. The chances are that it would have been fine. But if something had gone wrong, the outcome just didn’t bear thinking about.
So we ended up motoring for 30 minutes all around the airfield which, as the next picture shows, met with doggie approval. The date was July 2006.
What a dear dog he has been over all the years!
As if to reinforce the fabulous dog he still is, yesterday it was almost as though he knew he had to show how youthful he still was.
Because, when I took his group of dogs out around 7.30am armed with my camera, Pharaoh was brimming over with energy.
First up was a swim in the pond.
Then in a way he has not done before, Pharaoh wanted to play ‘King of my Island’, which is in the middle of the pond.
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Then a while later, when back on dry land, so to speak, it was time to dry off in the morning sunshine.
Long may he have an enjoyable and comfortable life.
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This was written quite obviously before Pharaoh died. He is still on the home page of this blog.
Beloved Pharaoh. Born: June 3rd., 2003 – Died: June 19th., 2017. A very special dog that will never be forgotten.
Learning from Dogs 