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
Shelter animals often display problematic behaviors. Can they be retrained? Shlomit Flaisher-Grinberg
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.
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.
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.
It is Wednesday morning in Southern Oregon and already I am having to think about the post for tomorrow. Not that this is a problem it is just one more thing that I want to do. Plus we are in the middle of a local heat wave with temperatures expected to be well above 100 degrees F and possibly 109 deg F (42.8 deg C.).
So I am turning to Treehugger for a dog post and hoping that I shall be able to share it with you all.
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Dogs Could Revolutionize the Sustainability of Future Pandemic Testing
Scent dogs are quicker, more effective, and create less healthcare waste than conventional COVID tests.
One of the more frustrating roadblocks in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic was the difficulty in getting quick, accurate test results. Sometimes, results for PCR tests took up to two weeks, rendering their diagnosis useless for planning isolation scenarios. Meanwhile, rapid tests still oftentimes provide a false negative if taken too soon after infection. When I had COVID, I was four days into symptoms before I got a positive at-home test—I’ve heard many people recount similar stories.
The testing we have is certainly better than nothing, but it leaves a lot to be desired. If only there were a better way, say, using something with remarkable innate sensitivity. Like, dogs. Far-fetched? Not at all.
A review of recent research concluded that scent dogs may represent a cheaper, faster, and more effective way to detect COVID-19 and could be a key tool in future pandemics. This could be a game-changer for sustainability as well, eliminating the enormous amount of waste that comes with billions of testing kits.
The review, published in De Gruyter’s Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, found that scent dogs are as effective, or even more effective, than conventional COVID-19 tests such as PCR tests.
Most of us know that dogs have a remarkable sense of smell; they sniff out drugs and explosives and have even successfully identified patients with certain cancers, Parkinson’s, and diabetes. They have up to 300 million olfactory cells, compared to 5 or 6 million in humans. And they use one-third of their brains to process scent information—humans just use 5%.
Professor Tommy Dickey of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Heather Junqueira of BioScent Detection Dogs analyzed 29 different studies in which dogs detected COVID-19. “The studies were performed using over 31,000 samples by over 400 scientists from more than 30 countries using 19 different dog breeds. In some studies, the scent dogs sniffed people directly, sometimes in public places as a health screening. In others, the dogs sniffed patient samples such as sweat, saliva, or urine samples,” explains a press statement from De Gruyter.
Dogs’ Incredible Accuracy
The dogs ranged from Labrador retrievers and Belgian malinois to beagles and English springer spaniels. In most of the studies, the dogs demonstrated similar or better sensitivity and specificity than the current gold-standard PCR tests or antigen tests.
“In one study, four of the dogs could detect the equivalent of less than 2.6 x 10−12 copies of viral RNA per milliliter. This is equivalent to detecting one drop of any odorous substance dissolved in ten and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools and is three orders of magnitude better than modern scientific instruments,” notes De Gruyter.
Remarkably, they not only detected COVID-19 in symptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and asymptomatic patients, but they could also sniff out COVID variants and even long COVID.
Considering the Safety of the Dogs
One thing we certainly don’t want is for dogs to become collateral damage in the pursuit of better testing. The study authors acknowledge this, writing that the “safety of scent dogs, their handlers, and those who are inspected by the dogs is critical for the acceptance and implementation of the scent dog screening and testing approach.”
“This is consistent with the One Health paradigm,” they add, “which defines health as more than the absence of disease and recognizes the interrelationships among humans, animals, and environmental welfare.”
The authors evaluated whether medical detection dogs could contract and become ill with the COVID-19 virus and if dogs pass on the COVID-19 virus to humans. From a number of studies, they concluded that dogs are in the low-risk category. “To our knowledge, there have been no deaths of dogs that can be unequivocally attributed to COVID-19,” the authors explain. “Importantly, the studies described above suggest that it is safe for healthy individual handlers to utilize scent dogs to directly screen and test individuals who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus.”
Speedy Test Results
A major benefit of using the dogs is their speed. In one study, researchers were able to do a lineup with 40 samples, including sample collection, lineup loading, and unloading, within just 3 minutes.
“The time between RT-PCR sampling and the return of results can be up to days, whereas the RAG test results are obtained within about 15 min.,” write the study authors. “Again, if scent dogs directly sniff individuals, results are learned in seconds, or a few minutes if samples are taken and sniffed soon after by the dogs.”
“The criticality of the speed of the return of test results cannot be overemphasized,” the authors add.
Elimination of Plastic Waste
That dogs could provide a result in seconds to minutes is crucial. But additionally, and importantly, scent tests by dogs don’t require expensive lab equipment or create mountains of plastic waste, unlike conventional diagnostic approaches.
As of December 22, 2022, the United States alone had performed around 1.15 billion tests for COVID-19. Thinking of all the material for the testing kits and all the resources used for testing labs and sending samples around, etc., the reduction in ecological footprint is potentially tremendous.
Not to mention the cost. Some of the research in the review was, in fact, motivated by the need for inexpensive testing in developing nations, the authors note.
“Although many people have heard about the exceptional abilities of dogs to help humans, their value to the medical field has been considered fascinating, but not ready for real-world medical use,” says Dickey. “Having conducted this review, we believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during pandemics, potentially as part of rapid health screenings in public spaces. We are confident that scent dogs will be useful in detecting a wide variety of diseases in the future.”
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In the interests of expanding the argument, here is a copy of a comment left to that original post:
Here we go again, using animals for testing. I believe that dogs can’t smell covid and detected it 100%, but we humans NEVER treat animals with the respect and equality they deserve, so I am very concern for the safety and health of testing “smell Covid” dogs… I know a person that have esophageal cancer and for almost 5 years before it was diagnosed, his dog (an adorable mutt) insisted on crawling over her owner chest every single time that he laid down, in an attempt to “cure” the inflammation in that spot. After the cancer was eliminated with chemo and surgery the dog stopped doing it… I which we humans were more connected and attentive with animal wisdom, to learn from them, respecting and became better people.
I think that second sentence should read can smell covid but have left it how it was printed.
Anyway, I will leave readers to cover the main article which speaks very highly of man’s best friend.
Last Wednesday, the 2nd, Jonathan sent me an email. He said that he was just starting out and also attached a file and asking if there was a chance of me publishing it. Of course, I replied. Here is that article. It is a very open and beautiful account of Jonathan taking on a new dog!
Backing the twenty-foot Penske rental down the freshly grated driveway, my mind is racing with thoughts, all too distracted to be driving such a large vehicle. The day has finally come. A new house. A new dog. A new town. Altogether, a new beginning. Soon after I finish backing this truck up, unloading all of my stuff, and fueling myself with whatever food I can find, I will go pick up the new dog. His name is Barry. He is a brown labradoodle whose is as small as he is energetic.
The thoughts don’t stop coming. How will I care for him? How will I be sure he is happy? What if I do something wrong? How could it possibly be that I can provide for another living being? These are thoughts that had come and gone for the last few months after deciding I would like to have Barry. As often as I convinced myself that I could do it, I questioned myself.
Anxiety and I were well acquainted far before Barry came into the picture. The prospect of owning a dog was just another medium for the anxiety to surface. Before Barry came into the picture, I had been battling anxiety for nearly six months straight. One imperfect travel experience left me rattled for quite some time and from then on I was either actively experiencing a panic attack or on the verge of one. Depression set in not long after, and I became an empty vessel for quite some time, barely recognizable from my formal self. Six months came and went until I finally sought out the help I needed. I was a broken person. Professional help was a requirement.
And the professional help was sufficient. It allowed me to at least function again and go about my day-to-day without constantly being in a state of fight-or-flight, without the irrational thoughts and worries. But I still did not feel like myself.
And then came Barry.
My original worries regarding Barry were just that: worries. As someone who grew up around dogs, cared for dogs, dog-sat plenty of times, and generally is quite responsible, there was no real reason to believe I couldn’t be a wonderful puppy parent. When Barry came home the first night we had to bath him. I know this is not always highly regarded in the dog community due to the puppy’s sensitive skin. But he needed a bath desperately, so I drew a slightly warmer-than-lukewarm bath and bathed him. His beautiful eyes gazed at me as he began to figure out this new reality. Ripped from the comfortable arms of his previous reality of familial warmth, loving siblings, and the scent of his breeders, there is no doubt he also experienced anxiety. I’m sure he felt loneliness. He was scared. But when his bath was over, I took him out, wrapped him in a warm, clean towel, and held him. He wiggled his head into a nook in the towel and promptly fell asleep. His stomach rose, fell, rose, fell. This being who just met me several hours ago, who was no more than 2 months old, gave all of his trust to me and embraced his new reality.
It did not take me long to follow in his footsteps and embrace my new reality. I fell in love with our new routine, our daily walks, and his company on my usually lonesome days. The subtle tether of Anxiety slowly began to vanish with every new command he learned, with every minuscule improvement in his loose-leash walking, with every excited tail wag at the call of his name. Embracing my new reality became effortless, and my former self reemerged. I began seeking out new hobbies, reaching out to old friends, and becoming excited about new challenges at work. This is not to say Anxiety and I have completely lost touch. That is not the case by any means. Rather I have a new relationship with Anxiety – one where the reality of these feelings can be observed, examined, and ridiculed to a point where they do not take control of my life. How our loving canine friends handle new situations and welcome change should not be taken for granted. Let us adopt their ways and come closer to living as wonderfully as they do. 🙂
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.
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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If humans went extinct, what would the Earth look like one year later?
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.
So much silence
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.
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.
Around your city
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.
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.
Like ancient Rome
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.
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.
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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Aging is complicated – a biologist explains why no two people or cells age the same way, and what this means for anti-aging interventions
While some people may be older in chronological age, their biological age might be much younger. FangXiaNuo/E+ via Getty Images
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.
What is aging?
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.
Repairing DNA and recycling proteins
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 involvingspecial 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.
Aging disrupts a delicate biological network
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.
Anti-aging interventions
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.
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.
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!
Just a short update to say that discussions that I had yesterday afternoon with the Discharge Officer at Regency Care, Julia H., resulted in Jean being ready to be collected by me this morning.
It is a great advance although Jean and I will have a whole series of different situations to deal with. But they will be dealt with one at a time.
The kindness shown by both the staff and Regency and our friends is overwhelming. Thank you everyone!
Learning from Dogs 