2nd If a mans body continuously repaired itself and regenerated cells the way a man in his twenties would do except this mans body regenerates indefinitely, would there be any medical way to tell how old he was (short of cutting his leg off and counting the rings)

Tracy

Fingerprinting failed to idenitfy him or his age? Dental records? Checking his Identification? They would try the simple methods first. Teeth- and Bone- examinations and xrays would reveal something.

I just have this basic idea right now. The way I understand it, doctors do not understand why our cell repair system fails in our late twenties. If they could fix the problem, then people would never age. This story wouldn’t focus on this human alien, how he got here or even particularly why he’s not conscious. The fact is that if a group of doctors stumbled across a John Doe patient like this, he would be the most valuable thing on the planet. Perfect human genetic stock, undying, unflawed. Perfect DNA with all the errors missing. His seed would be priceless. Even mixed with our DNA it would result in earthlings that lived for thousands of years. His stem cells would be equally valuable. This unconscious man holds the blueprints that reveal all that is wrong with us.

Got any ideas? You can help me develop a story if you like. It would be fun to develop a story as a group I think, and good to see how different one go about the process.

I really only have a genetically perfect human alien laying anonymously in a hospital bed that has found its way to a hospital with a rather advanced team of specialists. The team of specialists are the ones that quietly figure out that he is no ordinary man.

I HAVE NO IDEA. (cos I just thought of it today)

Come on, lets invent a great plot just as OSC would have us do to help us learn. You’ve all posted to the “what I hate in literature” thread, how about something a little more challenging now. I don’t have to own the story I have tons of really good ideas. Maybe everyone who participates in coming up with a great plot could write their own version and we could see which one works the best

I was thinking the focus might be on the team of doctors and how they decide to handle the situation. Do they isolate him, keep it all secret? Do they get greedy? Do they unethically cut on this unconscious man. Do they first seek to prolong their own lives with his stem cells to gain power and control? Do they build the ultimate pharmaceutical company that makes Microsoft look like a mom and pop shop? Do they figure out why he is in a coma but deliberately keep him in one so he never becomes a real person with a life to them… so they don’t loose control of their empire? Does the fact that they don’t know who he is or where he’s from eventually come back to haunt them? Do we write it first person, third person, what? Is this a “be careful what you wish for story”? I don’t think I even have an MC.

What do you think?

It would be awesome, too, if there was a cost: loosing the ability of cognitive thought process, sharing the conscious mind with the parasite...

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If a mans body continuously repaired itself and regenerated cells the way a man in his twenties would do except this mans body regenerates indefinitely...

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check out the function of telomeres:
from

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The ends of chromosomes that are normally slightly shortened after each round of cell division. Telomeres are thought to help stabilize chromosomes, and when they become too short after many cell divisions, the cell is no longer able to divide.

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from our friends at wikipedia:

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A telomere is a region of highly repetitive DNA at the end of a linear chromosome that functions as a disposable buffer. Every time linear eukaryotic chromosomes are replicated during late S-phase, the DNA polymerase complex is incapable of replicating all the way to the end of the chromosome; if it were not for telomeres, this would quickly result in the loss of vital genetic information, which is needed to sustain a cell's activities. Every time a cell with linear genes divides, it will lose a small piece of one of its strands of DNA. This process has been referred to by James Watson and Alexei Olovnikov as the "end replication problem" (1971). It is believed that telomeres have a function in the aging process.

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So if you are after medical hard sci-fi you may want to consider the vital function of telomeres that shorten with each replication and that its not as simple as saying that the telomeres do not shorten as:

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Telomere maintenance activity is a hallmark in approximately 90% of cancers in almost all mammalian organisms. In humans, cancerous tumors acquire indefinite replicative capacity by over-expressing telomerase. However, a sizeable fraction of cancerous cells employ alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT), a non-conservative telomere lengthening pathway involving the transfer of telomere tandem repeats between sister-chromatids. The mechanism by which ALT is activated is not fully understood because these exchange events are difficult to assess in vivo.

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Hope this is not bad news.

There really wouldn't be much of a way to "count rings" or tell age from bone or tissue tests. For example, the bones are constantly being devoured by one set of cells and then rebuilt by another set of cells. So basically, every seven years (if I remember correctly) the body has a completely new set of bones...well, bone tissue anyway. I believe the same goes for the other body tissues, with the possible exception of the brain and heart tissues. I think I still have my text books around here somewheres. I'll see if I can't find them.

If his body is constantly regenerating, then it stands to reason that the tissues would be replaced on a faster scale, and therefore finding his age that way would be impossible. I know that forensic pathologists have ways of determining age from just a skeleton. Perhaps a call to the coroner's office would be helpful, or even the morgue at the hospital. I'm sure you could also find some info at the library, too, depending on the size of your local library/municipality.

A DNA scan that would reveal he is perfect moves us into the realm of sci-fi, since I don't believe the technology to know that sort of thing really matters.

Maybe he has a projectile weapon thingy encased in his body from some bygone era. Like his perfect DNA decided the best way to deal with it was to encapsulate it. Maybe his current coma is from a blockage created by a similar event of more recent date.

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Maybe the MRI pulls the object out of his body. CAT scans are a little different, they don't involve as strong magnetic fields. Well, I'm not really sure how it all works, I just remember hearing stories when I worked at the MRI manufacturer, of Tatoo inks being manipulated enough to irritate, and people being killed by unsecured metal objects in the MRI suite

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...and remembered Mythbusters had an episode where they tested the whole tattoo thing. They found only one component (if I'm remembering correctly) that might cause some irritation, but overall, people with tats shouldn't feel a thing during an MRI.

There are like 400 pigment suppliers. There are even glow-in-the-dark colors. These, however, are not approved by the US government for use in tattoos. They are not hypoallergenic. MOST pigments are made with a saline solution -- which is found naturally in the body.

1. Exploration of coma.

a. Basic ABCDE+E reanimation. A stands for airway (is his airway clear?), B is breathing, etc. So basically, you check for anything life-threatening at the moment and place one of those collars (don't know their name in english) around his neck. A patient who is found in coma could have had some sort of trauma to cause it, so basically you prevent spinal cord damage and keep him alive until you know more.
b. Once he is stabilized and doesn't look like he's dying on you, you do a neuro examination. If you want your story to kick some serious a, you probably need to determine how deep this coma is. If you prick the patient on the finger, does he pull his arm away (this is an automatic pain-avoidance gesture), if you talk to him does he open his eyes and stare unseeingly at you? does he mumble? does he react in any way when you say his name? (do you know what his name is?)
c. CT scan, MRI, are image techniques that can be used to determine if his brain has something obviously wrong with it, but many many things won't show up (eg Alzheimes, Parkinson, sometimes even a blood clot in the early stages). They'd also take tons of bloodtests to see if it's a metabolic coma (glucose too high? blood ph? too much CO2? hypoxia etc). Also you do an EEG (electroencephalogram which might show epylepsy and viral encephalitis), and a spinal puncture to get liquid from the spinal cord (see if some bacteria are messing around in there). Since trauma is a frequent cause of coma, you explore the patient's body carefully for signs of fractures or internal bleeding, and in case of doubt, X-ray him from head to toe (better yet, CT-scan him from head to toe).
d. If nothing is wrong with him at this stage, you start wondering if your patient has a psychiatric coma. These are extremely rare, but they do happen in squizophrenia and some conversions (what used to be known as hysteria). A quick test is to pick up the patient's arm and drop it on the patient's head. If it's a psych coma, unconscious self-preservation will help the arm fall away from the head. If it's something physical, the patient's arm will smack on the patient's nose.
e. Whatever your findings, you begin empirical treatment for the most frequent causes of coma. Liquids are a must, keeping the patient alive and all that, but I would probably also include aciclovir, in case it's a viral encephalitis (yes, this should show up in the EEG, but...), antibiotics (meningitis?), maybe even fibrinolysis if you strongly suspect a clot. Etc. Last resource is a brain biopsy, but I would think that there would be many many stages before that including random biopsies of skin, liver, muscle... depending on what you think might be wrong with the guy.

2. Determining age.

Brief correction: people don't start aging when they turn twenty, they start aging the minute they're conceived (new-borns have pre-atherosclerotic lesions in their arteries). Basically, you're doomed since before you become a person.
If this guy doesn't age, doctors would assume he's twenty. Unless they knew otherwise, of course, or unless he spent the next forty years and coma and someone noticed how strange it was for a sixty-year old to look twenty.
Has this guy lived on Earth all his life? Do we know where he comes from? A creative way of determining age would be to find a heavy metal that is absorbed by the body but not excreted and check concentrations in say, a liver biopsy. This is SF, never done in Medicine, as far as I know, but feel free to use the idea. You'd have to take liver biopsies of maybe a 1000 people to compare, and extrapolate the age of the subject from the average deposit/age graph you would get from analyzing the results. Am I making any sense?
Another way to do this would be to carbon date cells that don't regenerate. Of course, if this guy is going to stay alive, all his cells regenerate (not like most neuron in humans, or eggs in women) so this isn't worth much.
If he's an alien he doesn't have human DNA, so you can't back track mythocondrial mutations and determine when he was born. Besides, this would only be useful if he'd been born at least 5000 years ago, since the different mutations after that would be too "normal" to place.

Telomeres wouldn't work here, because if he regenerates, then his telomeres would also regenerate and he'd have a new-born's telomere length.

If your patient doesn't wake up, maybe you could try some amphetamines. That might do the trick if they're lurking beneath the surface and need a little help.

Did this help any?

You need to find a reason why he regenerates but doesn't get cancer. Basically, aging doesn't result only from radiation and free radicals, but from an inbuilt process in your DNA. You are PROGRAMMED to age. This is because if cells don't die, you get cancer. Your body is a careful balance between death from cell-aging and death from cancer. Does that make you feel any better about being alive?
Anyway. Why isn't this guy one big malignant tumour growth. Maybe he does age, but more slowly

So are you saying that a human couldn’t have a perfect cell replacement system? I understand that most of our cells have to be replaced regularly but couldn’t that system work indefinitely if the DNA was so encoded.

If a human was found that was completely human but not from earth, that is to say from a completely compatible alien gene pool.
How valuable would he be medically speaking?
What if humans from his gene pool lived thousands of years or indefinitely?
If he offered to let you use him in whatever way to extend your own life or that of others, how would you go about it?
Would his stem cells be more valuable and how could you use them?

BTW your writing is becoming really, really good. Clearly dedication and talent are paying off for you. Have you ever heard of E. Catherine Tobler? She’s just starting out but you may like her stuff. Google her and check out some of her short stories. I love Gauging Moonlight and Vanishing act. They’re both on Sci-Fi.com but they’re hard to read unless you pull down the mouse and highlight the page. I don’t think anyone’s maintaining that part of the site since they stopped adding stories.

Like...what if beings aged into other types of beings...a weird spin on evolution. I'm thinking of analogies to cultures that have a definite sense of an "elder" class of people who are looked to for certain things, contribute certain things to society and to a family unit, etc. What if another life form had a way of evolving within the same life-span? It would mean life spans would have to be quite long, but...what if?

What are the threats to your integrity and survival? Let's examine them in the priority order of the original cavemen (for want of a better term). Humans have been primitive nomads for much longer than they've been sofisticates. This explains why we are pretty good at fighting threats that affected us back then, but suck at things like Alzheimers and cancer (basically, anything that happens after menopause is of no interest to your genes)

1st. Accidents, violent death. That's what the brain is for, right? Won't go into this, but we all know it's complex
2nd. Infection. You've got two immune systems that combat it. In prehistorical times epidemics were less of a problem (you need lots of people around to have enough human mass to support and epidemic) but wounds got infected and bacteria, almost any bacteria, will most likely go anywhere if you let them.
The reason this is important for your story is that the immune system also kills off cancerous cells. It does so less efficiently than combating infection bc cancer cells look so much like normal cells that the immune system has trouble telling the difference. When the immune system gets "overzealous" or doesn't regulate itself well you get autoimmune disseases, which are rare but devastating. So the immune system can't be more stringent about cancer for fear of hurting the rest of the body.
Paradoxically in most auto-immune disseases there's a form of immune-suppression. Maybe it's because the body is wasting its effort fighting the good guys and doesn't have enough immune cells left for the meanies.
3rd. All the things that concern us now. Cancer, cardiovascular dissease, dementia. The reason these happen when you're older is that the body evolved defence mechanisms for them and "pushed" them back further away from those precious reproductive years. The first cause of death in the 20-30s age group in my country is Traffic accidents, followed by cancer (lymphoma, I think). But of course lymphoma only entered the stats bc young people are no longer dying of childbirth, murder, infections. (or not so much). I would imagine in the US, death from firearms would be pretty high up that list.

So basically, there are three balancing systems in your body.
Cells grow to replace old cells. Adult stem cells tend to be less indiferentiated than embrio cells (that means that a neuron stem cell will never turn into muscle), but I don't know much about the subject. When this sytem malfunctions in excess, you die of cancer, when it's not enough, you die of age.
I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. If we had more efficient ways of countering external factors of aging maybe we could buy another hundred years, but I don't think, unless you find a perfect cure for cancer, that you can do away with aging altogether.
Why not have this character live 2000 years instead of forever? I can envision this, and it wouldn't go so much against biology. On the other hand, this is SF (dmit) and your story and you can be immortal if you want to
Immune system. Controls pathogenes but also tumor cells. When it malfunctions you die of infections, cancer, autoimmune disseases.

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You need to find a reason why he regenerates but doesn't get cancer. Basically, aging doesn't result only from radiation and free radicals, but from an inbuilt process in your DNA. You are PROGRAMMED to age.

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You are genetically programmed to age. A major part of that is because of the progressive shortening of telomeres through replication. Telomeres, don't regenerate, precisely because their 'purpose' is to limit how many times a cell regenerates to avoid perpetual errors in replication. Telomer maintenance is a hallmark of more than 90% of all cancers.

Why is he not full of tumours and in terrible pain?

That's what I was talking about above.

anyhow, interesting discussion,
if you're wondering, I looked into this while trying to figure out how someone surviving indefinitely through the use of healing potions would be affected by it...

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BTW your writing is becoming really, really good. Clearly dedication and talent are paying off for you. Have you ever heard of E. Catherine Tobler? She’s just starting out but you may like her stuff. Google her and check out some of her short stories. I love Gauging Moonlight and Vanishing act. They’re both on Sci-Fi.com but they’re hard to read unless you pull down the mouse and highlight the page. I don’t think anyone’s maintaining that part of the site since they stopped adding stories.

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In one of your later comments you mentioned a symbiont life forms and someone living for a long time before that. A human not from earth. My first thought was of the Voyagers series by Ben Bova. Three pretty good books the first one does not cover what you are talking about but the second two do and also a pretty good commentary on prolonged life and responsibilities of society. If you can get past the, what I consider, poor representation of women, they are worth the read. They also cover some of the medical stuff without going so in depth that they end up sounding like an episode of ER.

I forgot to add this.
On my note about the first thing I thought of was... Mr. Card has an Uncle Orson writting lesson that covers some of this. If you have not read it it is worth your time. I don't think you have a problem with this, but it put my mind at ease about several things when I read it.
http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/1999-12-20.shtml

Dont forget to read Gauging Moonlight as well Sara. I think you'll like it. She's is an editor over at Shimmer these days.

Tracy

Another thing that could cause them to be confused by him might be if his thymus were weird some way. I believe the thymus tends to shrink, and some of the stuff it does is very odd. If I understand correctly, it collects samples on what kind of virus might be infecting the body and tests antibodies to see if they will kill the virus without killing the person (the thymus is why T cells are so named, and why HIV's affect on T cells makes it so difficult to make a traditional vaccine for.)

The thymus is very active in babies and children, but as antibodies become less necessary its activities become more of a liability (risking autoimmune disease) so evolution has selected out long lived thymuses. I'm not really up on what the relative size of the thymus would be for a 20 year old. But if he were found to have antibodies to, say, the 1917 flu or the bubonic plague, that might be interesting.

Remember the liver man on the X files? :shudder: Why did they begin to suspect he was older than he appeared? I forget. I think it was a series of similar crimes dating back to the 1700's. For those who don't remember, he'd been around for a few hundred years. He was a mutant who would kill 10 people, eat their livers, then hibernate for 50 years. He could also change his bodyshape to slip through chimneys and ventilation systems.

For my part, I'm not that worried by the telomere thing. Humans already live orders of magnitude longer than animals that we think are similar enough to base a lot of our medical research on. Even if you don't look at mice, our lives are biblically long compared to dogs, cats and horses. I did once think of a story where HIV becomes prevalent so few humans live past 20. Actually, there was one locality where this happened and the rest of the world was trying to decide if they were safely enough isolated or should be destroyed.

A lot of my sci-fi oriented story ideas are one variation or another on the leper colony idea, I'm realizing. Maybe I should just write a historical novel about a leper colony.