Naked mole rats, honey bees and YOU

We are learning a lot about aging and anti-aging, about illness and health from animals.  As in lab animals (mostly mice and rats) used in experiments.  They are said to be experimental “subjects,” but really they aren’t subjects -- they are objects. We use them as objects of human scientific inquiry. We use them because it is dangerous, impractical, expensive or unethical (generally all four) to use humans.This post is not about the ethics of using animals in medical research (a conversation I am deeply interested in).  Rather it’s about this animals-as-subjects-animals-as-objects idea. Suppose we actually thought of animals as the initiators of (subjects) and not recipients of (objects) our scientific inquiry.  Suppose we considered what they could teach us, just by who they are and how they live, rather than (or in addition to) teaching us by serving as low-cost “models” or stand-ins for humans.Take the naked mole rat.Please.So here’s the deal about these extraordinarily unattractive little mammals: They can live for 30 years -- 10 times longer than their rodent cousins -- and they show remarkable resistance to tumors.  Why?  What are they doing right that we aren’t?  Turns out (say researchers at the University of Rochester and at Oregon State University) that mole rats have astonishingly efficient cellular “factories” that carry out a degree of cellular surveillance unknown in humans.  Deep in the mole rats’ RNA are mechanisms for finding and repairing and recycling damaged proteins before they can do harm.  Harm as in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and cancer.  Harm as in the accumulation of small errors that lead to cell death.  And, well, death death.   These hairless burrowing rodents with disturbingly large front teeth have something to teach us.Or consider the honeybee.  Young honeybees are as busy as…well, you know, in the hive, caring for the queen.  But as they age (their life expectancy is six weeks), they are replaced by younger bees who take over the work.  These now aged bees who no longer perform useful hive-work begin exhibiting “age-associated learning deficits,” according the Arizona State University researchers who studied them.  If you read the “Thinking Young” chapter in my book, Counterclockwise, you’re probably making the same connections I made when I read this study:  Members of a society who no longer have a useful place in that society internalize this and begin to think, act and actually be biologically old.But bees?  Yeah, bees.  Guess what happened when the researchers removed the younger, active, useful bees from the hive?  The older, aged, “useless” bees were re-invigorated. They took on, with fervor, the nursing responsibilities they had fulfilled earlier in life – and they lived longer than they otherwise would have.  There is, it turns out, much to learn from the biochemistry of the bee brain, as well as the dynamics of the hive.You’ll note that both of these examples involve human interference and manipulation, and the sacrifice of animals.  So they are not PETA-friendly.  I wanted to highlight them because I was struck, when I read this exciting anti-aging research, that the studies begin from a position of interest and respect for the animal, an animals-as-subjects point of view.