How would you improve the human body ( if you were "the maker" )

Better knee joints. More organ redundancy like the kidneys and lungs. Two livers, two hearts(come on down Dr Who). More robust backs. Even though we've been walking upright for at least 5 odd million years it's still a weak point. Longer telemeres. Better insulin management. Extension of vitality beyond the first flush of youth. Ability of both sexes to prevent conception internally.

opinion guy wrote:

Well interesting - is ageing in our genes or is it environmental?

While environmental stress will speed up the process, aging is broadly genetic and biological. We have a built in upper limit. For longevity at the extreme it appears to be 120, but after 70 the systems start to break down. Before 70 with effort the body can be made remarkably "young". We're basically programmed to die. Some animals may not be. Certainly some animals age in very different ways. Birds for example. They don't go grey or obviously age compared to mammals. They keep on going and then they just die. Whales may be similar.

Certain animals like Box turtles don't appear to age at all after maturity. Their blood and other biological markers look the same in a 30 year old one as they do in a 100 year old one. It seems they basically die due to accident disease or predation. One might theoretically live to a 1000. I read of one that wandered into someone's garden in Florida IIRC and they started to feed it. They noticed very faint scars on it's carapace and when they looked closer they found two names. Man and womans and a date in the 1700's. They checked the parish records and found that this couple got married in the 1700s and apparently for a time it was a local custom to carve lovers names on turtles because of their longevity. Rather than diamonds are forever it was turtles are forever. Not such a ring to it. Obviously there's no way to prove this little guys true age, but it's intriguing.

Low metabolic rate seems to help.The lower the rate the longer the life. High metabolic rates cause oxidative damage and the like. That old one about allocated heartbeats in mammals. I can't recall the figure, but whatever it is, once a mammal passes say 20 million heartbeats its on borrowed time. So a pgymy shrew with a heart racing away makes it to a year and an elephant with a very lazy heart rate makes it to 50 years kinda thing. Just a few mammals buck this trend. We're one of them. IIRC we pass this heartbeat marker around our late 20's. Size is another one. Generally the bigger the mammal the longer it lives. Dogs screw with this one as generally it's small dogs who live far longer than big ones. The real odd one are bats. Bats are basically mice with hang gliders. They have an even faster metabolic rate because of the adaptation of flight and are small, yet bats can live well beyond 20 years of age, some hit their 40s. In the wild. Figure out how those little buggers manage it and we'd have a "live to 300 pill".

Good babbie Jeebus that was a tangent... :eek::o:D

opinion guy wrote: »

Entertaining tangent Wibbsey old boy. Most of that is dogma though -I wouldn't accept alot of that as fact. Edit: Lets put if this way Wibbs, why would there be an inbuilt age limit of 120 years in humans when in no point in history have humans ever lived that long ? There has never been any evolutionary pressure to drive such a limit.

That's an absolute and very rare limit of the system, not the average. People throughout history (not just a Jewish preacher in the year 30) saw three score and ten as the natural span of a life, with luck and strength maybe you get to four score and this seems to be the case. Medical science has added about ten years to that, by giving the rest of us the "luck and strength" part. We do seem to be programmed to remain useful members of the group up to 70. After that the systems start breaking down.

--Kaiser-- wrote:

There's nothing wrong with human knee joints, what's wrong is humans. Lack of proper diet (not enough collagen and omega 3s, specifically) and using them for what they weren't designed (specifically, running on hard surfaces with modern trainers). Both my knees used to make clicking noises, hell, I could even feel pain in wet weather in one. Changed my diet and starting running barefoot on grass and there hasn't been a peep out of them in years.

Similarly, most back problems probably come down to two things, excess bodyweight (especially in the belly, pulling you forward) and lack of core muscles to support the spine.

Oh I agree, a helluva lot of problems in these areas is self inflicted, however they're still areas that cause more problems than other joints. I'd add hip joints too.