epigenetics
Article
epigenetics is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 02, 2021 and May 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Sinclair’s answer is epigenetics”; “Falconer tries to give this last one a “scientific” grounding by talking about epigenetics”. It most often appears alongside Harvard, Alexandre Gueniot, Algernon’s Law.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: December 02, 2021
- Last seen: May 21, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Harvard (2 shared issues)
-
- Alexandre Gueniot (1 shared issues)
-
- Algernon’s Law (1 shared issues)
-
- Alzheimers (1 shared issues)
-
- Australia (1 shared issues)
-
- Australian outback (1 shared issues)
-
- Bay Area (1 shared issues)
-
- Bessel van der Kolk (1 shared issues)
-
- Bob (1 shared issues)
-
- bone cancer (1 shared issues)
-
- Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind (1 shared issues)
-
- calorie restriction (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Sinclair’s answer is epigenetics. Remember, all cells have the same DNA. The reason kidney cells are different from lung cells is because they have epigenetic markers on the kidney genes saying “turn these on” and on the lung genes say “turn these off”. Part of the cloning process involves telling the cell to be an egg cell. After that, it undergoes the normal embryogenesis process where embryonic stem cells differentiate into kidney cells, lung cells, and the rest.
Epigenetic damage could potentially still be unfixable: how do you convince the thousands of different intermixed cell types in the body to all be the right type again? But Sinclair thinks the body already has a mechanism for doing this: epigenetic repair proteins called sirtuins. I’m a bit confused about where sirtuins are getting their information from: is there a backup copy of epigenetics that they read to figure out what’s wrong and needs repair? I get the impression from one or two cryptic statements that Sinclair thinks maybe yes (see the discussion of “the observer” on page 171). But for some reason, the system works well enough to keep you alive for the normal human lifespan (and no better).
(Falconer tries to give this last one a “scientific” grounding by talking about epigenetics, which broke my suspension of disbelief - talk about demons and I’ll listen, but intergenerational epigenetic inheritance of behavioral traits is a step too far)
Inline links: is a step too far