*
'Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, "We need to rethink what genes are," says microbiologist and molecular biologist Gisela Storz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.'
Wow. Amazing how incredible biology and proteins are and their still-barely-understood mechanisms. For anyone who hasn't already seen it, I highly recommend The Inner Life of a Cell [0]
> But people and genetic testing companies seem to want to keep it going.
You can still get alot of mileage out of a simplified, inaccurate model. If you just say to yourself, "well, this whole gene thing is hopelessly complex", then you'll never get anywhere outside of a lab or personal project. Applied biology especially, and medicine in particular, seems to require grossly simplifying assumptions in order to make any problem tractable.
I would think that would be understood by people on HN. One of the biggest impediments to smart people starting companies is an inability to set aside the inherent, irreducible complexity that they, alone, see and appreciate. The people who succeed in business tend to be those ignorant of the complexity[1], or those able to come to terms with the reality that any practical, marketable solution is necessarily built on an inaccurate model of the world and is doomed to eventually crumble for its inherent flaws.
The old adage that ignorance is bliss is more insightful and meaningful than people give it credit for. Knowledge, especially epistemic knowledge, can be debilitating.
[1] Which doesn't imply being stupid or incurious. Willful ignorance seems like a potentially useful strategy.
We will eventually find that there's the equivalent of JPEG encoding (plus SSL and ECC) and that today we're doing the equivalent of someone with no knowledge of SSL or JPEG staring at a tcpdump trace of a browser loading an image over https, trying to make sense of the resulting hex dump.
Trying to figure out how a single compressed/encrypted buffer works given only it and its resulting image is certainly an unwinnable task, but increase the sample size to a few million or billion and I don't see why the algorithm couldn't eventually be cracked.
If genes are the data, then methylation is more like an additional piece of metadata directing the cell (potentially different across cells) how to use the data. One possible use for this metadata is potentially error correction, but it does much more than that.
That doesn't really follow. We don't need to have a complete map genotype to phenotype in order to have an understanding of the weight of genetic component of certain traits. Just because we don't know exactly which genes cause a certain hair color doesn't mean we can't guess which parents are more likely to have children with that hair color. The same goes for behavior that can be measured and predicted. As long as that prediction is more accurate than a random guess, the prediction has value.
If you drop an apple & observe that it falls, you get some predictive value about the nature of gravity. But that's a far cry from computing the orbital dynamics of a spacecraft. Parent's comment on "transparency" in the mapping from genotype to phenotype was more akin to the latter -- and their point stands.
We sent astronauts to the moon with Newtonian physics. No need for relativity. This is more akin to relativity in that it expands our domain knowledge and explanatory power but the old model already does most of the work.
Which is why I have zero interest in things like 23 and me. I worked in a genetics lab and the longer I worked there, the more I realized how little we understand.
Sure, we don't understand much detail but we know a whole lot of things like "you're x% more likely to get y disease", and if y is something that can be monitored or tested for, this can literally save your life.
I recommend reading "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande to get a good sense of how hopeless "curing aging" is. Although that's not the focus of the book it does a wonderful job describing the challenge.
The way it reads to me as a lay person, the body just falls apart. Things go wrong. It's not one thing going wrong, it's a very long list of disparate problems that ultimately aren't survivable. Aging isn't a losing battle, it's a massacre. It's one damn thing after another.
What struck me is how our veins go "crunchy" in old age from the build up of calcium and how an expert can tell the age of a person within a 5 year period from just a picture of their gums and teeth. I put the book down and couldn't sleep that night.
I never read the book, but during the last couple years I became more attentive to things in life. Nothing special, but just the general flow of life so to speak. I started noticing an interesting pattern. There is pretty much always exists a single solution to any problem. A core solution. A polymorphism in programming could be an example of what I mean. Say you have a program with a bunch of similar entities and a ton of if/else statements handling the logic for various cases. Conditions keep growing with each new entity. The code becomes messy as you fight the language trying to "cure" your program. Then you introduce an interface and suddenly everything becomes more clear and things just _make sense_. Your conditionals slowly disappear, the logic gets simpler and the code is now flat.
I keep noticing similar patterns pretty much everywhere in life and somewhat confident that the same core solution exists for aging as well.
Shot in the dark (coming from a MS in Biomedical Engineering): circadian control to stabilize the body’s metabolic activity to lessen the “wear and tear” of the body’s condition to intensely survive for but a cosmic microsecond. Once we can “hack” ourselves to de-couple the body away from its heliocentric regularity, we can “slow aging”.
After all, ex vivo cellular immortality exists. I think it’s the hormones that ruin everything.
That's interesting. I've always suspected that "curing" something as fundamental as aging would change some basic aspect of what makes us human. Per your comment about hormones, imagine that if you want immortality, you have to never have had testosterone or estrogen in your body. That person would have a vastly different human experience than everyone else. It sounds like it would make a pretty cool scifi story, as a matter of fact.
The human genome is full of harmful mutations. While many are widespread and some are shared by everyone, we each still have our own unique collection of them. I often wonder how much longer we'd live with every obviously harmful mutation reverted.
It's probably not black and white, some of those harmful mutation may have necessary benefits in some other function. It's like drinking a poison that will kill in the long term but you need to live in the short term.
For a more hopeful picture: Ending Aging, by Aubrey de Grey. He organizes that long list of disparate problems and propose a possible path for their solution. Doesn't make it sound any easier, but at least it is a hopeful reading.
Making a very crude analysis based on the size of data, I would say solving aging is a piece of cake comparing to scanning someone's brain content. Our proteins that eventually break down with aging are coded by the DNA. The DNA is a few GB across. Sure there are mutations, folding and other complexities, but it is still mostly digital data. The brain has 80B neurons, each with thousands of dendrites. You'd need to scan not only the (real valued) state of the neurotransmitters in each of these dendrites, but also the topology of the (varying) connection to other neurons. Not that it isn't a daunting challege, but I would bet my money on beating aging, rather than scanning the brain.
It depends on how close the biological cells are to being immortal. What I was referring to in somewhat sarcastically in another post is that modern senescence research is basically operating from the position that the cell just has, you know, maybe one or two or three things wrong with it, and if we can "just" extend the teleomeres (presumably with just ingesting some substance), and maybe supplement our diet with a couple of substances, and maybe fix cancer or something, we'll be there.
There are some reasons to believe this may be true, such as the existence of cells in the wild that seem to be effectively immortal, like certain jellyfish and such. (Nothing terrible close to us taxonomically, but at least they're from planet Earth.)
On the other hand, it may turn out that after a couple of quick wins worth, say, 20 or 30 years, that the whole thing devolves into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of interventions, all complicating each other, a good number of them unique to the individual, as you try to pick up the pieces in your ever-aging organs as they continue to find new and exciting ways to fail. Imagine trying to keep an old car running, but you're not actually allowed to just replace parts, and you have to do all the fixes while the car is on the road, and this is just barely the tip of the iceberg. Senescence research may be one of the worst examples of a light-post problem in human history, as they search for this or that substance that will fix aging but the minimal solution is in fact literally gigabytes worth of information converted into biological machines we can barely even conceive of.
If you can read one neuron, you can read two; those problems are not independent. (That's a simplification to some extent, but at this level we'll take it.) If you can understand one protein's function, that doesn't help anywhere near as much with the next one, and the state of the body is roaming through a very high-dimensional space over time, with the interventions all also affecting the next intervention that will be necessary... it can get pretty ugly in there, potentially. Amusingly, the brain is the problem in both cases; biological immortality probably wouldn't be so hard, we could probably solve everything by transplants of freshly-grown organs based on our genetic code... except transplanting a freshly-grown brain in kinda defeats the whole purpose. In the end, both problems may come back to scanning brains one way or another.
Simulating the micro-environment is the tricky part. Humans go great distances and interact a lot with the world, and that, plus time, is what aging is, isn't it?
Can you simulate all the different ways DNA can mutate?
Wow. I understand that you are a layperson, but that’s a very strong statement in my view. What do you base it on? Or did you just pull it ”out of a hat”?
Changing genetics seems to me a bit like changing an engine in-flight. Mappping the brain to a computer is more like building a plane from scratch in a hangar.
In a computer, we build the materials but we also build the world around them. With biology, all we have to work with is are the real-life materials, which are harder to grok than their digital equivalents.
Piece by piece migration/replacement into a computer/ artificial neurons seems more likely. Still a gargantuan task with the requirement of a gargantuan amount of neurons.
First, the goal I'm shooting for is the conquest of aging, effective biological immortality, not just living 150-200 years.
When understanding a complicated existing system, like a program, with the intention of making changes to it or fixing it, I find there are characteristic phases to it. There's the part where you have no handle on it at all. At this point you think there maybe isn't that much to the system. Then you get a handle, and you view the whole system through that handle for a while, and everywhere you look you see new stuff. Every time you find something new, your estimate of the size of the task grows. Slowly, but surely, you begin to go more places and look at more things and you encounter stuff you've already seen before. Your estimate of how much work you have to do goes up, but the rate of change starts to decrease. You find more useful handles to understand more bits of the system as you encounter new subsystems and bunches of code. There's a long period of consolidation, where your understanding finally starts matching the complexity and you start getting to the point you know what you are doing, and the rate of surprises you encounter slopes off, perhaps never quite reaching zero, but certainly dropping off. You then have the long slog of actually doing the work, because now you understand it.
In biology, you can argue about exactly where we are, but we are certainly not at the "long period of consolidation" yet, because we keep finding entirely new subsystems that we weren't even aware of. For the past several decades, it seems like every 5 or 10 years we keep finding new subsystems and the apparently complexity of what's going on keeps going up. The ratio of "things we know" over "things we know we don't know" has been steadily going down over the past decades, even as the "things we know" may be increasing in absolute terms. At this point I would have no confidence in anyone's claim that "no, this is the last complication we'll find, we're on our way now!"
Trying to get into that mess and fix it for the long term may just be an unrealistic goal entirely. I suspect modern research into fixing senescence and this or that promising treatment option (oh, look, maybe if we supplement with this, oh, look, maybe if we supplement with that!) may be the equivalent of trying to fix an architectural issue in a large-scale code base armed with the equivalent of three letter "a"s you can insert into the code base, or trying to reassemble a supernova armed with a BB gun.
Not that brain simulation is easy either. In fact, I'm not even convinced the simulating is the hard part. It's the reader I can't hardly imagine how we're going to build without some serious borderline-magic nanotech. You need to be able to read millions of neurons in parallel if you have any hope of finishing before the patient being scanned dies of old age. (And what does "reading" a neuron even mean? Can a "reader" fit into the space between neurons? If not you've got some serious scheduling problems with how to cover everything. And it's not like 'a neuron' is a point, either... one of their major purposes is to spread.) There's also a chance you'll have to be dynamically simulating the already-scanned parts as you go, since the system is changing as you scan it and it's basically the equivalent of a stroke if everything scanned is just dead afterwards, and who would want to be scanned that way? It's an insane machine to build.
It's really hard to tell which is harder, because they are both insanely hard. Neither would particularly surprise me. It's like an ant trying to judge which Redwood is higher.
Even if we could separate your mind from your body and run it on an immortal computer (or rather succession of computers), I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that making a mind immortal is easier than making immortal tissues and organs.
It's not just making the machine immortal or serviceable. You also need to make the program robust enough to run continuously without crash/reset conditions or other pathological bugs. But, the techniques we understand to engineer "immortal" programs are at odds with the complexity of a real mind, in much the same way as our techniques for engineering machines are at odds with real biology. I.e. it isn't really preserving a real mind if we have to strip away the stateful learning and memory, the moods and emotions, and the inherent potential for bouts of irrationality or even psychosis.
Finally, to "solve aging" for one organism or one mind just raises more questions which are equally as hard. What is an immortal society or civilization? How do new people ever relate to their immortal forebears or participate on equal footing in an economy where some have literally had forever to gather wealth and power? Or does sexual reproduction cease in a future with backup-restore options? Immortality means solving all these levels, otherwise you just replace illness and senescence with accident and violence as the common cause of death...
Just to your first sentence: even if we had biological immortality, the current estimate is that you can only make it about 250 years before on average you suffer a fatal accident.
Beating aging isn't really enough - we have to beat death.
One nuance is that if you want to live forever you only need to hit longevity escape velocity where every year there is another discovery which buys you another year of healthy life.
Of course it might lead to living to 800 and being confined to a wheelchair by 80.
Several companies and research groups are working on it. The challenge is a lack of priority, funding and even recognizing aging as a disease, at least in legal terms.
Look up the Sens foundation (Dr. Aubrey De Grey), Dr. David Sinclair (Harvard .. Some are skeptical because he has started several companies) and Dr. Bruce Ames as starting points.
I think the real challenge is mind boggling complexity of interactions. Suggesting it’s a question of funding etc is vastly understating the actual issues.
Curing cancer for example is a vastly simpler problem.
Don't get me wrong, it is a very complex set of complex issues depending on which pillar we attack. (Metabolism, Repair, Pathology). The latter is very expensive and too late in the game. That is what we attempt today with conventional medicine and it's just treating symptoms of aging. We barely understand human metabolism and the little bit we know is a auditorium wall sized flow chart. Repair is the new area and Aubrey is putting a lot of effort into that pillar. That is where funding would certainly help. Then there are legal and ethical issues we will eventually dive in to.
Absolutely. There is already a great deal of work on the metabolic side, such as removing biofilms of cancer with AGE (aged garlic extract), slowing or stopping metastases with bio-availability enhanced Curcumin, up-regulating autophagy and cell apoptosis with the up-regulation of NRF2 via cycling Sulforaphane and Myrosinase, starving cancer cells by removing all glucose and processed carbs via Keto and intermittent fasting, 5 day FMD (fast mimicking diet). All of these things highly complement Chemo, increasing the effectiveness and mitigating much of the damage caused by Chemo Therapy.
On the repair pillar, quite a bit of work is being done with CRISPR to attack cancer cells. There is also research on targeting specific cells using sound (11th harmonics) and destroying them.
Sorry I don't have any links to share. I must get back to work. :-)
Why Bruce Ames? Bruce Ames is long retired, and his research was on the free radical theory of aging, which is largely seen as a dead-end for the past 15 years after it was realised that merely throwing different antioxidants into the works gummed up the normal function of reactive oxygen species and did nothing or worsened aging.
Actually he still does a lot of work and is currently researching theories around "conservation". e.g. when the body is low on a particular micro-nutrient, it conserves delivery on particular pathways that are related to longevity.
So while he may have "retired", I mean, he's 90, so it's about time, he most certainly still works full time in the lab.
Define "curing". Is it giving some decent percentage of people an extra 10, 20, maybe even 30 years of reasonably healthy life, compared to what they have today? Or is it making people live forever? The first objective, as challenging as it is, sounds a lot more plausible than the second. If we ever achieve either, I'm sure the first will be reached long before the second is.
By a literal definition of "curing", only the second is a "cure". But the first would still be an amazing achievement, and is probably a prerequisite to ever being able to achieve the second.
You might be able to cure dying without curing age related degeneration of the body. Migrating minds outside of the body might be possible. To me it seems quite likely.
It's worth noting that there are a lot of active efforts towards tackling the different hallmarks of age related disease to extend healthspan. Some are in clinical trials already: https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/
Probably not soon enough to be of much benefit to anyone alive today. I have no qualifications to say this, so I can only base it on the staggering lack of progress made on many other medical fronts in the last decades.
The difference is that the peptides are generated by chopping up larger proteins, while miniproteins are synthesised as short proteins. I.e. you need other enzymes to turn a protein into peptide, but a microprotein only needs to be translated to be short!
> while peptides usually are too short to have a defined fold.
That's not strictly true. My PhD project has looked at an entire class of peptides that are known to fold in to alpha-helices when bound to a cell membrane e.g. https://www.rcsb.org/structure/2k9b.
There are many others that are known to fold into beta-sheets too.
Fair, but I would not really call a single helix a 'fold', either!
Ok, so I'm playing with definitions here a bit. Clearly 2k9b adopts a helical structure so it is 'folded' in some sense. However it has no tertiary structure.
Structural proteins like collagen are different again. They have a simple fold that could be described as quaternary (multichain), although that is again an abuse of terminology.
There are also some small proteins (peptides?) held together by disulphide links that have no secondary strucure to speak of. I think these are Class 4 in CATH, but I do not remember.
What is an example of a beta-sheet peptide? Amyloid is beta, I thought, but sheets are not normally stable outside sandwiches, barrels, etc
WW domains[1] fold stably into a three-stranded sheet. Also, not strictly a sheet, but beta hairpin motifs (e.g. tryptophan zippers[2]) are known to be stable isolated from their parental domains.
> OTHER SHORT AMINO ACID chains, often called peptides or polypeptides, abound in cells, but they are pared-down remnants of bigger predecessors. Myoregulin and its diminutive brethren, in contrast, are born small.
"""
Later in life, myoregulin steps in to help regulate muscle activity. When a muscle receives a stimulus, cellular storage depots spill calcium, triggering the fibers to contract and generate force. An ion pump called SERCA then starts to return the calcium to storage, allowing the muscle fibers to relax. Myoregulin binds to and inhibits SERCA, Olson's team found. The effect limits how often a mouse's muscles can contract—perhaps ensuring that the animal has muscle power in reserve for an emergency, such as escaping a predator. Another small protein, DWORF, has the opposite effect, unleashing SERCA and enabling the muscle to contract repeatedly.
"""
I've noticed when I take magnesium that my muscles really relax, and jaw doesnt tighten as much when I sleep. this is from what i understand, because Magnesium acts as a natural calcium blocker, helping your muscle cells relax after contracting preventing excess muscle contraction (tightness). An interesting avenue i've started exploring is attacking the problem from another angle and instead of using mg, lying on a grounding mat plugged into a wall, which after reading this, is providing extra grounding for the "ion pump" described above? After sleeping on that mat, i feel even more relaxed than downing 500mg of magensium, i can even feel like the inner heart area be able to relax, which otherwise felt uncommandable to relax.
Ben greenfield, a biohacker whos pumped his entire body full of stemcells at one point (including the netherregions), has recently been investing it [1]
I can imagine since we know _so little_ about how even proteins and now these mini proteins work... how is the underlying electric system affecting the whole interaction a couple of abstraction levels up!?! what happens when the entire system is operating under a slight electric potential for 80% of lifetime, as opposed to being grounded? (static in a television signal)
This is "the andy grove fallacy": it's not clear that you actually can, because code and computational hardware was designed by humans and biology emphatically was not.
I'm starting to wonder if there are physical limits to cognition and if we've already hit them. Maybe it's impossible for the physical universe to understand its own complexity.
i've been doing biological/biomedical research for about 20 years now (god, that's a scary thought...)
I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... :
What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the worst spaghetti you've ever seen, god-objects everywhere, no separated state at all, spooky action at a distance, the whole spiel.
We don't have a reliable debugger, you can't trace the stack because the stack changes when you look at it, and the entire thing is running all the time and mutating in a really nasty feedback loop with you.
Oh and there is no software, there's only FPGA-like firmware that reprograms itself all the time and can decide to add or remove logic units basically whenever, or wrap itself in duct tape and baling wire.
I...doubt that's an accurate characterization, because the things that you are describing lead to fragile software. Biological systems are hard to understand and to modify, but maybe that's more due to redundancy that has evolved than to systems that are coupled like bad software systems. After all, if they broke like buggy software, we wouldn't have so many diseases to study; living things would just crash and stop.
The above should be taken as an evocative analogy for the complexity and senselessness - don't go too far trying to apply your intuition about designed/engineered systems (even really bad fragile ones) to biology.
The reason it's so crazy is that it's been evolving for billons of years - random mutations without one discernable iota of forethought or intention. The reason it works at all is that we're looking at the tiny fraction of accumulated changes that didn't die out. Evolution by natural selection builds crazy awesome, intricate things - just not sensibly engineered ones.
Do not doubt experts on this field. What he's saying is true.
> Biological systems are hard to understand and to modify, but maybe that's more due to redundancy that has evolved than to systems that are coupled like bad software systems.
No, it's not. It's all highly interconnected. There are no nice decoupled modules. If someone is showing you a module from biology which seems to have no interactions, he's leaving out information.
The only reason biological systems are not as fragile (although they also are. E.S. Collizi did some interesting research on why) as you think is precisely because they are so interconnected and redundant.
Furthermore, you seem to misunderstand why we don't see fragility. It's not because we get sick instead, but because nearly all of the nontrivial mutations are highly lethal, and the fetus dies in utero and you get a miscarriage. Most miscarriages happen so early the mother doesn't even notice.
Biological systems mostly make up for the brittleness by being, if they survive, very redundant. You might be made up out of spaghetti code, but damn if we can't monkeypatch that shit on the fly!
Well said, I'm a biomedical engineer and even the cutting edge of research in this field is crushingly far from finding the capital T Truth of biology.
this is literally why I went into bio after learning to program: I thought it was like being told "this is a computer, but we have no manual, so just hack and let us know if you find something interesting".
30 years later, I'm back in computers because I can't deal with the constant ambiguity in bio.
OT, if I may ask, in what field eare you working exactly? I study bioinformatics and I always love to hear stories from someone with experience in the field (it is really hard to come by those people).
I have an email address on my profile, if you’d like to contact me more directly.
You can calculate digits of Pi, but can't understand why Pi is the way it is ... Do you call the assumption that humans and computers can never understand why Pi is the way it is, and that you cannot extract understandable patterns from Pi (or any irrational number for that matter) a religious idea?
That's not a difficult thing to imagine at all! Many mathematical problems have been unsolved in spite of a few thousands years of research! And math isn't nearly as weird as biological systems!
in a thousand years, of course, the things we're researching will be a thousand years differently evolved.
My point, mostly, is that any "law" of biology i've ever encountered has an "except sometimes when ..." clause. I do not expect that to change; biology is best described in the language of probability, and evolution (if i may anthropomorphize it so without peril) is very good at ruthlessly exploiting edge cases.
Oof. Every year I regret not sticking with genomics/ biology. Its changed so quickly that even what I learned at the beginning of this decade seems very outdated.
I love these discoveries.
Are proteins easy to detect and isolate? How does one tell where a protein begins and ends and if one megs protein is not just a bunch of smaller proteins.
Also how do they discover the functions of proteins? Just turn them off and on and try to see what effect it has on the body?
This is such a super interesting field; Any one have good resources (youtube) that show how this stuff is done in the lab?
Disclaimer: These are novel chemicals and most sources you can find them from are questionable at best. Don't even consider using these without deeply researching the risks from the specific peptide, the quality control of the supplier, as well as the inherent risks of injecting substances of questionable purity.
"It has been tested in animal trials for cytoprotective and wound healing activities. BPC-157 can contribute to wound healing due to muscle and tendon rejuvenating properties through accelerating the rate of angiogenic repair."
It is cheap and readily available (on Amazon even!), when injected it appears to greatly accelerate recovery from injuries - it's been called the "Wolverine drug" (as in the x-men character with superhuman healing powers). It requires injection, so its use is most common in bodybuilders who are aren't as averse to injecting questionable substances.
Many stories from people claiming it successfully repaired years-old tendon injuries and such. Some claim that oral administration can help with gut issues as well.
Melanotan is another interesting one - it's an injectable peptide that increases melanin in the skin. From the image journals I've seen reporting progress over time, it definitely is highly effective - one individual used for several months and went from a pasty caucasian to looking Indian or almost Black. He decided to discontinue his trial when his friends started making 'blackface' comments.
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I think it's a really exciting area of research, and I'm glad the people willing to take these risks post about it so readily on the /r/Peptides subreddit. Not for me, but I'm glad they're publishing the results of their n=1 studies!
Melatonin and Melanin are closely related chemicals that are used all over the body and are synthesized in the body through related mechanisms and pathways. Melatonin is used in the sleep-wake cycle and melanin is used by the skin to darken it and protect from solar radiation. When you need to sleep and when you need solar protection tend to be inversely related. The interaction between these processes is still being studied and is likely to involve many other things currently not under study.
In general, unless you are under the close supervision of your doctor, I would HIGHLY AVOID injecting peptides or really any other thing into you. In relation to just melanin and melatonin, the interactions are complicated and not well understood. We likely do not have the full picture of what melanin is doing in your body and there could be big problems. There also could be no problems at all. That said, I would not want to be the test cases for a M&M conference on this.
I do not think that people on /r/peptides are doing anything but unnecessarily putting their health at risk and (possibly) doing harm to their families, friends, and other relationships. As we know so little about this area of research, the risks are not well constrained and could result in death or worse. When it comes to health and wellness, especially biochemically, it is much better to leave it to ethical and well trained medical researchers that know what to look out for and how to help when things go bad. Auto-biochem hacking is a hard pass from me for now.
While I agree personally, I am comfortable letting others experiment with new drugs and take on that risk with the potential to discover things a bit faster than traditional medicine. Regardless of what you think of CBD, it has garnered steam because of non-medical use and I think brought it up to popular culture which researchers are then hearing about and interested in researching more.
At the end of the day, in the USA, we tend to avoid telling adults what to put in their bodies. I like it that way and I see this as just an extension of the same thing.
That being said, they shouldn't be selling their solutions or misleading people with non-existent medical data. You are hacking your biology, death and injury are very real potential risks you can only accept for yourself.
researchers have been working on CBD much longer than it was in the popular culture (I'm not contradicting your statement that it garnered steam in the popular culture).
For example, in England there is a whole company that has gotten CBD through clinical trials and approval (you couldn't have done this in the US at the time). The researchers knew two decades ago that CBD had medical potential, although they only completed trials in 2015 and it was approved in the US in 2018.
One of the big changes for researchers (in the US) is that it's a lot easier to obtain materials, but it's still really onerous.
The comment you are replying to is referring to Melanotan and you are referring to Melatonin. Two very different things (but the same caution about injecting peptides should apply to both)
Melanotan has been reported to cause yawning and sleepiness as a side effect, so I think concern that MelanotAn could interfere with the melatonIn system is certainly plausible.
Totally agree, and your comment compelled me to add a disclaimer to the top of my comment to discourage anyone from jumping into these based on the reported benefits without understanding the serious risks.
That being said, if people are going to try these, I'm glad that they are sharing their experiences online to both warn others of negative reactions and indicate promising avenues for further clinical research.
I would love to see a website that organizes clandestine research like this in a way that makes it more functionally useful - reddit and other forum testimonials are the best I've seen so far, and they leave a lot to be desired. This is something that I'd like to work on, but my biggest concerns are legal liability and how to screen out profit-motivated fake testimonials.
I've been trying to get the capsule form of it for gut repair, but there are only two companies that make it and they are always out of stock. BPC-157 is certainly interesting and I would love to try it.
I've read of people preparing the injectable form with bacteriostatic water and syringing it directly into the back of their throat and swallowing, or into a capsule for swallowing.
Definitely do your own research before forging ahead - these are uncharted waters with inherent risk - but it is supposedly stable in gastric juices so I don't think encapsulation necessarily requires anything fancy.
In retrospect it’s shocking that we are surprised by this.
When life evolved on earth wouldn’t it have first been dominated by shorter, less complex proteins? Why assume all of those have disappeared? Especially when we have some pretty archaic forms of life still around?
Wow. Amazing how incredible biology and proteins are and their still-barely-understood mechanisms. For anyone who hasn't already seen it, I highly recommend The Inner Life of a Cell [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y