Heavy water prolongs life: details
The first message that the Russian scientist Mikhail Shchepinov, working in England, created not only a real elixir of eternal youth, but a means capable of delaying the onset of old age, based on heavy water, was confusing and incomprehensible. We offer you an abridged retelling of a much more competent article from NewScientist magazine (Would eating heavy atoms lengthen our lives?).
A brilliant idea came to the scientist on the Catholic Christmas of 2006, when Mikhail Shchepinov, an employee of the Moscow Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, worked for a British biotechnology company in Oxford, and devoted all his free time to studying literature on aging. The theory of free radicals is the most widespread at the moment. According to it, the aging of the body is the result of irreversible damage to the biomolecules that make up our body. The main culprit of the destruction is recognized as free radicals (primarily reactive oxygen species) – aggressive chemical compounds that are a byproduct of human metabolism.
The reason why these radicals are dangerous is that they take away electrons from everything that comes across: water, proteins, fats and DNA, leaving behind a trail of destruction. The damage caused by oxygen radicals only increases over time and leads to the fact that biochemical processes in the body cease to function normally.
One of the most destructive results of the action of radicals is the so-called carbonylation of proteins, when radicals attack the fragile hydrocarbon chains of protein. It is this process that underlies the most serious diseases of old age, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, cancer, diabetes and chronic kidney failure.
The human body produces a huge amount of antioxidants, including vitamins and enzymes that intercept free radicals before they can cause harm. However, over time, this protective system, in turn, also becomes a victim of free radical attacks. Therefore, many means to slow down aging are primarily aimed at supporting the body's own defense system by supplying it with antioxidants such as vitamin C and beta-carotene, although there is no evidence that these measures are beneficial.
Shchepinov took a different path in the fight against radicals. His daily work lay in the field of studying the isotopic effect, which is that the presence of heavy isotopes in a molecule can slow down its entry into chemical reactions, since heavy isotopes form stronger chemical bonds. For example, the bond between carbon and deuterium atoms turned out to be 80 times stronger than the one containing hydrogen.
All this has been known for a long time. The isotopic effect was discovered in the 30s of the last century, and its mechanism was explained in the 40s. Nevertheless, Shchepinov became the first researcher to link this effect with aging. He thought: if aging is caused by the destructive effect of free radicals on covalent bonds in biopolymer molecules, and these bonds can be strengthened due to the isotopic effect, then why not use it to make fragile biomolecules more resistant to attacks? All that needs to be done is to put deuterium or carbon–13 into the most vulnerable chains for attacks, and chemistry will take care of the rest.
The first article outlining the proposed method, “Reactive Oxygen Species, Isotope Effect, Essential Nutrients, and Enhanced Longevity”, was published last March in the journal Rejuvenation Research. Its editor, the well-known radical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, became a scientific consultant for the company Retrotope organized by Shchepinov.
Opponents of the new method have two serious arguments. Firstly, there are myriad chemical bonds in the human body, and not all of them are susceptible to free radicals. The question arises: how to deliver isotopes exactly where they are needed? Secondly, the ingestion of heavy isotopes cannot be called healthy in any way.
The scientist claims that neither one nor the other is a serious problem. Some heavy isotopes, such as tritium and carbon-14, are indeed radioactive, and their use is unsafe. At the same time, isotopes such as deuterium and carbon-13 are quite stable, both occur in small quantities in nature and are a natural part of some biomolecules found in our body. Both isotopes, which is important, are practically non-toxic. In mice that were kept on a diet enriched with carbon-13 for a long time, up to 60% of the atoms of ordinary carbon-12 were replaced with a heavy isotope without harm to health.
M. Shchepinov's article "Do heavy eaters live longer?", published a year ago in the journal BioEssays, provides another curious fact: embryos actively absorb a heavy but stable carbon isotope C13 from their maternal bodies. And since neurons do not divide, many protein molecules and, most importantly, DNA in them, according to Shchepinova, have increased resistance to free radicals, which makes great evolutionary sense – prevents the accumulation of damage in the brain: "Every single atom in the DNA of a 100-year–old's brain is the same atom that was in this place when he was 15 years old."
In human experiments, the content of heavy water in the body was brought up to 2.5% and did not lead to negative consequences. Moreover, the researchers found that deuterium has become part of some proteins.
Nevertheless, experiments with plants and animals have shown that heavy water is indeed toxic, but only in very high concentrations. With a 20 percent deuterium content in water, mammals exhibit toxic effects, and a 35 percent concentration is fatal. Plant cells withstood 30-, 50-percent concentrations of heavy water. And unicellular algae could live in 75-, 80-percent heavy water. And only the simplest nematode animals not only existed in heavy water, but their life even extended by how many weeks.
But the company in which our scientist works and is not going to give its customers elixirs on heavy water. Instead, she is going to create products with her content. This method has a huge number of advantages, since it allows you to target heavy isotopes exactly where they are needed. Of the 20 amino acids necessary for a person, the body independently produces only 10, and the rest come from food. Thus, if you include in your diet foods containing the right amino acids, whose vulnerable bonds have already been strengthened by isotopes, it is they that your body's proteins will receive. Similarly, some components of fats and DNA enter the body through food, which can be enriched accordingly, Shchepinov says.
An alternative to artificially enriched products can be meat, milk and eggs obtained from pets whose diet included heavy water and "enhanced" amino acids. The only problem is that none of the companies working in the production of products can create the necessary ingredients. Employees of the Moscow Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry and Minsk State University are already working on solving this problem.
Another obstacle that the merchants of youth have to overcome is the high price of the final product. At the moment, the production of 1 liter of heavy water costs $ 300. "Indeed, isotopes are expensive," Shchepinov says. – However, there is no need to mine them. There are other methods of obtaining them, but no one needs them." While there is no demand, there is no need to produce heavy water in industrial quantities, so prices continue to remain high.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru according to the materials Point.Ru
03.12.2008