Category Archives: Science in the News

But my grandma smokes and she’s like 80!

With the negative health effects of smoking tobacco well understood by science and accepted in the general population, many smokers struggle to justify their habit. A common excuse is that they know somebody who did xyz their whole life and they are still alive and well at a ripe old age. It’s a common logical fallacy to take a small sample size (even just an individual) and attempt to generalize it on the larger population.

But what about that elderly person in your family that has been smoking since they were 20? The 85 year old daily drinker? What about Ozzy Osbourne? If we die so much younger, how do the cumulative effects of decades of drug abuse not impact these people?

Researches from the Universities of California and Southern California wondered the same thing when they took a look at people like Jeanne Calment. At an age of 122 she was a daily smoker – since the age of 21! She didn’t have a particularly good diet either, with large quantities of wine and chocolate on the regular. Somehow Madame Calment defied all statistics. The researches looked in the genetic code of 90 such people with the goal to find out why they go against the grain. What they found were previously unknown genetic differences which gave their carriers ‘superpowers’, putting them into a “biologically distinct group”.

Ozzy Osbourne How is he still alive?

Source: Creative Commons License – Source: www.northatlanticbooks.com

There are a small number of people that are born with genetic markers which appear to shield them from some of the negative consequences of smoking, the researchers concluded. It is people like Ozzy Osbourne who, despite decades of well documented drug abuse, seem to have sustained less physical damage than one might expect. The researches suggest this may be the same or a related process that allows certain people to be ‘young and full of life’ in very high ages while a majority their age peers tend to die much younger.

Maybe drugs are ok after all?

It appears there is an unknown population among us who have the innate genetic ability to survive environmental damage that kills most others. While screening for such a resistance is not practical yet, future advances in genetic sequencing will soon make it available to the general public. And what if you happen to be one of those super-humans? The research team reiterated: Even if you are a carrier of these protective genes, stopping smoking will always be beneficial to your health.

This may be a positive outcome for the purpose of communicating science to the public. We now understand much better why certain people can smoke and still live a (relatively) healthy life. The element of the unknown has invited people to speculate that smoking itself might not be the culprit (see headline). Yet now we know that tobacco still effects humans the way we know it, it’s just that a subset of the population happens to be more resistant. Once we can integrate these results into different areas of medical science routine screenings as well as the potential of gene therapy for the many non-resilient humans opens up.

Lorenz Buehler