Dr. NakaMats Is the World's Most Prolific Inventor 194
MMBK writes to share an interesting look at Dr. "NakaMats" Nakamatsu, mastermind behind a world-record 3,000 patents. The 81-year-old scientist has inventions like the "PyonPyon" spring shoes, the karaoke machine, and others. He's also at least partly to blame for things like the digital watch, the floppy disk, and CDs. "Dr. Nakamatsu harbors other ambitions too: in 2007, he took his penchant for political campaigning to a new level, becoming a candidate in the gubernatorial election in Tokyo, and the election for the Upper House. Although he failed to get a seat, Dr. NakaMats has other tricks up his sleeve. In 2005 he was awarded the Ig Nobel prize for Nutrition, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting). By the time he dies at the age of 144 (a goal he maintains with an elaborate daily ritual that rejuvenates his body and triggers his creative process), he intends to patent 6,000 inventions."
Unless he's invented (Score:2, Informative)
Most prolific? I doubt it. (Score:5, Informative)
He's got nothing on Shampoo.
More info about his lifestyle (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wait...what? (Score:3, Informative)
Ig Nobel (note the Ig) prizes are awarded for weird, but actual research. Unless there was some scientific value to your organization of shoes you wouldn't get one. His photographing of his food is at very least interesting for nutrition. It looks like he also did some sort of analysis on it, though I can't find what exactly. So, this is actually a very long running study, and not just an OCD thing.
Skip the video and read (Score:3, Informative)
The linked is a video that takes to long to watch, read this one instead.
http://www.wishtank.org/magazine/commons/yoshiro_nakamatsu_we_salute_you1 [wishtank.org]
Re:gadgets you probably use every day... (Score:1, Informative)
The sauce pump is also used in hand lotion containers, therefor many of us owe our "social lives" to this guy.
Re:Unless he's invented (Score:3, Informative)
A way to cap telomere's he's not going to see 144. Antioxidants can keep in-gene encoding errors low but when the telomere's unravel there's nothing we can currently do to reverse the effects.
I'm going to need a citation for the rate here to prove he wouldn't be able to make it to 144. One person [wikipedia.org] lived to 122. I have no idea what she eventually died of, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that 22 more years would be impossible due to telomere shortening. How fast the telomere burns down until further cell proliferation is no longer possible, how many divisions this requires, and how many divisions are happening in the important tissues per year? Because I don't think most of those things are known or even necessarily estimated, and I'd be suprised as all heck if that estimate suggested somewhere between 122 and 144.
While it's quite obvious he won't live to infinity, I've never seen anything to indicate that his intestinal stem cells, for example, are going to be exhausted before the age of 144. The current textbook model for intestinal stem cells is that they divide rarely, and when they do they usually produce one stem cell and one transiently amplifying cell that divides like mad to actually produce the terminal cells that don't proliferate further. So while there are now maybe 200 cells from that one cell division, the stem cell that is going to continue has only effectively divided once.
Furthermore, cell proliferation doesn't happen in the entire adult body. You brain cells for example don't continue diving and would not be directly limited by telomere shortening.
That being said, I kind of doubt that antioxidants are going to keep him from getting cancer or heart disease, or dying of an accident.
Re:Unless he's invented (Score:3, Informative)
Filing a patent != invention (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Unless he's invented (Score:3, Informative)
Neurons do in fact divide (or at least we now know new neurons do grow, not sure if the genesis of that growth is known).
Some of that is in fact known [wikipedia.org], it's not the neurons dividing, it's a niche of neuronal stem cells (not neurons themselves) producing new neurons. Notably, it's the subventricular zone [wikipedia.org] and the subgranular zone. The SVZ for certain and the subgranular zone I'm pretty sure don't contain mature neurons. The proliferative cells of the SVZ are well known to not be neurons. In fact, several factors that seem to be important to actually being a mature neuron appear to stop the cell cycle and prevent cell division, suggesting that a cell is a neuron, it won't be dividing, and if it's dividing, it's not exactly a neuron. Then again, we could have already found an exception to that rule that I don't know about.
Those sites of proliferation might also dry up as a result of telomere shortening, but the mature neurons already present would not be affected as they're not dividing. We also haven't found a function yet for adult neurogenesis, although I've read interesting speculation that "chemo brain" or loss of mental sharpness when taking chemotherapy might be a result of that.
Anyway, neurons of the brain really don't seem to divide, and telomere shortening isn't directly going to kill your neurons before the age of 144.
The upper bound on divisions for cells appears to be about 50 (known as the Hayflick limit) which is speculated to be at the heart of current human maximum lifespan with other factors causing the majority of deaths before the limit is reached for key stem cells.
That is interesting, but 50 cell divisions does not appear to prevent a person from living to 122, I suspect that isn't going to limit a person to below 144 either.