X-Message-Number: 10988 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #10976 Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 22:13:08 +1100 (EST) Hi Tim! I noticed your reference and will try to find it in the local (ANU) academic library. I cannot do this immediately because it is shut for the Christmas holidays. I must also point out that this does not mean that the mice in question, assuming that they do not age, will necessarily live for a particularly long time, even for mice. There is another experiment bearing on this issue, which I will give you a reference for once I recover it (I think it was published in Journal of Gerontology). Someone looked at the actual lifespan of wild mice on a small island off of Britain. Their average lifespan was about 2 months; the same strain of mice, in the lab, live much longer than that. The author plotted the lifespan of these wild mice against time and got --- the same kind of curve you get with radioactive disintegration ie. they did not show a LIFESPAN in the normal sense. Lifespans in our sense occur when the animals (or persons) live long enough to die of internal problems, not external ones (such as consumption by crows or eagles). So a lot depends on just how long the half-life of these mice might be. If you remember that from the article, I'd be very interested. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10988