X-Message-Number: 23681
From: 
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 00:37:54 EST
Subject: Antiaging research articles

Content-Language: en

Hi: 

Recent articles about two prominent researchers of aging are rather 

interesting.  They seem to indicate that these people think that we may have 
anti-aging 
drugs within a few years. 

The first is an interview in Discover,  March 2004, with Cynthia Kenyon.  

Since 1993 she has been working with nematodes by suppressing genes, and 
recently 
has extended their lifespans sixfold.  Similar genes have been found in fruit 
flies and changing them causes the flies to live longer too.  The interviewer 
points out that worms and fruit flies are very different from humans, and she 
replies "That's why it's so exciting that these experiments are working in 
mice, in mammals.  In mice, two different research groups have shown that the 
homologues of daf-2 control mouse life span ... They removed  the insulin 

receptor from this [fat] tissue and extended life.     They lived longer, and 
they 
didn't get fat."  

The interviewer also asks the "Is your company conducting mouse trials of an 
antiaging drug?" she replies "We have animal data in the company, but it's 
still in the early stages.  We're trying to make small molecules right now.  

We're hopeful.  We just got some preliminary information that looks great. " She
says that it appears that the gene functions only in the adults to control 
aging.  "If you turn down this hormone system during development, and then you 

turn it back up in adulthood, there is no effect on aging.  But at the beginning
of adulthood, if you turn it down, you would live as long as you would if the 
gene were turned down your whole life.  So it's only the adult  that matters, 
which is great. We don't know yet whether you continue to get larger effects 
if you turn down the daf-2 in late adulthood. " 

I haven't looked, but at the end of the article it says that an extended 
version is available on-line at www.discover.com.  

The second quote occurs in a peculiar place, in the March 2004 Coloradan, the 
alumni magazine of the University of Colorado.  There is an article called 
Never Grow Old, with a silly illustration which makes it appear to be pure 

fluff.  Yet in the middle of the article are interesting and serious quotes by 
the 
geneticist Tom Johnson at the University of Colorado.  The article does not 

say if Johnson is a Noble-ist but I believe he is quite famous. (nemotods too I
think - caloric restriction?)  Johnson says "There are clinical trials under 
way right now for  life-span-prolonging interventions.  And we might see them 

in a decade or less on the market.  The interventions we have been working with
can prolong life 70%. " 
(Elsewhere he speaks of knocking out the actions of some of 200 genes, so I 
do not have the impression the intervention is caloric restriction.) 

The rest of the article is boring, but I find it exciting that two prominent 
mainstream scientists are now speaking seriously about drugs which might 

nearly double the human life span.  I think that such people are strongly 
opposed 
to great exaggerations and overpromising.  And this is the first time I have 
seen such people going out on a limb to say that we may soon have drugs like 
this.

"The times they are a'changin'!"

Alan Mole


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