X-Message-Number: 22645 From: Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 10:50:02 EDT Subject: Bill Warner >3.) This shortening of the telomere is the basis of aging It is one type of aging. Mice have telomerase on in every cell, but still age from other causes (mitochondrial DNA damage, etc.) Bowhead whales, on the other hand, allow somatic cell telomeres to shorten (you won't find this on Pubmed yet, I haven't written it up), but still live 200 years. >4.) The shortening of the telomere uncovers additional genes that code for aging and eventually death. No one has found "telomere position effect" in human cells with natural genes. (Dr. Joe Baur wasted his whole grad student stint trying, though). As far as lengthening telomeres goes, there's already a program for a nanobot in every cell for not only lengthening telomeres, but selectively lengthening the shortest ones first. It's called telomerase... the trick is to turn it on when it's needed. -Bill Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22645