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 Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23681