X-Message-Number: 31834 From: Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:13:11 EDT Subject: "That's Incredible" program on "Eternal Life"-- also Parabios... The program was reasonably accurate and pro-science. On Cryonics they showed Alcor and explained things reasonably well. John Rennie, Editor in Chief of Scientific American, said it was a last-ditch insurance policy, and Aubrey DeGrey says they can't revive you yet, but he pays a little to a life insurance company each month so if he deanimates suddenly he'll be covered for cryo. Someone else calls it a sci-fi pipe dream, but the narrator says that's what they called heart transplants too. Then it launches into transplants and organ growth. It was very encouraging that Scientific American was positive. Just a couple of years ago their Skeptic, Micheal Shermer, said you could freeze tissue but upon thawing it would be "hamburger". (Thus apparently denying the successes of cryobiology, which nobody else ever doubted.) I've previously discussed parabiosis here, connecting the circulatory systems of two rats, young and old, as was done in the 60's. (The older rat then lived longer.) The program makes no mention of that, but does show Dr. Thomas Rando of Stanford, who did it with two mice in 2007, and found damage repaired faster in the old mouse (cuts healed faster etc.) It's interesting someone is still working on it. They hypothesize there is some single "youth" ingredient. That was hypothesized long ago, that some small molecule mediated "age" and if we could find it and synthesize it we could make a fountain-of-youth drug. Alan Mole **************Hot Deals at Dell on Popular Laptops perfect for Back to School (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1223105306x1201716871/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Faltfarm.mediaplex.com%2Fad%2Fck%2F12309%2D81939%2D1629%2D9) Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=31834