Posted on 06/09/2009 11:46:19 PM PDT by neverdem
People die, but one part of them, at least in principle, is immortal. In the germline cells that produce eggs or sperm, biological time stands still. This is why babies are all born with the same age, the clock set to zero, regardless of the age of their parents.
A little piece of the germline’s immortality, it now seems, can be acquired by the ordinary cells of the body, and used to give the organism extra longevity.
This is the conclusion of a research group at the Massachusetts General Hospital led by Sean P. Curran and Gary Ruvkun. Their studies were carried out in the laboratory round worm, C. elegans, but many of the discoveries later turned out to apply to people, too.
The finding may provide an explanation for the many recent experiments in which biologists have made laboratory organisms live longer by manipulating their genes. Most of these genes lie in what is known as the insulin-signaling pathway, which influences the body’s metabolism of fat and glucose.
When the pathway is disturbed, by deactivating one of its genes, the animal generally lives longer. The effect seems similar to the extension of life span enjoyed by laboratory mice when they are kept on a diet very low in calories.
The insulin-signaling pathway activates a powerful gene regulator that controls many genetic pathways, including some that govern metabolism. Dr. Ruvkun’s team reports in Nature a novel effect of the regulator: It can switch on in the worm’s ordinary body cells, or somatic cells, two genes that are usually active only in the germline cells and are kept permanently switched off in the somatic cells.
These two genes protect the cells’ DNA by reducing protein synthesis and cranking up the worm’s equivalent of an immune system.
Higher-level protection of DNA is...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Do we really want to start going down this road? Sure, everyone wants Grandma or Grandpa to stick around a few more years, but how about a Kim Jong-Il or Fidel Castro who can get a new lease on life? Maybe our cells have an expiration date for a very good reason :)
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Gator113
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Kim Jong-Il, his father Kim Il-Sung, IIRC, or Fidel Castro, why are we bedeviled by these petit tyrants? We avoided having a decisive resolution. It's come back to haunt us.
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Who wants to live long anymore? The new Statist mentality is “Hurry up and die working at 50 so no one will have to foot your elderly medical bills”.
Yes, longevity is good.
The longer the worm, the better the worm. 8<)
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