From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Tue Mar 21 2006 - 00:04:55 MST
"Philip Goetz" <philgoetz@gmail.com> Wrote:
> He doesn't mention that those gene alterations
> merely slow down metabolism and produce weak,
> lethargic worms that couldn't survive in nature
> and probably do not experience whatever
> constitutes happiness for a worm.
That's not true for a mutation in the daf-2 gene, the animals were quite
active they just lived a long time. Cynthia Kenyon wrote about it in Science
and I found an article about it on the web:
"Whereas the mean life span of wild type was 20 days, these animals had mean
life spans of 124 days," Kenyon's team reports. "In fact, only 15% of the
animals died in the first three months." What's more, the worms are "quite
active for most of their lives." The authors compare the long-lived worms to
"healthy, active 500-year-old" humans.
"These findings in C. elegans show that remarkable life span extensions can
be produced with no apparent loss of health or vitality by perturbing a
small number of genes and tissues in an animal," Kenyon's team writes. These
life span extensions, which they claim are among the longest ever produced
in any organism, "are particularly intriguing because the insulin/IGF-1
pathway controls longevity in many species, including mammals."
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8234/8234aging.html
For the entire story.
John K Clark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:56 MDT