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<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2></FONT></DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2></FONT>From <A
href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/22/BUG4E5OBTG1.DTL">SFGate.com</A>:
If humans are like worms, we may be closer to living considerably longer lives
than most people realize. The worms in question are transparent and about a
millimeter long. A favorite of geneticists because of their simple anatomy and
small number of genes, they wriggle around on a clear gel of worm-edible
bacteria in the lab of Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular geneticist at UCSF's new
Mission Bay campus. Normally, these roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans) live for
about 20 days. But when genetically tweaked by Kenyon and her team last year,
they have lived an average of 125 days, six times normal -- the equivalent of
you or me living to over 400 years old. <BR>They weren't old and decrepit as
they pushed outward in worm days, but youthful, wiggling happily on their gel in
videos Kenyon shows visitors to her lab. In human terms, this would mean a
person would remain youthful for decades, growing old very slowly. It also
suggests a radical new method for treating maladies of aging such as Alzheimer's
disease, Huntington's disease and some cancers. The idea would be to manipulate
a few genes to help fix these ailments systemically by extending life span
rather than by treating one disease at a time. (For many of these diseases,
aging is the No. 1 risk factor.). <BR>But why stop at 150? What about
immortality? "I think this may be possible someday," she
says.</DIV></BODY></HTML>