[extropy-chat] Altered genes let roundworms wiggle longer

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 gpmap at runbox.com
Mon Mar 22 18:58:30 UTC 2004


>From SFGate.com: 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.
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.).
But why stop at 150? What about immortality? "I think this may be possible
someday," she says.

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