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Ageless Quest: One Scientist's Search for Genes that Prolong Youth
by Lenny Guarente
MIT scientist goes in search of the ever elusive fountain of youth.
Ah, yes – the ever elusive fountain of youth. It's been pursued by everyone from explorers to anthropologists to scientists, with their efforts most often being regarded as nothing more than human folly.
But with recent advances in science, is it such a foolish notion anymore?
According to author and MIT molecular biologist, Lenny Guarante, it is not, and he presents his evidence in Ageless Quest: One Scientist's Search for Genes that Prolong Youth.
Guarante's experiments, oddly enough, started with yeast as he looked for ways to keep yeast from aging during times of food scarcity, and his research revealed slowing the aging process in yeast boiled down to manipulating a single gene – a gene that is remarkably similar to a gene that is also found in animals.
Coincidence? Maybe. Guarante himself admits, “The aging process is extremely complex with many causes,” and “The chronicle of our research is by no means the final word on aging.”
By nature, scientific research is a long drawn-out affair that can take years to yield significant results, but Guarante's book does make for interesting reading as he relates “how new findings are made, while acknowledging the sometimes chance nature of scientific discovery.”
And so with the help of a group of graduate students at MIT, Guarante set about pursuing the brass ring that unlocks the fountain of youth by taking on the onerous task of trying to determine which of roughly 6,000 genes found in yeast might determine life span.
From there, they extrapolated their findings to worms, where their suspicions about the gene that extended life were confirmed.
Not everyone on the faculty at MIT shared Guarante's enthusiasm about the results. “I couldn't wait to race to my brand-new department chairman to tell him that we made worms live extra long by giving them more copies of their own SIR2 gene,” Guarante writes, “His response – ‘just what the world needs, long-lived worms.”
And despite his own enthusiasm, Guarante also realizes the limitations of his research thus far, acknowledging, “We have traveled down a very narrow path of SIR2 genes in our studies of aging. Different roads followed by other labs may lead more directly to the fountain of youth,” and also wondering aloud, “What if SIR2 genes turn out not to be relevant to human aging? Sure, there have been other molecular models of aging that have fallen by the wayside. In fact, most of them have.”
But still, Guarante's book, although sometimes slow going due to scientific jargon, provides an interesting inside look at both the tedium and rewards inherent in scientific research.
Naturally, Guarante has founded a biotechnology company that aims to capitalize on his discovery by developing drugs that may slow the aging process in humans.
Title: Ageless Quest: One Scientist's Search for Genes that Prolong Youth
Author: Lenny Guarente
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
ISBN: 0879696524
Review written by: Marc Duane Anderson
Reviewer's Rating:5.5
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
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