Aging Matters
A venerable theory of aging is the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory (MFRTA). Mitochondria are the energy factories of the cell, where sugar is burned to create electrochemical energy. Of necessity, the mitochondria use high-energy chemistry, and this creates toxic waste in the form of ROS–pieces of molecules that are too eager to combine with delicate … Read more
A recurrent theme on this page is the idea that human aging is driven by a combination of proteins circulating in the blood. Blood is not just red cells and white cells; there is the blood plasma which contains thousands of dissolved proteins (and RNAs), signal molecules which regulate all aspects of metabolism, on time … Read more
Dear Readers – It’s been a deeply gratifying year for me. Twenty years ago, I first started writing that aging is something the body does to itself, a body function, rather than deterioration or loss of function. Journals would not even send my submission out for peer review. Journal of Theoretical Biology sent me the … Read more
From the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA came an announcement last week that the four factors previously identified to turn ordinary cells into stem cells (in cell cultures) was successfully used as a rejuvenation procedure in live mice. The results provide important new evidence for the hypothesis that aging is under epigenetic control, and … Read more
One of the major themes in aging science of the last 15 years has been that there is natural variation in telomere length, and individuals with longer telomeres have lower disease risk and longer life expectancy than those with shorter telomeres. A paper last week in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology found that stem cell … Read more
I have just returned from three months in Beijing as a visiting scholar at the National Institute for Biological Sciences. My host was Meng-Qiu Dong, who heads a lab studying aging in worms. At the end of my stay, I took a look at longevity from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine. There is no … Read more
The dominant theory of aging today was conceived at a time when genes were thought to be biological destiny. Handiwork of George Williams, it is called Antagonistic Pleiotropy. Pleiotropy is the idea that one gene can have multiple effects, and the core of the AP theory is that there are genes that give us strength … Read more
Thanks to some of my readers who noticed that AgingAdvice.org had disappeared. It is now back online. FMDRecipes.org is also back online. (The site had been hosted by GoogleDrive, and I missed Google’s announcement that they would no longer be supporting public web pages. The page now has a permanent home at Site5.com. The web address remains … Read more
Cold Spring Harbor labs on Long Island has a diverse offering of conferences that attract experts from all areas of biology. For the last six years, there has been a sister group organizing conferences in Suzhou, China. I spent last week at the 2016 CSH Asia conference on Systems Biology. While I have been to … Read more
C. elegans worms live up to 3 weeks, and for the last 2½ weeks, they are post-reproductive, unable to lay fertile eggs because they have run out of sperm to fertilize them. Why do they stop fertilizing their eggs, when sperm is metabolically ‘cheap’? Why has evolution endowed these nematodes with such an extended period … Read more