RE: A Little Economics and Healthy Life Extension

Fight Aging!: A Little Economics and Healthy Life Extension

Following up on a recent call for an economic analysis of staged radical life extension - progression through ever-better medical technologies and ever-greater extensions of healthy life span to reach a form of actuarial escape velocity, always a step ahead of age-related degeneration - Michael Rae has unearthed a 1979 Laurence J. Kotlikoff paper entitled "Some Economic Implications of Life Span Extension" that I think you'll find interesting. The full PDF version is online, a graphic reminder of a time in which typewriters ruled the earth:
[Via Fight Aging!]

technorati tags: life exension, economics, cryonics

Vaccine provides 100 percent protection against avian flu virus in animal study

I shouldn't be surprised at how quickly this was developed, but I still am. I also had no idea that the previous vaccine had to be grown in chicken eggs. This development will also greatly speed the production of the vaccine. I think this will effectively eliminate the chances of a pandemic for this particular virus.

University of Pittsburgh researchers have developed an avian flu vaccine that completely protected mice and chickens from infection by the deadly H5N1 virus. Because it is a live virus vaccine, it may be more immune-activating than an avian flu vaccine prepared by traditional methods. It also can be grown in cells rather than fertilized chicken eggs and, thus, can be produced much more quickly than traditional vaccines.

[Via EurekAlert!]

TOR Signaling and Calorie Restriction

The researchers working on thousands of strains of gene-engineered yeast in order to understand metabolism and longevity are turning up some interesting science: "We developed a high-throughput assay to determine [life span] for approximately 4800 single-gene deletion strains of yeast, and identified long-lived strains carrying mutations in the conserved TOR pathway. TOR signaling regulates multiple cellular processes in response to nutrients, especially amino acids, raising the possibility that decreased TOR signaling mediates life span extension by calorie restriction." Scientists are turning up all sorts of places to be looking for the biochemical mechanisms of longevity through calorie restriction.



View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16418483

Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

[Via Longevity Meme]

One million people, one medical gamble

I think this is a great idea. I don't know about you, but if I was one of the baby boomer generation, I think I would definitely take part in something like this. This could produce some major results relatively quickly. Think what it could do if they were to sequence the genome of every person in the study, and correlate that with the medical data.

A huge scheme is underway in the UK and US to find out how our genes and the environment interact - but at what cost?

original article

RE: SIRT6 and Accelerated Aging

Scientists are discovering all sorts of interesting things now that mainstream calorie restriction research is focused on sirtuins: "The research on SIRT6 is part of a broad effort in the Alt laboratory to study the role of a family of seven known mammalian sirtuin genes. These studies were prompted by findings some two decades ago that a yeast counterpart called Sir2 maintains genomic stability and regulates aging in yeast cells. Researchers had also found that enhancing the activity of Sir2's counterparts in the roundworm and fruit fly extended their life span. ... we've found that the SIRT6 knockout produces the most dramatic effects ... The researchers do not know whether the accelerated aging-like effects of losing [SIRT6] relate to its role in DNA repair. Nor do they know whether the degenerative effects are relevant to the natural aging process. However, they said, the discovery offers an intriguing new model for studying DNA repair, as well as its possible role in aging-related degeneration."



View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.hhmi.org/news/alt20060127.html

Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/

[Via Longevity Meme]