immortality as an engineering problem
fortune at teleport.com
Sun Aug 9 04:08:32 EST 1998
James wrote in message <35AF951A.73E32CAC at nospam.com>...
>Many readers of this group, even if they can critically evaluate a
>paper, may not be familiar with scientific publishing considerations. Read
>hopefully this will prove interesting.
>> > The "distant future" may be closer than you think. Dr. J.Shay et.al.
>> > published a report in SCIENCE Jan 16;279(5349):349-352 showing that by
>> > extending the telomeric length at the ends of human chromosomes that
>> > cells would survive beyond their normal senescence and death.
>> > Dr. C. Greider
>> > in current biology Vol. 8, No. 5, Feb. 1998 showed that the precursor
>> > enzyme telomerase, hTERT, can, by acting on the telomeres, cause human
>> > to live beyond their normal senescence and death.
>The experiments conducted by Shay et al. in the SCIENCE article have never
>successfully repeated. At least two labs have tried and failed (and those
>the ones I happen to know of - there are almost certainly more).
Holds the patent for related works.
>4) No one in my lab has ever even HEARD of the Current Biology paper.
>prove anything? No. But it is additional reason to be suspicious.
>a paper is out that should be news, but no one pays attention to it, that
>because people have decided that the work is junk.
>> In plain english they have found the cause and the cure for aging.
Actually they found the a mechanism of cellular senesence.
>He makes this statment, but then goes on to provide a huge list of caveats
>totally invalidate it. Even if you assume that the SCIENCE paper is true,
>a big assummption at this point, no, they haven't found the cause or cure
>aging. At best that have found some interesting ways to help burn victims
>maybe regrow other organs in the future by increasing the ability of cells
>replicate. Aging is much more than this.
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