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(Last updated on Friday, August 15, 2008; 5:09 PM PDT)
Click for the formal XML-definition of the GRG universal time/date stamp
TDS.
December 28, 2007; A 90-day clinical trial of human Growth Hormone Releasing Factor 1- 29NH2 (Sermorelin) will be conducted by Drs. Karlis Ullis, Stephen Coles, and Richard Walker in early 2008; If you would like to learn more about this study or become a subject yourself, click for more details and examine a copy of the Human Subjects Informed Consent form to learn if you would be eligible to participate. E-mail Dr. Ullis at kullis@ucla.edu for further information.
By definition, a Supercentenarian is anyone who has been validated to have lived to be 110 years or older. We presently recognize 79 Validated Living Supercentenarians -- 69 Women and 10 Men.
June 2, 2007; In keeping with the times, we have now created an SRF website
presence on
with
access to a video clip of our CNN-TV Interview with Mrs. Gertrude
Baines,113, of Los Angeles. If you click on the MySpace Logo, the website should appear
accompanied by classical music (Demitri Schostakovich). BTW, if you already have a MySpace
account, please add us as a "friend." -- -- MySpace Site Administrator
July 10, 2006; Click on the SRF Logo above to consider making a contribution to our
newly-formed
Supercentenarian Research Foundation to further scientific research into to why
Supercentenarians live as long as they do? (And, conversely, why they don't live longer still?)
Now that we are incorporated and have held several meetings of our Board of Directors, we are
nearing approval of our 501(c)(3) non profit, tax-exempt status with the US Internal Revenue
Service. Nevertheless, we are urgently in need of "seed money" immediately to fund the
formation of an international team of physicians and investigators who could travel to visit each
of our living Supercentenarians around the world in person before they are no longer with us.
Obviously, the data that we plan to obtain is a precious resource that could disappear from our
radar screens unless we get started right away. If you can assist us with a pledge of even as little
as $100.00 or more, please click on the logo above to learn the details of how to accomplish this
contribution.
-- L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Director and Treasurer of the Supercentenarian Research
Foundation.
April 28, 2008; For those biblical scholars curious about what God has promised
humans regarding immortality on Earth (as distinct from Heaven), Dr. Pete Estep quoted from
the Old Testament during his LA-GRG Lecture...
"He shall swallow up death forever, and the Lord God shall wipe away tears from all faces; the
rebuke of His people [mortality] He will take away from all the Earth; for the Lord has spoken." -
- Isaiah 25:8 King James version
Thus, God seeks to abolish death hoping that we will achieve immorality on Earth, contrary to
what He seemed to fear in Genesis when he speculated about Adam and Eve eating not
only from "The Tree of Knowledge" but also from "The Tree of Life" were He not to evict these
disobedient humans from the Garden of Eden nor to post a Cherubim (an archangel) at the East
Gate with a flashing and flaming sword to prevent them from sneaking back into the Garden of
Eden without His explicit consent, "lest they eat from the second tree and become like one of
Us." [Note the use of plural pronoun "Us," the only occurrence in the Bible in which God admits
the existence of others like Himself.] ("After he drove the man out, he placed on the East side of
the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way back
to The Tree of Life." Genesis 3:24.
One of the curious things Dr. Estep explains is that religious conservatives, such as Prof. Leon
Kass, frequently ignore this text, saying instead that all attempts at human life extension are
sacrilegious (against God's will). So how can they reconcile this apparent contradiction? We
don't know.
January 30, 2008; Quote of the Day: "And to speak plainly and clearly, [the true end of knowledge] is [the] discovery of all operations [and possibilities of operations] [ranging] from the meanest mechanical practice to immortality [if it were possible]." - - Sir Francis Bacon, Chapter 1 "On the Limits and Ends of Knowledge," Valerius Terminus (1603).
Click for the current GRG Table of Worldwide Living Supercentenarians.
Our high for 2005 was 75, while our all-time high record for 2006 year was 87 Supercentenarians on November 9th. Our Chief Claims investigator, Mr. Robert Young of Atlanta, GA, has speculated that there are systematic seasonal variations each year with highs during the late Spring and early Summer and a fall-off in the latter part of the Summer or early Fall. This observation is purely empirical, and we have no scientific rationale for a mechanism for why this should be so. There may be statistical artifacts in the way our Japanese cases are reported to us by their government on an irregular basis.
The large ratio of women to men cannot be explained in simple terms. Although there is no shortage of hypotheses to explain why women outlive men by such a large margin at the end of human life (e.g., men are naturally more aggressive and therefore more likely to die violently or as soldiers in war, while women were always, but no longer, likely to die in child birth) none of these hypotheses are fully convincing. However, the ostensible protective effects of estrogen (and the lesser harmful effects of cortisol, as women are presumed on average to have less chronic stress) are the most plausible. However, the present differential life expectancy in favor of women for men-and-women-living-to-age-65 is expected to decline in future decades, as the rate of heart disease, our number-one killer, equilibrates once women pass menopause (and their estrogen is depleted -- in the absence of HRT. By the way, not all forms of HRT are protective, as we have sadly discovered in a surprising clinical trial with Premarin showing that it may not only be non-protective, it could actually contribute to a higher mortality compared with controls taking nothing at all (especially in women whose onset of HRT was not immediately following menopause to alleviate hot-flashes, but a few years later on)! The Route-of-Administration [pill vs. patch] and first-pass [through the liver] effects may be important. Bioidentical vs. synthetic estrogens could also be important. Clinical trials are presently underway to tease out these uncertainties. Curiously, we have seen a recent hypotheses that women have longer telomeres compared with men). Nevertheless, based on our own empirical statistics here at the GRG, the extraordinary longevity difference by gender in "the oldest old" has not shrunk over the last five years. As just one observation, the world's oldest person for the last five years has always been a woman (although this has not been true throughout history and it is not currently true following the death of Lizzie Bolden of Tennessee (December 11, 2006)). See our Table D for more details).
June 12, 2007; We presently have 183 worldwide members of the GRG Discussion Group hosted by UCLA. To join us, click on the "Join Us" Button to the left. Note: There could be as many as five to ten messages a day seven days-a-week. Some of them are about highly technical matters while some concern politics or literature, so we are a fairly eclectic, gregarious, and iconoclastic group. And even though there have been some occasional shouting-matches, we manage to maintain a high level of decorum and scholarship, with news items and abstracts from current journals that you may not discover easily by any other means.
August 27, 2006; We are sad to report that Sra. Capovilla passed away at 3:00 AM this morning due to pneumonia. See the News Section for details.
Please take a look at the website of one of our new sister organizations... The Society for Applied Research in Aging (SARA) based in South Florida. Dr. Richard F. Walker, Ph.D., R.Ph., Executive Director, is working on the fascinating case of Brooke Greenberg, a 14-year-old girl who appears to defy the normal process of aging (with a total disconnect between her biological age and her physiological age). Her diagnosis (genetic mutation or chromosomal aberration in the spectrum of embryogenesis/maturation/senescence) has not been made.
July 5, 2006; A team of our Senior Investigators (Dr. Tom Perls, Director of the New England Centenarian Study in Massachusetts, Mr. Robert Young of Georgia, Mr. Louis Epstein of New York, Mr. E. A. Kral of Nebraska, Ms. Emily Schoenhofen and Ms. Gayle Schlissel Riley of California) has identified two remarkable Supercentenarians -- the first confirmed pair of Mother/Child Supercentenarians in the world:
Miss Mary P. Romero Zielke Cota, at age 22 (L) taken 1892. Born in 1870 in Montecito, CA, she
died in 1982 at age 112 years, 17 days and
Miss Rosabell Zielke Champion Fenstermaker, at age 18 (R) taken 1911. Born in 1893 in
Carroll, NE, she died in 2005 at age 111 years, 344 days.
The vast majority of the nine children born to Mary Romero and Edward Zielke achieved a remarkable cluster of inherited longevity, not only by comparison with their own era but by current standards as well. Recall that average life expectancy for men in 1900 was only 47.8 years, while for women it was only 50.7 years. And one of the men was eliminated from the population by the Great Pan Flu Epidemic of 1918.
"Paradoxically," Mrs. Karen Lyons, Rosebell's Granddaughter who lives in Dove Canyon, CA in Orange County, explained, "her Mother and her Grandmother hardly knew one another (one lived in California while the other lived for a time in Nebraska), and that's why there are no known photos with both of them together at any age! More details can be found on the website of The Nebraska State Education Association's Profiles of Nationally Distinguished Nebraskans. Three additional early photos can be found in the Centenarian Section of our website.
Above are two sample photos of the World's Oldest Person, Madam Jeanne Calment of
France who died in 1997 at the documented age of 122 years 164 days, first when she was
20 years old (in 1895) and then a century later when she was
120 years old (in 1995).
Click on the first photo to see more historical photographs of Madame Calment (13 photos with
two others elsewhere) presented in approximately chronological order (not all the photos were
dated when we received them, so we had to guess on some of them).
For further details, click on the Centenarians Button here (or on the left side of this window) for the complete set of Official GRG Tables containing considerably more information. In addition, there are now well over 100 photographs of Supercentenarians in this section and the number grows every week.
Click on the photo below at it will take you to the current GRG Table of Worldwide Living Supercentenarians
Sra. Gesuina Donati of ITALY (born June 9, 1893) on the occasion of her 111th
birthday, with our Italian Correspondent, Mr. Giovanni Alunni. Note that the piece of paper
they are holding is an official hard copy of the GRG Table of the Oldest Worldwide Living
Persons. This Table serves as an inspiration to all living Supercentenarians, as it helps
them to appreciate where they rank in comparison with other persons of their own age all around
the world.
Quote for the Day...
"The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find homes elsewhere in the universe
because there's an increasing risk that a disaster could destroy Earth as we know it. Humans
could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.
We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we were to go to another star system." [1]
-
- Stephen Hawking, Ph.D., Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University; UK (a
post once held by Sir Isaac Newton), at a Press Conference while traveling yesterday in Hong
Kong. He also said on Thursday that Pope John Paul II tried to discourage him and other
scientists, attending a cosmology conference at the Vatican, from trying to figure out how the
universe began. The British scientist joked he was lucky the Pope didn't realize he had already
delivered a paper at the gathering suggesting how the universe had been created. "I didn't fancy
the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo," Hawking said in a lecture to a
sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In particular,
the late Pope told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because "it was
the work of God." Hawking quoted the Pope as saying, "It's alright to study the universe and
where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment
of 'creation' and 'the work of God.'" [2] Later, Hawkings took center stage in Beijing as the
headliner of a a national physics conference. His mere presence was a powerful symbol of what
China is likely to become. [3]
Refs.:
1. "Hong Kong: 'Man Must Leave Earth to Survive,' Hawking Says," The Los Angeles
Times, p. A21 (June 14, 2006).
2. AP, "Stephen Hawking Touches on God and Science," MS-NBC (June 15, 2006).
3. "Hawking Takes Beijing. Will Science Follow?" The New York Times, pp. A1, D1
(June 20, 2006).
May 2, 2006; Click for a Google Internet Video of Dr. Aubrey de Grey's recent talk at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference held on Saturday morning, February 25th (TRT = 23 min. 5 sec.). In his short PowerPoint slide presentation, de Grey makes a convincing argument for why our respected academic science and medical establishments will continue to resist the idea of employing government funds to adopt a serious engineering approach to anti-aging therapeutics (out of fear that the whole field will gain a bad reputation and consequently all researchers will suffer, because the public is already convinced that the task is impossible. After all, this is what they have been told by expert apologists for the status quo since they were children.). Nevertheless, "there are other entrepreneurial pathways involving the use of prizes that could lead us down a shorter path in the brief time period of only ten years when we could achieve life spans of 1,000 years for persons who are in their 60's today!"
Click on the image to the left
for the March 2006 issue of The Scientist with an excellent article, entitled
"In
Pursuit of the Longevity Dividend: What Should We Be Doing To Prepare for the Unprecedented
Aging of Humanity?"
by
S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., Daniel Perry, Richard A. Miller, M.D., Ph.D., and Robert N. Butler,
M.D.; as well as
"Your Money for Your Life: How One Company Carved Itself a Piece of the Anti-Aging
Industry
Pie" by Alison McCook;
"Plugging the Mitochondrial Leak" by Nick Lane; and
"The Trouble with Markers" by Michael O'Neill
[Editorial Remark: A copy of the first paper in the list above will soon appear in the Resources Section with further commentary, because, in our view, it represents a significant welcome departure in attitude from establishment figures in the field of Biogerontology regarding our field's short-term promise in the next five to ten years. They are well known for their largely-correct adversity to the concept of present, commercial "Anti-Aging Medicine." Perhaps now is the time to publish a sequel to the Scientific American article in that same journal that was endorsed by a broad spectrum of nearly 50 scientists in the field. (Scroll down to the bottom and click on to the next Main Page for details "No Truth to the Fountain of Youth," Scientific American, Vol. 286, No. 6, pp. 92-5 (June 2002)). -- Steve Coles]
March 25, 2005; Sorry, this clip has now been removed form our server to conserve space. If
you still need to download it, E-mail me personally, and we will arrange to send you a copy.
Steve Coles.
Click on the photo to download a high-resolution 40-second "*.avi" video file of a clip from
the February 17th interview of Mrs. Marion Higgins and her son by The Wall Street
Journal that can be viewed with either a Real One Player or a Microsoft
Windows Media Player. [ Warning: This is not a "*.mov" file (with
streaming-video capability); because the default compression parameters were inadvertently set
to such a high-resolution (for a full-screen PowerPoint presentation) its size is 163.2
MB. Therefore, it could take quite a long time to download on a slower telephone modem, if you
didn't have a high-speed cable-modem as your standard Internet connection.] If you downloaded
the clip but are still having trouble understanding what she said...
Question: "Tell
us about... why you think you've lived so long..."
Mrs. Higgins: Firstly,
following George Burns's advice, "I don't smoke too many big, fat, black cigars"; and secondly,
"I've never had enough money to engage in riotous living!" [from the Bible].
Click immediately for the font-page WSJ interview or go to the News Section for more details.
May 17, 2005; Do you really believe that a woman from the Sao Paulo area of Brazil is 125 years old? Neither do we. Nevertheless, we're still investigating this interesting case and will keep you informed of our findings. Through the efforts of one of members from Florida, Mr. Stan Primmer, we have just learned by speaking to one of her sons (in Portuguese) that, given his presumed age and her alleged age, she would have had to have given birth to him in her 60's, which strikes us as fairly unlikely, unless of course she was willing to claim the title of the World's Oldest Mother (to give birth by natural means) at the same time. We will continue to keep you informed as we learn more. Click for photos and more details.
September 30, 2004; Click for the Morning Edition story on "The Secrets of America's Supercentenarians" narrated by Neenah Ellis and broadcast nationally this morning on NPR (National Public Radio). Click on the colored icon of the speaker to hear the whole segment (TRT = 8:47 min), which includes interviews with several of the members of our List, as well as the GRG Senior Investigator, Mr. Robert Young of Atlanta, Georgia. There are also a number of photos from their gallery, including Mrs. Verona Calhoun Johnston, 114, and Mrs. Marion Bigelow Higgins, 111. There were only 44 Supercentenarians on our list at the time of the interview last August. However, today, there are 59 (see below).
November 29, 2007; Quote of the Day:
"One must learn to be ruthless in dividing between 'the possible', the 'might be possible' (i.e.,
something that would require significant breakthroughs in accepted science and technology), and
'the impossible'. There is much which is 'quite possible' but currently would be considered
fantastic. Pursuit of the ' impossible fantastic' is a recipe for endless frustration;
however, pursuit of the 'possible fantastic' is a path that leads to significant rewards. The
question then is how to tell the difference."
--- Robert Bradbury, Cambridge, MA
If you are a physician and would like to earn CME credits by attending one of our cutting- edge Age Management Conferences and Expositions for Health Care Practitioners then check back with our Conference Coordinator in Chicago, IL at 312-840-8431 after May 1st to get more details about the dates and location. We hope to schedule our next conference in Las Vegas in the Fall. We will announce the Conference dates on this website as soon as we know them. The previously announced June dates for the Venetian Hotel have been canceled.
April 6, 1830; "Dear Diary: I passed these last few days in setting up my laboratory and
making further improvements to our power supplies. This time I must not fail, for I don't have
the courage to overcome further failures. But finally, I now have the means to defeat our
adversary, Death, and lack only a few more materials with which to synthesize our new
man, Homo novus, the man who will lead mankind into the dawn of a new age, the age
of immortality." - Viktor Frankenstein
Ref.: The Frankenstein Diaries, Edited and Translated from the German into
[British] English by The Rev. Hubert Venables, p. 65 (The Viking Press, New York; 1980).
Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were
supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I
would not live forever.
-- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA Contest.
Quote for the day...[Q: What makes man unique in comparison with other animals on our planet? A:] "For the longest while it was thought that we humans were the only animals possessed of -- how was it put? -- an immortal soul. Of course, those of us who have lived with Irish Wolfhounds for most of our lives know that this [notion] is preposterous..." -- Edward Albee, Playwright, Op-Ed Piece, excerpted from the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation Address delivered at the award ceremony of the American Academy of Arts and Letters earlier this May, "Chimps Don't Draw," The Los Angeles Times, p. B14 (May 30, 2006).
Last Quotes...
"Some have said to me that 'sequencing the human genome will diminish humanity by taking the
mystery out of life.' Nothing could be further from the truth. The complexities and wonder of
how the inanimate chemicals that are our genetic code give rise to the imponderables of the
human spirit should keep poets and philosophers inspired for millennia."
-- J. Craig
Venter, Ph.D., CEO Celera Genomics, Inc. of Rockville, MD; USA
"When we get this worked out [the human genome] and we're all living to be 150, ...
we will see the unbelievable capacity of humanity to be noble. This is a great day."
-- Bill
Clinton, President USA, ~11:00 AM EDT on Monday, June 26, 2000 in the East Room of the
White House; Washington, D.C. with Drs. J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins on each side of
the President, Prime Minister Tony Blair on a large-screen monitor from London; UK, and a
large number of members of the press corps in the audience on the occasion of the announcement
of the completion of the first draft (90 percent completion) of the Human DNA Sequence. As far
as the competitors were concerned, the completion of the HGP was called a draw by the media,
even though the Celera Genomics sequence was superior (at that moment in history) and its stock
rose for a few months before it fell back afterward. In February 2001, the publications in
Science and Nature presented at the San Francisco AAAS Annual Meeting
gave equal time (on different nights) to both adversaries. To mark the occasion, Craig wore a
tuxedo; Francis didn't.
Ref.: James Shreeve, The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the
Code of Life and Save the World, pp. 356-7 (Ballantine Books, New York; 2004; also
available as an audio book read by Erik Singer on 5 CD's).
November 1, 2005; Click for President Bush's Emergency Plan for Dealing with an Avian Flu Pandemic.
A summary of
GRG discussions on the potential threat of Avian Flu and how to prepare for a pandemic can be
found in the 2005 News Section of this website.
August 12, 2005; The Department of Homeland Security has decided to lower the Threat Level from Orange (High) back to Yellow (Elevated) as of 5:00 PM PDT.
July 7, 2005; In response to the attack earlier today in London, the US Transit System Threat Level has been raised from Yellow (Elevated) to Orange (High).
September 23, 2005; Information security executives and CIO's from private industry have given
the DHS 'low marks,' saying that "the color-coded alert system has proved virtually useless, and
the Congress should either scrap it or radically modify it." As far as INFOSEC is concerned,
when DHS declared an Orange Alert back in July, it hardly registered with US critical
infrastructure companies outside the government.
Ref.: "DHS Gets Low Marks," CIO Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 23, p. 66
(September 15, 2005).
Note: If you access this website regularly, please click for a one-time message about our backup website hosted by UCLA. This www.grg.org website has had domain name server problems on the Internet that began on June 5, 2004, and we are pleased to be back up again.
Click for the formal definition of a GRG Time/Date stamp with associated editorial remarks on the innumerate history of time keeping and other foolishness.
May 28, 2008; Quote for the Day: "I don't mind dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens." - - Woody Allen
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