The
mechanism of atherosclerotic-plaque formation is now revealed in a three-minute Apple
QuickTime Color Animation .The Los Angeles GRG has begun a survey of zoos throughout the world with the aim of obtaining information on the lifespan of tree shrews -- small, squirrel-like mammals that are closely related to primates. This survey is being conducted in the hopes of finding a "short-lived" species more closely related to humans than rodents. Such a species could be a suitable subject for aging experiments intended to lengthen the life span of these animals without having to wait for a significant percentage of the experimenter's lifetime before the results are in. Click for more details .
The
mechanism of atherosclerotic-plaque formation is now revealed in a three-minute Apple
QuickTime Color Animation .
Video-Clip Interviews with Centenarians: The first in this series is with Mr. Ben Levinson of Los Angeles -- now 104 years old. See a new article about Ben in the January 2000 issue of Los Angeles Magazine. The second interview is with Mrs. Amy T. Rubison of La Verne, California.
Dr. Edward Schneider of USC appears in a 15-second video clip on CBS Morning News.
Apoptosis has now been revealed in a video clip that must be seen to understand what Programmed Cell Death is all about.
Engineering the Human Germline
News Item... Geron Announces Breakthrough in Overcoming the Hayflick Limit...
As of May 1999, human cells have now undergone nearly 400 mitotic divisions in vitro without abnormality. See the Nature Genetics article by Dr. Choy- Pik Chin and also see the January 16, 1998 issue of Science Magazine in hard copy or go directly to Science Magazine's Web Site and look for this issue.
(Note 1: There is no charge for viewing this particular paper, although Science normally charges individual on-line subscribers a small fee to get early copies of its papers. Note 2: Printing the full text of the paper requires Adobe Acrobat version 3.0. But this is relatively easy to download from the site, if you haven't already loaded it onto your hard drive.)
What are world-class gerontologists saying about Geron's Announcement?
Note: Geron now has its own website.
After Jeanne Calment, who
is
now the world's oldest centenarian?
Question: How old is the world's oldest plant?
Why is Dolly back in the
news again? She gave birth again.
Japanese and New Zealand Researchers clone adult cows.
4/27/99
More calves: George & Charlie from Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester,
Massachusetts; See their web site at
www.advancedcell.com Dr. Michael West previously of Geron Corp. is now President and
CEO of ACT as of a few months ago.
Still more calves from Japan: According to Associated Press on December 9th, Japanese researchers reported that they have cloned eight genetically identical calves using cells removed from one adult cow. (Other sources revealed that four of the eight calves died after birth due to external or environmental causes.) In a study to be published in Science this week, the calves were cloned using a technique similar to that used with Dolly, but with much higher efficiency. Nuclei from adult cells were transferred to enucleated bovine egg cells. Ten eggs were triggered to undergo mitosis (as though they had been fertilized in the normal fashion), and then grew into blastocysts, which were implanted into five unrelated cows all of which became pregnant.
Still more calves from Germany: Scientists in Munich seeking to capture some publicity surrounding the birth of cloned animals unveiled Uschi (short for Ursula), a newly cloned cow, to the media on Friday January 8, 1999. The brown and white calf, born just before Christmas on December 23, 1998, was a bit camera shy and unsteady on her feet, but "in perfectly good health" said Prof. Eckhard Wolf of the Ludwig-Maximilian University. Four eggs were implanted into two surrogate mother cows, with one becoming pregnant.
Still more from France: Marguerite, France's first cloned calf died sometime last year in 1998 at less than two months of age after an accident in her pen. (Sigh!)
Mice are cloned in Honolulu.
New proposal to clone a dog
at Texas A & M.
January 2005; We have just learned that Missy died in 2002.
Will Pandas be next?
Chicago Physicist, Dr. Richard Seed , wishes to clone himself.
South Koreans now say that they have cloned a human embryo [12/16/98]. However, a panel of four medical experts in Seoul, South Korea now casts serious doubt on the claims of the experimental team that it had succeeded in cloning a human embryo. After a 25-day investigation, "the Konghee gynecologists couldn't present sufficient data to prove what they said they had accomplished. We would not go so far as to call it a complete fraud, but we concluded that as scientists, they were very clumsy throughout their research, not keeping proper documentation of their procedures," said Dr. Seo Jeong Sun, a Professor at Seoul National University who led the probe [ The Wall Street Journal , p. B8, 1/29/99].
Another website source for the latest, breaking news on cloning is www.phrma.org/genomics/cloning/ .
Why do Rockfish live so long?
Click License Plate to see our custom "GRG*ORG" California Automobile License Plate.
The GRG Time is now 14 minutes before midnight and counting... Click here for an explanation of the GRG Clock.
Click to read a newly-revised statement of our Central Dogma.
Click on the boy 
to see a larger picture.
Check out the Black & White Painting called "Bridge of Life" commissioned by the British Statistician Karl Pearson to represent the notion that death may strike at any stage of life by various means and with varying degrees of effectiveness.
We have nearly vanquished three of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
Quiz: Can you name the fourth of these evil
horsemen?
Hint: Sweep the mouse over the picture.
First Thought for the Day: "Toward the end of his life, man is continually in fear of death; in fact, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." -- Thomas Hobbes
Second Thought for the Day:
"Do not go gentle into that good night;
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light." -- Dylan Thomas
Click on the photo for the complete one-page poem.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or perhaps even better, click for a
reading by
the poet himself, using a RealOne Player. Thomas first visited America in
January 1950 at the age of 35. His reading tours of the United States, which did much
to popularize poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for
Thomas was the archetypal romantic poet of the popular American imagination; he
was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, and engaged himself in roaring public
disputes. He read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling, and he became a
legendary figure, both for his poetry and the boisterousness of his life. Tragically, he
died in 1953 from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout
in New York City.
For those who admire Dylan Thomas, you may wish to consider his
And
Death Shall Have No Dominion, well appreciated in the Stanislaw Lem
movie Solaris by 20th
Century Fox (2002). The Lem novel was first produced as a beautiful Russian movie,
which I saw in Tiblissi, USSR (Soviet Georgia) [without subtitles (Sigh!)] in
September of 1975.
October 10, 2007; Click on the YouTube link for a recent cartoon animated video-clip (TRT= 3:18 min.) reminiscent of the Thomas poem. The clip is entitled "How to Cope with Death.
Third Thought for the Day: "Centenarians who are still alive at the turn of the millennium will be one of the few human cohorts to live in three different centuries!"
Fourth Thought for the Day: "Ours could be the last human generation to suffer involuntary mortality." -- Michael R. Rose, Professor of Biology at the University of California at Irvine
Fifth Thought for the Day:
Classical Syllogism:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
... Aristotle
Modern Syllogism:
Other men are mortal.
I am not like other men.
Therefore, I am not going to die.
... Vladimir Nabokov [died 1977]
Sixth Thought for the Day: "Physicians need to view
dying as a
natural part of life, not a disease."
-- Christina M. Puchalski, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine of the Center to
Improve Care
of the Dying at the George Washington University School of Medicine in
Washington, D.C. and
Director of Education at the National Institute for Healthcare Research in Rockville,
Maryland
( Los Angeles Times Editorial; May 1999)
No, Christina, we respectfully disagree with your most fundamental assumption.
Indeed, we
wish to instruct our fellow physicians to consider precisely the opposite viewpoint:
Namely,
aging is a disease, and dying need not be a natural part of life. It's only a
matter of
timing, give or take 20 years.
[ Editor's Remark: July 31, 2003; We have reluctantly softened our position since the above remark was written in 1999, four years ago. We are now willing to concede to Dr. Puchalski that aging should not be considered to be a disease in the classical sense. The traditional Medical Model of a disease: (1) form a Diagnosis; (2) Treat/Intervene following a second opinion if needed; (3) make a Prognosis; and (4) Monitor the condition of the patient until a Cure is obtained, that normally characterizes all traditional diseases taught to medical students does not apply to aging. Aging is qualitatively different. One cannot try to move a defective life- history program (trajectory) away from a pathological state toward a more normal state. Once the patient is old enough so that intrinsic aging becomes a problem, there is no longer a "normal" state that one should strive for. Frailty, Weakness of Muscles, Brittleness of Bones, Blindness, Deafness, Loss of Smell, and Taste, Failed Dentition, and Dementia are the normal state. They are the hallmarks of the aging process in humans. Aging is the absence of appropriate programming in the genome that is (exponentially) exacerbated with the passage of time after the age of 60. A cure would not be the cure of a "standard disease," the cure would be the introduction of brand new genetic programming (not normally present in Homo sapiens' genome), perhaps in the form of reactivated adult stem cells in all of our tissues (while not simultaneously provoking cancer). More on this topic elsewhere, as time permits.
Seventh Thought for the Day: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it by not dying." -- Woody Allen
Eighth Thought for the Day: "When the Grim Reaper appears, at least you could give him a bagel." -- attributed to Woody Allen