From: Scott Badger (w_scott_badger@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Sep 24 2002 - 10:05:48 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
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The Ellison Medical Foundation had its recent annual
report on the research it is funding. I attended.
Here is a very brief summary.
"How to Investigate Exceptionally Successful Aging: An
Example from the Birds Steven Austad, Ph.D.,
University of Idaho"
Steve gave his usual great summary on why we should
study birds, in particular Budgerigars (parakeets) to
determine why they live so long. They are using
Japanese quails as a control (long lived vs. short
lived). The Budgies show significant resistance to
oxidative stress while the quails do not. However the
resistance does not appear to be due to any of the
obvious antioxidant genes (similar to the confusing
state of affairs right now with transgenic mice where
mice overespressing various antioxidant genes do not
show extended lifespans). Gene expression studies
using Chicken microarrays suggest that the response of
Budgies and Quails to oxidative stress are different
and seemto involve a limited set of genes. Work is
ongoing to produce species specific arrays and arrays
with greater coverage of the genomes (current arrays
only have ~10% of the genes on them).
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Hi Robert,
Dr. Austad works in the Biology building just 5
minutes from where I worked. In fact, I approached him
a couple weeks ago to propose he conduct a study
examing Metformin as a caloric restriction mimetic.
Even though this is not my field (I'm in education),
he actually sounded somewhat positive about the idea
and we will discuss it further. I'm not holding my
breath cause he's quite busy, but I would love to work
on such a project, given that I am personally taking
Metformin. (btw, Ward Dean, MD is a big advocate and
prescribes Metformin for all his male patients over
40)
We chatted about life extension for about an hour
total I guess. It's sure nice to have such an
authority in such near proximity. He says he's been
invited to washington by the white house to discuss
life extension issues but he was a bit vague on the
specifics.
One thing I took away from our conversations is that
CR implemented in mid life demonstrates no effect on
either max life span or avg life span. But after I
expressed grave disappointment at this revelation, he
noted that the mice used to study this are all kept
quite healthy. None of them are on a high carb diet or
forced into sedentary routines, etc. So the aplication
to humans is limited due to these paraments. Besides
the fact that we're not mice.
Anyway, CR mimetics research is somewhat robust now so
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he'll let me clean
the cages and let me put my name somewhere near the
end on the eventual paper.
One other thing he said that was disappointing was
that many of the stem cell lines approved for research
by Bush were never intended to serve that purpose and
as a consequence, many of them are worthless due to
viral contaminations.
Best regards.
=====
Scott Badger, Ph.D.
Member: ALCOR, Extropy Insitute, Life Extension Foundation
Instructor/Researcher-University of Idaho
Just released: "PHENOM"- my Transhumanist CD (www.mp3.com/scottbadger)
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