23 AugGummy Bears, trampolines, and Ben Franklin’s spectacles

Between the age of 40 and 50, a universal sign of aging, farsightedness, begins. Also known as Presbyopia, the medical term comes from the Greek word for ‘old man’, presbys, and opia-sight.

The lens can be thought of as having a “Gummy Bear” viscosity, allowing it to flatten when fibers holding it from around its circumference, like the springs around a trampoline, are pulled open . The trampoline springs are themselves connected to and controlled by a relaxed circular muscle sphincter. This focusing mechanism allows you to see objects from distances of 1.5 inches up to infinity.

This oddly-conceived coffee table provides a good model if you see the table top as the iris which controls the amount of light that enters the pupil (open in dark, pinpoint in the bright sun).

At rest, the muscle that controls the trampoline (aka Gummy bear lens) is a big circle so that the lens is maximally flat and permits viewing of objects that are far away.

——————————————-NEARSIGHTEDNESS—————————-

With Myopia (aka nearsightedness), you need glasses to see objects that are far away because the lens focuses the image before the back wall of an egg-shaped, myopic eye:

But keep in mind, the problem with nearsightedness is not the lens. It is as though you had moved a slide projection screen farther away after the focus had been established.

————————————FARSIGHTEDNESS—————————————

To focus on objects that are progressively nearer, like newspapers and prescriptions bottles, the circular muscle will constrict, thereby letting the ‘trampoline springs’ slacken, which in turn, permits the central Gummy Bear/lens to become rounder.

So you need reading glasses as you age because even with the circular ‘lens sphincter’ becoming its smallest circumference, the Gummy Bear has become too hard to take on its rounder, more light-refractive state.

And if you have an egg-shaped eye AND your lens has become a harder Gummy bear, you’ll have myopia and presbyopia and you’ll be needing need bifocals or two sets of glasses.

————–
Reading glass strength is measured in diopters. Click here for a site to test your own eyes.

Although just anecdotal, one of our recent 1 year follow up patients, a gentleman 65 years of age, actually had his reading glass prescription weaken from 2.5 to 2.0 diopters. While taking TA-65, his lens must have become softer.

Even more surprising were the radical improvements in his myopia reflected in his farsighted vision. This might also be attributed to the softening of the lens, thereby allowing the maximally relaxed sphincter and its trampoline springs to pull the lens flatter.

———————
In isolation, there may be a simple explanation. But over the next two posts, we’ll share his improvements in lung capacity and arterial stiffness, which are also universally-deteriorating signs of aging. Together, these improved biomarkers paint an picture of a man growing younger!

11 AugWe’re with the J Kevorkian HMO, and you can be too!

Readers of this blog know that I believe Telomerase Activation with TA-65 has made me younger, is safe, and works for others.

When people whom I haven’t seen for a while remark, “You look great! And got skinny! What are you taking?” I cringe a little because I know that semi-rhetorical question will elicit the following eerie deja-vu.

I reply: “Actually, I’ve been taking this new anti-aging pill.”

Them: (A chortle erupts as they literally laugh in my face.)
After reading my response was in ernest, they reply:
“No, seriously. Have you been working out and dieting?”

Me: “No, there’s this nutraceutical that extends the telomeres…(blah, blah, blah)”

Their eyes glaze over as they suppress a strong urge to laugh out loud again and wonder whether they should find a way to quickly escape from someone who has clearly lost his grip on reality.

But as I string words, sentences, and ideas together, my voice morphs back from the grown ups’ garbling of some Charlie Brown holiday cartoon (wah,wahh, wo, wah, wah…) back into English.

Me: “(Wah-wah-wah) protect the chromosomes (wah,wahh, wo, wah, wah) shorten as you age (wah,wahh, wo, wah, wah.) By lengthening your telomeres, you grow younger.”

By now, they have usually concluded that A) I’m serious and believe in what I’m saying, B) I appear to have a logical and coherent story, & C) it’s worth asking a few questions.

Them: “Wow. How come I haven’t heard about it?”

Me: One of several responses:
1) We’re trying to get the word out but only about 500 people, many of whom are borderline reclusive MD’s, PhD’s or CEO’s, have taken it.
2) There has been some limited press in Discover magazine and the Globe and Mail
3) It’s costly and is only offered through a small number of physicians.

Them: “How much is it?” or “Where do I get it?”

Me: “It’s $4,500 for six months. And I’m one of the doctors who can sell it.”

Them: “What? Why so expensive?”

Me: “It is very difficult to extract because it is insoluble in water or lipids. It takes three tons of root to make one batch.”

Them: “I’ll wait for the price to come down. Anyway, is it safe and FDA approved?”

Me: “Its a nutraceutical, like Vitamin C extracted from Rose hips, so it’s not regulated by the FDA. And so far, of the hundreds that have taken it, there have been no new cancers or adverse effects. Of course, before I took it, I scoured all the safety testing regarding carcinogenesis, toxicity, and human trials.

Them: “I don’t want to live longer. What’s the point?”

Now, I explain our goal is to have a better quality of life by becoming younger and then resuming your normal biological aging after stopping, like running a bit farther up a relentlessly descending escalator that you’re riding from the cradle above to the grave below.

Them: “Sounds too good to be true. Anyway, I just want go when it’s my time.”

And that is how it unfolds. Every single time, without fail, like Bill Murray forced to relive the same experiences over and over in Groundhog Day.

I used to wonder why 9 our of 10 rational people will so glibly profess a death wish as the final punctuation to this conversation. I thought it was because the fantasy was too threatening and anyway, they know the cosmos won’t hold them to thier proclamation any time soon. But I just stumbled upon the writings of a life extension advocate and cryonics guru named Ben Best, that might help explain the “logic of emotion” behind my dozens of identical, deja-vu encounters.

—————-

“Suicide counseling is primarily for people who are undecided about the value of life. The suicide counselor can attempt to remind or inform the despairing person of the potential pleasures of life — or attempt to suggest ways to end pain and depression. But a person lacking the will to live usually has no motivation to find a reason to live. The suicide counselor is helpless to change a person who innately experiences life as being something negative — helpless to find goals & values that would be meaningful. Many (if not most) people will eagerly choose death as a means to stop physical or emotional pain if the pain is intense enough and if the prospect of the pain ending seems bleak.

To me, discussing the value of life extension with people uninterested in extending their own lives is a great deal like suicide counseling. I see no easy way of translating my positive attitudes about life into other people having a positive attitude about life. I have come to believe that if a person does not value life, or believes that the value of life has an expiry date, the matter is beyond discussion. And I mean this not in the sense of difficulty of communication, but in the sense that what is of value to me may not be of value for someone else. I like strawberry and she likes vanilla. I want to live to be a thousand years old — and he doesn’t care whether he is alive in five years. Personal choices.

(he goes on to explain all the things he would do with a longer lifespan)

But telling people what I would do with my extended life will not satisfy those who don’t know what to do with themselves. Enthusiasm for living is the driving force behind the desire to live. To someone who equates extended life with extended boredom, a list of possible activities will only seem like a list of chores.

If people ask me why I want to live forever, I ask why they want to die. This is not a trick answer — my bafflement is as genuine as theirs. I can only speculate that most people live lives that are woefully boring, depressive or painful — and they are locked in despair that things will ever change. Many people complete the goals of social programming (education, marriage, family, career and retirement) — and then feel that there is nothing left to do but die. Why so little imagination and enthusiasm? I cannot understand why people are so content to age & die when science is making strides towards the prevention of these things and there is such a limitless supply of exciting things to explore & experience. Yet people ask me why — in a few decades — I cannot find fulfillment and satisfaction that I have lived. Why should I want a good thing to end? There is an incomprehensible gulf of different attitudes.

Too many people cannot believe in the potential for rejuvenation and perpetual youth. An elderly relative of mine who had been a dirt farmer all his life spent his final years on his porch playing a record “When you and I were young, Maggie” — bringing tears to his eyes. As a hard-working youth he and his young wife were described as the happiest of couples. Narrowing opportunities accompanying a deteriorating body & mind — with no hope for improvement — have a destructive effect on enthusiasm for life.

The energy of youth is often spent struggling to establish oneself in the world, with too little time to smell the flowers. Youth presents us with many opportunities which we fumble due to lack of wisdom — opportunities which seem lost forever when wisdom arrives. I have regrets for things I have done, but far greater regrets for things I have not done. All my mistakes were really terrific “learning experiences” Everything would be OK were it not for aging and death. I love my life and my life history — “warts and all”. Without aging and death all my mistakes would merely be the path to wisdom and fulfillment. Aging and death mean the futile loss of my life’s lessons, experiences and opportunity. I will do all in my power to prevent this tragedy. With rejuvenation we need not spend years mourning the loss of youth. A lifespan of even one hundred years is far too brief an experience of life. I want to live many thousands of years, at least — as long as possible.”

——–

(My Disclaimer: I do NOT advocate cryonics, for a lot of reasons that I ‘flesh out’ in my new sci-fi graphic novel, Maximum Lifespan, about a scientist who freezes his body and downloads his consciousness into a computer and then into his unsuspecting son.)

But Best’s insights truly shed new light on my Groundhog Day conversations. Historically, spirituality has always made good commerce in the transmigration of souls, whether it be the maudlin reawakening at the deathbed, or its ‘chicken-little’ proclamations that we’re ‘living in the end of days.’ Eschatology of individuals and their memes must emerge from their core values of the futility of earthly living and a sort of spiritual thermodynamics, not from a perspective of hope and abundance, which are relegated to the theism of an Afterlife and the magic beans of fairy tales.

Best’s words made me realize that biomedicine of our culture, the medicine that I’ve practiced for the last 21 years, is like a crack Roman legion engaged in frontier skirmishes even as Rome burns. I realized that Allopathic medicine and all our important cultural institutions have addressed immortality long ago and safely proclaimed all worlds of life extension to be flat and, ipso facto, frivolous to consider. I presume the logic goes something like this:

If G-d (or Gaia, or whatever trickster entity that controls us) had wanted us to eat from Eden’s other tree, the Tree of Eternal Life, he would have given us something like this supposed telomerase activator. But since this Ed Park guy isn’t famous and I’ve never heard about this, this couldn’t possibly be legit. Who cares if someone won a Nobel Prize for it? Unless Oprah, Oz, and Perez Hilton are talking, it can’t be that important.

Fast forward to the next time someone smugly proclaims, “Sounds too good to be true. Anyway, I just want go when it’s my time,” I’ll smile knowing full well that their ‘faith in futility’ is really talking but that most wouldn’t find it hard to choose between antidote and alter water if they’d just been poisoned.

Dear reader, we’ve all been poisoned with the knowledge of our own mortality and we are all afflicted with the only undeniable risk factor for causing death: being alive.

We close with the words of the Apollo and Dionysus of the aging Boomers:

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.

Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive.

31 MayThe Seven Deadliest Wars

Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, a day when we honor those who died during war.  For some historical perspective, here is a list of the seven most lethal wars that mankind has faced.

The Seven Deadliest Wars:

#7 Vietnam War (1968-75) - 2.5M killed

#6 Korean War (1950-52) - 2.5M killed

#5 Second Congo War (1998-2003) - 3.8M killed

#4 Russian Civil War (1917-1921) - 5M killed

#3 World War One (1914-1918) - 10M killed

#2 World War Two (1939-1945) - 40M killed

#1 War Against Aging (50,000 B.C. - present) 100 Billion killed

In this  “War Against Aging”, an individual’s weapons were limited to rest, exercise, nutrition, and herbs.

Cultures waged their battles against oblivion using prayers and sacrifices, having descendants, fighting wars, or creating art and ideas of lasting value.

But the winds of war are shifting against our ancient enemy of aging, which has slain 94% of its combatants (100B of the 106B Homo sapiens that have lived.)

Because just as we harnessed the power of the atomic nucleus to deter war, science has harnessed the power of the cellular nucleus to deter aging.

TA-65 is simply a scientifically-proven, MAGIC BULLET to defeat the Grim Reaper by refurbishing and recharging your DNA protection at the genetic level.

To enlist in our “War to End All Ends,”  visit:

http://www.rechargebiomedical.com/aging.html

19 MayHGH supercharges but Telomerase RE-charges

With the current furor over Tiger Woods and ARod’s doctor
being busted for treating high profile athletes from MLB and the NFL, we should revisit the facts about ANABOLIC substances that cause increased muscle mass through altered gene expression.

All the world loves a winner and the undeniable truth is that ANABOLIC substances such as testosterone and HGH, do make professional athletes run faster and hit balls harder. And doing those things sells TV ads and fills stadium seats.

But even for the weekend warriors, it has been common for men concerned about aging to take Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and other male hormones, which include tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), androstenedione, and testosterone.

If you think of your body like a car, then anabolic substances cause a supercharging and that burns through your stem cells and may ironically cause premature aging!

In contrast, telomerase activation is regenerative, leading to improved function by naturally rescuing senescent or dormant cells. Your metabolism increases only as a result of firing on “all cylinders”, not because of adding supercharged intake and exhaust and ‘red-lining’ at 9000 RPM’s

When people ask whether taking TA-65 is safe, I say yes because we know the three dozen or so genes that it modulates thanks to these amazing “gene chips” that measure the 25,000 known human genes on a device about the size of a postage stamp.

Interestingly, most of the genes activated by TA-65 are involved in DNA repair and rejuvenation, which are undeniably GOOD things.

In contrast, anabolic steroids like testosterone alter genes expression in almost a thousand genes!



To learn why non-anabolic telomerase activation is safer than the current “anti-aging” fads of HGH and male hormones, go to http://www.rechargebiomedical.com/taisnotanabolic.html

14 MarPrometheus and Methusela, the world’s oldest trees

The two oldest trees known were Bristlecone Pine trees in Nevada (Prometheus-5000 years old) and Prometheus in California (4800 years old)

bristlecone_pine

a Bristlecone pine

Like all living things more evolved that bacteria, trees need to lengthen their telomeres with telomerase otherwise they’ll die from critically shortened chromosome tips, the telomeres. The difference between us and trees is that their telomeres are seven base pairs repeating (TTTAGGG) rather than the six that we use (TTAGGG.)

Bacteria all have circular DNA, which can be easily reproduced without shortening. In contrast, each cell from a EUKARYOTE (yeast, plants, and animals) houses the entire vast library of thousands of genes in its nucleus. The variable expression of those genes determines the form and function cells in their organs.

Evidence shows that trees with more telomerase activity live longer. With high telomerase activation, 2000- to 5000-year lifespans are possible. With moderate activity comes medium lifespans (400- to 500 years) and with little activation, the pine trees are short-lived (100- to 200-years.) †

You are fortunate to live in a time after the discovery of TA-65, a nutraceutical substance that can activate telomerase and thereby delay aging. Start your Patton Protocol now and you can experience rejuvenation so that someday, you can be “as old as the trees.”

† Flanary and Kletetschka published these results in Rejuvenation Research (2006 Spring; 9(1): 61-63

To learn more, go to:
Rechargebiomedical.com

14 FebCancer “stem cells”: a new paradigm.

Is there really such a thing as a Cancer Stem Cell (CSC) ?

The traditional view of carcinogenesis was that any run-of-the-mill cell could become cancerous by accomplishing three things:

  1. The deactivation of a tumor suppressor gene,
  2. A proto-oncogene becoming an oncogene,
  3. Reversion to a more primitive, stem-like state allowing them to activate telomerase, the enzyme that allows the ends of chromosomes (telomeres) to lengthen and make the cell immortal.

This theory is analogous to a long-time worker bee transforming itself into a Queen Bee without all the special diet and preparation that is normally required.

Burning the candle at both ends

Once upon a time, scientists thought that all cells in a dish could grow forever, like cancers. But experiments showed that differentiated (aka non-stem) cells only divide about 50 times before the colony dies out. The destiny of these differentiated cells is a product of two fundamental rules: non-stem cells don’t activate telomerase and the replication of non-circular DNA always results in some shortening of DNA at the telomeres. This aging your chromosomes is like burning a candle at both ends and is known as REPLICATIVE SENESCENCE.

When the telomeres inevitably become critically short on any of the 92 chromosomal tips in every cell, the informational DNA is exposed and will be damaged. Telomerase is your stem cells’ way of manufacturing new telomere DNA to keep your chromosomes capped and protected.


The Cancer Stem Cell model


The new paradigm is that cancers, like the cells in your healthy organs, are maintained by very rare Cancer Stem Cells (CSC’s). Using the beehive metaphor, if you get the carcinogenic mutations in the Queen Bee (stem cell), the resulting new CSC is already an immortalized, telomerase-active cell. That may help explain why highly toxic radiation and chemotherapy sometimes kills off the “worker bees,” but since the robust Queen survives, she can recreate a whole new colony

Whether none, some, or all of clinical malignancies have CSC’s is a matter of ongoing investigation and controversy. What seems clear is that by telomerase activation, TA-65 safely adds more “wick” to the candles that are your telomeres. By delaying the damage to our cellular DNA, we delay the ravages of time. At the cellular level, we call those ravages REPLICATIVE SENESCENCE. At the human level, we call it getting old.

For more information about CSC’s go to: http://rechargebiomedical.com/cancer.html

P.S.: Please check your inbox each Sunday for a new post. Here are some of the upcoming posts:

  • “Telomerase is like an old-school Dymo labeler”
  • “If you are what you eat, where are all the smart zombies?”
  • “Taking antioxidants is worse than useless”
  • “Vitamins that can kill you- ADEK that’s stacked”
  • “Premature aging syndromes – what’s the common denominator?”
  • “9,500 year old trees”
  • “G.U.T check.: A Grand Unified Theory of Aging”
  • “AIDS is AGING and vice versa”
  • “Family history, cancer risk, and other flat-earth theories”
  • “Fourth and longer – lengthen your chromosomes to make it to overtime”
  • “The Age of Aquarius and the End of Time – Hippies and Mayans and why we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden
  • “You are already a cancer survivor, many times over!”
  • “Telomerase activation and Cancer (these amps go to eleven…)”
  • “The Philadelphia Experiment – what REALLY causes cancer”
  • “p53 – All along the watchtower”
  • “Roseanne Rosannadanna and the truth about life insurance”

07 FebProtecting your genetic “Hard Drive”

“If your genome was like a computer hard drive…”

DNA code is a sequence of chemicals that encode all the data you need to build and operate a human and it is written with only 4 DNA digits. It is a digital code but it is not binary like computers, but quaternary with 4 distinct items. The encoding information in an ordered sequence of 4 different symbols called “bases”, typically denoted A, C, G, and T.

* A: adenosine
* C: cytosine
* G: guanine
* T: thymine

These 4 substances are the fundamental “bits” of information in the genetic code, and are called “base pairs” because there are actually 2 substances per “bit.”

The entirety of human DNA code, called the “human genome”, runs about 3 billion bases in total. Every human being has 2 copies of this code, one copy from each parent, so a human’s cell DNA contains a total of around 6 billion bases. In computer terms, this is around 6 Gigabytes of symbols per cell that need to be copied and distributed to each daughter cell in a process of cell division or “mitosis”

mitosis_500

Luckily, both computer drives and DNA copying have very efficient error detection and correction mechanisms. The most important error corrector for biological data is the p53 enzyme, which will be featured in the future post, “All along the watchtower”

But unlike computers, there is a single critical step in every cell division in which 23 double pairs of chromosomes are simultaneously pulled apart to impart 23 single pairs for each of the two new cells.  This occurs in the miraculous kinetechore:

Kinetochore_428w

Think of this as a huge Virginia Reel of chromosomes but with pairs of siamese twins instead of men and women.  That way, it doesn’t matter which chromosome goes to which daughter cell. This dance party happens 50 billion times a day in your body.

Unfortunately, DNA sequences, like Scarlet and Rhett, can be attracted to complimentary DNA strands even if they are not supposed to be paired with them. If they don’t follow the music or “dance with the ones that brung ‘em” you can get an improper number if chromosomes or new and abnormal fused chromosomes.

But even without taking into consideration the crash-prone event of the kinetochore “mosh pit ,” consider that there are 50 billion cell divisions x 6 billion base pairs copied per cell division every day. This means there are 300 quintillion chances for errors every day. That’s 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 chances to make a mistake every day.  Wow.

That makes me feel lucky to have woken up this morning.

You should feel even more fortunate because for the first time in history, you can protect your genetic code, like I have, by lengthening the telomeres with TA-65.  Visit RechargeBiomedical.com and schedule a consultation soon. Don’t wait for your genetic hard drive to crash. Be proactive.

Good health to all,

Dr. Ed Park

(adapted  from “Introduction to Genes and DNA”)

P.S.:  Please check your inbox each Sunday for a new post. Here are some of the upcoming posts:

  • “Telomerase is like an old-school Dymo labeler”
  • “If you are what you eat, where are all the smart zombies?”
  • “Taking antioxidants is worse than useless”
  • “Vitamins that can kill you- ADEK that’s stacked”
  • “Premature aging syndromes – what’s the common denominator?”
  • “9,500 year old trees”
  • “G.U.T check.: A Grand Unified Theory of Aging”
  • “AIDS is AGING and vice versa”
  • “Family history, cancer risk, and other flat-earth theories”
  • “Fourth and longer – lengthen your chromosomes to make it to overtime”
  • “The Age of Aquarius and the End of Time – Hippies and Mayans and why we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden
  • “Cancer Stem Cells- a new paradigm”
  • “You are already a cancer survivor, many times over!”
  • “Telomerase activation and Cancer (these amps go to eleven…)”
  • “The Philadelphia Experiment – what REALLY causes cancer”
  • “p53 – All along the watchtower”
  • “Roseanne Rosannadanna and the truth about life insurance”

08 Dec“Nobel, Schnobel, where did the Dow close?”

Congratulations to the winners of the 2009 Nobel prizes:

  • Economics: Elinor Ostrom (governance of the commons) &   Oliver Williamson (corporate governance)
  • Peace:          Barack Obama (for international diplomacy)
  • Literature:    Herta Muller (Poetry of the dispossessed)
  • Chemistry:   Ramakrishnan, Steitz, Yonath (Ribosomes)
  • Physics:       Charles Kao (Fiberoptic communication) &  Willard Boyle and George Smith (the CCD imaging sensor)
  • Medicine:    Greider, Blackburn, Szostak (the discovery of telomerase)

I find it notable that from the six categories,  an average person with a college degree would have some idea of what the first five prizes were awarded for.

But the prize in Medicine was for the discovery of something unknown to 99% of its own expert practitioners.

Why? Is telomerase biology an obscure backwater of the field?  Hardly. A simple PubMed literature search brings up 16,385 citations for “telomere or telomerase”

A search of telomere + (other search words) yields these results:

  • +Arthritis:                             56
  • +Atherosclerosis:                  90
  • +Neurological Disease:        644
  • +Aging:                            1,375
  • +Cancer:                          3,590

Someday, clinical physicians may have heard of a telomere, even though most all diseases they treat may be causally related to failures of protecting the tips of chromosomes.

With every day that passes, you will get older, but your doctor won’t get any wiser to telomere biology.  Even a Nobel Prize in their chosen profession isn’t enough for 99% of them to “Wikipedia it”  or take their eyes off of Health Care Reform or CNBC.

So maybe it’s time you did your own due diligence about what causes illness and aging?  It is a lot simpler than exercise, diet, and anti-oxidants.  It’s all about the telomeres.

To take the first step towards a longer and healthier life, go to www.rechargebiomedical.com/aging.html

Postscipt: Before you dismiss this newsletter, consider that telomerase is THE essential enzyme that protects the tips of DNA in all plants and animals.  That’s EVERY SINGLE CHROMOSOME in every single plant and animal!  That seems like a pretty significant discovery well worthy of a Nobel Prize.  After all,  Seven Billion other people were in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize just by virtue of not being George Bush ;-)

20 NovTelomeres are longer in healthier, older people

Hello subscribers, I’m passing along this press release from TA Sciences. It is more evidence that telomeres are a critical factor in staying young and healthy.

This study shows that people “who have lived to a very old age have inherited mutant genes that make their telomerase-making system extra active.” For those of us who have not inherited such genes, TA-65 is the only known product that can activate telomerase.

“Longevity Tied to Genes That Preserve Tips of Chromosomes
November 11, 2009; Bronx, NY ­ A team led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has found a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that rebuilds telomeres -­ the tip ends of chromosomes. The findings appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yousin Suh, Ph.D.

Telomeres play crucial roles in aging, cancer and other biological processes. Their importance was recognized last month, when three scientists were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for determining the structure of telomeres and discovering how they protect chromosomes from degrading.

Telomeres are relatively short sections of specialized DNA that sit at the ends of all chromosomes. One of the Nobel Prize winners, Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., of the University of California at San Francisco, has compared telomeres to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces that prevent the laces from unraveling. Each time a cell divides, its telomeres erode slightly and become progressively shorter with each cell division. Eventually, telomeres become so short that their host cells stop dividing and lapse into a condition called cell senescence. As a result, vital tissues and important organs begin to fail and the classical signs of aging ensue.

In investigating the role of telomeres in aging, the Einstein researchers studied Ashkenazi Jews because they are a homogeneous population that was already well studied genetically. Three groups were enrolled:  86 very old ­ but generally healthy people (average age 97); 175 of their offspring; and 93 controls (offspring of parents who had lived a normal lifespan). Gil Atzmon, Ph.D. “Telomeres are one piece of the puzzle that accounts for why some people can live so long,” says Gil Atzmon, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine and of Genetics at Einstein, Genetic Core Leader for The LonGevity Project at Einstein’s Institute for Aging Research, and a lead author of the paper. “Our research was meant to answer two questions: Do people who live long lives tend to have long telomeres? And if so, could variations in their genes that code for telomerase account for their long telomeres?”
The answer to both questions was “yes.”

“As we suspected, humans of exceptional longevity are better able to maintain the length of their telomeres,” said Yousin Suh, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and of genetics at Einstein and senior author of the paper. “And we found that they owe their longevity, at least in part, to advantageous variants of genes involved in telomere maintenance.”
More specifically, the researchers found that participants who have lived to a very old age have inherited mutant genes that make their telomerase-making system extra active and able to maintain telomere length more effectively. For the most part, these people were spared age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, which cause most deaths among elderly people.

“Telomeres are one piece of the puzzle that accounts for why some people can live so long.” Gil Atzmon,  Ph.D.

“Our findings suggest that telomere length and variants of telomerase genes combine to help people live very long lives, perhaps by protecting them from the diseases of old age,” says Dr. Suh. “We’re now trying to understand the mechanism by which these genetic variants of telomerase maintain telomere length in centenarians. Ultimately, it may be possible to develop drugs that mimic the telomerase that our centenarians have been blessed with.”

The study, “Genetic Variation in Human Telomerase is Associated with Telomere Length in Ashkenazi Centenarians,” appears in the November 9th on-line issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to Drs. Atzmon and Suh, the study’s other Einstein researchers were co-lead author Miook Cho, M.S., Temuri Budagov, M.S., Micol Katz, M.D., Xiaoman Yang, M.D., Glenn Siegel, M.D., Aviv Bergman, Ph.D., Derek M. Huffman, Ph.D., Clyde B. Schechter, M.D., and Nir Barzilai, M.D.

03 NovMaximum Lifespan- The Graphic Novel

After over three years, we’re proud to announce that the E-Book publication of Maximum Lifespan is ready for download!

Ken Garrett, a dying scientist, lures his estranged son home by revealing that his mother was never really dead, but in hiding. Dr. Garrett will gamble with his children, his own body, and the future of the human race to achieve immortality.

An original, full-color, 185 page graphic novel in the style of Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Total Recall) or Alejandro Amenábar (Vanilla Sky, The Sea Inside, Agora)

Please see our Graphic Novel trailer and download the first 53 pages, which is yours to read and share widely with friends.

Maximum Lifespan

Maximum Lifespan

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