Fountain of Youth Found in Easter Island Bacterial Secretion
Chris Rock told us that if it’s hurt or broken, just pour some ‘tussin on it. Well, when he said ‘tussin, he probably meant rapamycin.
The drug blocks immune-system activity and is commonly used during organ transplants. Rapamycin keeps your body from attacking your new liver. But if you give a fat dose to mice, they live longer.
This substance, isolated originally from a strain of bacterium found on Easter Island—or Rapa Nui as it is known to the locals—acts by suppressing a particular signalling mechanism inside cells, called the TOR pathway. The TOR pathway, in turn, promotes protein production and inhibits the active destruction of parts of cells that are no longer needed. Slowing down all this molecular turnover seems to slow ageing, at least in worms and flies. So Dr Harrison’s team decided to give it a go in mice. ... Measured from the time the drugs were first administered in early old age, these figures translate into a 38% increase in life expectancy for females and 28% for males. ... hat is not to recommend people take doses of rapamycin. Its main medical use is to suppress the immune system, so anyone consuming it casually would open himself to serious infection.
Another longevity study out this week confirmed that cutting a monkey’s calories by 30 percent adds year to their life.
Dr Weindruch’s paper is the result of 20 years of work. Over the course of that period he and his team have looked at 76 monkeys (30 males to start with and, since 1994, another 16 males and 30 females). Half these animals were kept as controls, with no changes in their diet, and the other half experimented upon. ... so far, 14 of the 38 control animals have died of age-related illnesses such as type II (late onset) diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Only five of the experimental animals so succumbed. A statistical analysis showed that, at any given time during the study, an animal in the control group was three times as likely to die from an age-related cause as one in the experimental group.
