My first newspaper review on my book!

The coming new age

Genetic research will lead to longer lives and other breakthroughs, author writes

By Cecil Johnson

Special to the Star-Telegram

Some scientists are wagering money that by the year 2150, there will be people on Earth who will have reached their 150th birthday, writes award-winning science journalist Gina Smith in her thought-provoking new book, The Genomics Age.

One of them, reports Smith, is gerontologist Steven Austad. Biodemographer Jay Olhansky has called Austad's bet. The two, according to Smith, have put $150 each into an investment fund, and they plan to add $5 to it every year. In 2150, when the fund will be worth an estimated $500,000, the bank will distribute the money to the family of the winner.

Now Olhansky does not doubt that human life expectancy will be significantly increased during the next century and a half. He just sees 130 years of age as the outer limit.

Austad's descendants can only collect the money if the century-and-a-half-year-old is in decent health and his or her age is proven beyond a doubt. One of the things that gives Austad confidence in his bet is the research being carried out by geneticist Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California at San Francisco.

"Look at what Cynthia's doing. Molecular geneticists like her are already helping identify the [proteins] that inhibit aging in [animals]. I can't believe we won't make improvements in human anti-aging treatments in the next 100 years," Austad tells Smith.

Kenyon performs gene manipulation experiments with roundworms and is excited about the results she is getting. She tells Smith:

"These worms aren't dead, they're moving around. They should be in the nursing home, but they're out playing tennis. It blows you away. They're like 450-year-olds who act and look like they're 60-year-olds. It just makes you wonder how far you can go."

Smith expresses the view that Kenyon will go down in medical history as the researcher who has contributed most to the theory that aging can be delayed through gene manipulation.

"In essence, she has succeeded in doubling, then tripling, then sextupling the life span of her little rice-size roundworms, increasing their longevity far past their normal two weeks. Some of her worms live as long as 12 weeks," Smith writes.

This discussion of the life spans of roundworms and humans occurs in a chapter of Smith's book titled "The Fountain of Aging Well." The ultimate goal, according to Kenyon, is extend health span as well as life span, to enable people to be 90 and feel 40.

"The premise is that we can slow down the aging process. And if we can do that, we can reduce the risks for all kinds of diseases. Cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis -- the risks for all of these go up as you get old. But if we can slow down the aging process, we can reduce risk," Kenyon tells Smith.

Kenyon's gene manipulation experiments constitute one of several different approaches to extending life and good health touched upon by Smith in that chapter. All of them derive from that moment on Feb. 28, 1953, when Francis Crick and James Watson rushed into an off-campus pub near Cambridge University and announced to a lunchtime crowd that they had found "the secret of life."

They weren't exaggerating all that much, says Smith. According to her, Crick and Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for their discovery, had uncovered one of the secrets of life, if not the ultimate one.

"The two researchers, working together in a lab for several years had managed to figure out the double helical shape of DNA and how its two strands lined up with one another. Understanding the shape and replication method of DNA paved the way for the biotech and genomic revolutions that came later, and helped explain countless questions thinkers had posed before," Smith writes.

In The Genomic Age Smith provides a plain-English retrospective on DNA, commencing with the discovery of DNA by the Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher in 1869 and culminating with the completion of the Human Genome Project, the sequencing of the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome.

Former President George H.W. Bush, Smith reminds readers, referred to that scientific endeavor as the "Human Genome Initiative." Smith also shows through some of President George W. Bush's comments about stem cell research that the younger Bush also does not have a clue about genomics.

Smith's basic, reader-friendly explanation of DNA replication and mutation should prove extremely valuable to anyone whose science education ended before getting to Krick and Watson.

After providing those fundamentals, she then explores some of the ethical, political and economic issues raised by the rapid advances happening in DNA technology.

Other issues pondered by Smith include the possible use DNA testing and fingerprinting to curtail civil rights, the misuse of DNA information to discriminate in employment and insurance coverage, abuse of DNA reproductive technologies to determine the sex of a child, and other reasons besides the prevention of disease or deformity and economic inequities that make gene therapies and genetic mapping unaffordable to the poor.

On that last issue, Smith quotes Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University and former head of the Human Genome Project's ethics, legal and social implications board on the subject of pre-implementation diagnosis: "We have a market economy, so there's your answer."

Duster maintains that gene therapies will become increasingly available, and the people who can afford them and don't mind the additional tests will get them, but we shouldn't "fool ourselves into thinking that all technologies will be available to all the people across the board."

The Genomics Age: How DNA Technology Is Transforming the Way We Live and Who We Are

By Gina Smith

AMACOM 262 pages

$24

(p.s. It's a bit cheaper on Amazon.)

YEAH! Very happy tonight about this.
Not so happy about the election returns, but that's MHO.
gs

Comments

[peter demma]

ce mai faceti? nu stiam ca si dumneavoastra
sunteti aici! (those words still linger in my brain)
and I still like the idea of making
"guts " into an Oscar winning film (maybe with
Samuel Jackson starring as Picket?) I bought my copy of yr book from amazon for 87cents and
I would love to get it autographed by the author, so visit Santa Cruz perhaps, or I might cruise down through Texas to share a couple of drinks if you haven't fallen onto the wagon by this time