Author: Foresight Editor

from the hurry-up-we're-aging-fast dept.
Senior Associate RFreitas writes "If anyone would like to read my recent nontechnical nanomedicine article "Say Ah!", published in the July/August 2000 issue of The Sciences, it is now online." An excerpt: "The goals of nanorobotics may seem overblown, even wacky, to people today. But consider that, as recently as 1874, the British surgeon Sir John Eric Erichsen predicted that 'the abdomen, the chest, and the brain will be forever shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.'…The hope and the dream is that, sometime in the not-too-distant future, [miniature medical] devices will be able to eliminate virtually all the common diseases of the twentieth century, and virtually all bodily pain and suffering as well."

from the eat-right,-live-well-(and-long) dept.

Two press releases on joint research by the Buck Center for Research in Aging and Emory University describe "using drugs that help eliminate oxygen radicals — the toxic byproducts of metabolism — scientists have extended the normal lifespan of the nematode worm C. elegans by approximately 50 percent. In addition, the scientists restored a normal lifespan to mutant worms that had a mitochondrial defect causing increased oxygen radical production and rapid aging."

The drugs used in the study were actually modified versions of naturally-occurring antioxidant enzymes. The findings were reported in the 1 September 2000 issue of the jouranl Science.