GENETICS OF AGING & LONGEVITY
Search for the Fountain of Youth

Program Summary

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Producer: Karen Michel
Tissue Rejuvenation Feature Producer: Sheri Quinn
On the Air Beginning: November 2001

A New Yorker cartoon shows a nurse shouting into the ear of a very elderly man: "Scientists have extended the life of the fruit fly." True, and other experiments on worms and mice have yielded similarly tantalizing results.

But will these and other studies have any bearing on prolonging human life or postponing the debilitating diseases of aging?

In this program, you'll go on a tour of aging research that is part fantasy, part science - an appropriate style with which to present a field harboring so much promise and so much hype.

Producer Karen Michel is known for her creative use of the radio medium. She has crafted a program that is part NOVA and part Wizard of Oz.

While touring Florida's Fountain of Youth, John Hockenberry meets the immortal Cleopatra, disguised as a tourist, who whisks him away to DeNial Lounge, a fantasy casino that scientists frequent. There he meets real scientists who are exploring which genetic mechanisms make us age, and are trying new ways to thwart or delay them.

One of the first scientists we meet is Cynthia Kenyon. She studies C. elegans, a tiny worm which has yielded some big surprises. She has found genes in this simple organism that indirectly regulate hormones connected to aging; further, these genes are also found in flies, yeast, and possibly humans. If she can figure out how to switch them off, she says, she may have found a key to slow the aging process.

We meet Stewart Olshansky and Bruce Carnes, biodemographers who say we will never extend the human lifespan much beyond what it is in developed countries today. Once we've cleaned up our public health and thwarted the big killers like infectious disease, they contend, we can't physically wring much more than 85 years out of our lot.

We'll also meet Roy Walford, who believes that the way to slow aging is through radically restricting diet. In one study he reduced the caloric intake of mice by 30 percent. These animals, which usually live to be 38 months old, lived for 54 months.

Walford has become so convinced of the approach he's practicing it on himself, living on just 1,500 calories a day.

And we meet Titia De Lange, who is looking for the mechanism that drives our biological clock. She studies telomeres, the tiny sequences of repetitive DNA at the end of our chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, another segment of the telomere falls off until the cell stops dividing or doing its work (most cells divide 60 times).

De Lange and other researchers' studies on telomeres may lead to clues about how the whole body ages.

What would the world look like with a large population of people, say, in their 100s? Would people live longer and healthier lives? Is aging a disease that modern medicine must cure?

Although none of the research discussed in this program has yet resulted in a bona fide cure for aging, it has provided new insight into what role aging must play in evolution.

Apparently, aging has been around since, well, the beginning of time.

Special Feature: Tissue Rejuvenation

Several recent studies using adult mouse stem cells to enhance tissue growth in heart muscle have had promising results. This feature illuminates the science of adult stem cell research and explores the potential for cell rejuvenation in humans.

Topic In-Depth: Implications of living longer

Last Updated: July 2004