A toast to dorian gray

Is our post-modern condition characterized by an instilling of youthfulness into an ancient world. A rejuvenation of creaky old bones. Baudelaire wrote of youth as a sort of priesthood, at least according to the young. Youth is a fetish, a search for original freshness, of lost innocence, of back to the Garden, of a Paradise Lost, of the origins of original spontaneity, and the glory of the playfulness of the child.

Read More:http://fany.savina.net/2010/05/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/

From an article, ( see link at end) :All the anti-aging potions, lotions and notions on the market and in development add up to a very pretty penny. Maybe some of them actually work. Yet the biology behind aging, and how to slow its effects, has never been well understood.

Now, seven years of Israeli research have revealed that it may all come down to a specific gene called Sirtuin 6, or SIRT6 for short. They described their study in the February 22 online issue of the popular science journal Nature.

SIRT6 is one of seven sirtuin genes that encode a class of proteins found in every species from single-celled yeast to complex humans. For years, scientists had zeroed in on SIRT1. When they removed SIRT1 from yeast, worms and flies, these creatures aged faster and died sooner. When they transplanted a copy of SIRT1 into the three species instead, their life expectancy increased….

---Cary Grant (Barnaby Fulton) a chemist, has taken an elixir of youth by mistake. He becomes 20 years younger and goes out with his boss's secretary Marilyn Monroe (Lois Laurel).--- Read More:http://www.gonemovies.com/www/Hoofd/A/PhotoLarge.php?Keuze=ActGrantMonroeMonkeyBusiness


Nothing wrong with prolonging childhood and youth. It can be plausibly argued, as Richard Halpern wrote in The Underside of Innocence that most adults are infantile anyway, or at best overgrown children. There is a certain decadence, mixed with comical associations of aging youth, almost as form of luxury, a conspicuous consumption where a Keith Richards can get drunk and climb a palm tree, making sure the press is informed of his monkey antics. Mark it down to a fear of becoming old and traditional, as if youth is a calling in the legions of an Alfred Jarry and shit disturbing a mark of the youthful prodigy.

…But yeast and flies aren’t mammals. So molecular biologist Haim Cohen of Bar-Ilan University instead turned his attention to a 2006 study involving SIRT6, which showed that mice lacking this gene aged more quickly, developing spinal curvature, calcium deficiency, osteoporosis, immune system problems and diabetes — just like humans.

“People were mostly interested in SIRT1,” Cohen said. “So I thought it might be better for us as a new lab to work on something that is less crowded.”

His Bar-Ilan graduate student Yariv Kanfi spent more than five years breeding mice that would receive an extra dose of SIRT6. Most of the lab work was done in Bar-Ilan, the pathology at Hebrew University’s Hadassah Medical School and the bioinformatics by Ziv Bar-Joseph, an Israeli professor at Pennsylvania’s Carnegie Mellon University…

Its part of an avant-garde self image, the cutting edge, eternal youth of the rebel claiming some hermetic secrets permitting one to outsmart time. The denial of death , even if the Paradise is an artificial one. Forever young and desiring to continue on a rebelliou


ail without showing any signs of wear and tear. Maybe these researchers are onto something, tapping into some dark corner of our psyche that will be redeemed in its conviction that we can be young and modern forever. Like a Rimbaud always in full flower and able to throw unwelcome maturity into a dark hole.  Does anyone not have a wish to remain young forever? To bathe in the luxury of emotional impotence?

…Cohen’s hunch proved to be a good one. His team demonstrated that extra SIRT6 increased survival rates in their male laboratory mice by as much as 15 percent above normal.

They’re not sure why it didn’t have a similar effect on the female mice, but since females of this strain tend to live 15% longer than males, the boost of SIRT6 may simply have allowed the guys to catch up with the girls….

---Baudelaire and Gauguin agree that the child’s toy is the model and inspiration for the avant-garde work of art, that is, the work of art that is true to modernity, which is a new age of youth, indeed, a hopeful new childhood for humanity, free of the fetters of traditional models of behavior and thought. To be modern is to be young, and to be young is to be modern, and to rejuvenate one’s youth and instincts is to be eternally modern. --- Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/feb/06/benjamin-button-brad-pitt-cate-blanchett

…”Females have different hormone levels that affect metabolism and lifespan,” explains Shoshana Naiman, a doctoral student from Chicago who joined the study four years ago. “SIRT6 perhaps caused the males to be a little more like the females. I’m now heading the project on researching the gender difference and exactly how the lifespan extension occurs, so we can try to transfer it to humans.”

Cohen tells ISRAEL21c that the team also wants to determine which body tissues are most critical to longevity by injecting SIRT6 selectively rather than generally. In addition, they’ll be searching for molecules than can mimic the effect the results in mice.

“If we want to translate this to human therapy, we must find molecules that activate the protein. Once we have that, we can go to clinical trials,” he says. Read More:http://www.israel21c.org/health/have-israeli-scientists-discovered-the-fountain-of-youth#.T045VHEeksk.facebook

Even without yet understanding every piece of the puzzle, the results are quite significant, Naiman tells ISRAEL21c. “Nature is one of the top journals, and only 1% of total submissions get accepted. This was the first from Bar-Ilan in about 30 years.”

There may be a direct correlation between this new study and a 70-year-old scientific discovery that eating 30% fewer calories can prolong good health and life expectancy. Perhaps obesity deactivates the SIRT6 gene, while a frugal diet — or possibly a synthetic drug mimicking its effects — may activate it.

“We’ve made a huge evolutionary leap in the transition from yeast cells to mice,” said Cohen.

“We were the first to show that these sirtuin genes regulate lifespan in mammals. The research was conducted in laboratory animals under very sterile conditions. Is this what happens in nature? It’s not clear. The human SIRT6 gene is very similar to that in mice. It could be that drugs designed to activate the gene will have a positive impact on our ability to treat age-related diseases whose frequency increases in the elderly and in the physiological damage caused by obesity.” Read More:http://www.israel21c.org/health/have-israeli-scientists-discovered-the-fountain-of-youth#.T045VHEeksk.facebook

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