Looks line our old friends telomeres, caps at the ends of chromosomes, are showing up in new contexts all over the place. Theory 12 in the Anti-Aging Firewalls treatise, you will recall, is that aging is measured if not caused by shortening of the telomere caps due to progressive cell divisions throughout life. When the caps get too short with age the cell can no longer reliably reproduce so it dies or settles into grumpy senescence or does evil stuff like causing cancers. This week, it is reported that defects in a single gene related to telomere length and stability leads to susceptibility to at least five different kinds of cancers. The cancers involved include basal cell carcinoma, melanoma and cancers of the lung, bladder, prostate and cervix.
Perhaps the greatest historical strides in population longevity have been related to public health – sewage systems, cleaner water, sanitation measures and the like. A recent study by Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham Young University researchers points to the importance of good air quality. It appears that improvements in air quality in the US, particularly in cities, added about five months to life expectancy in the U.S. over twenty years. I speculate a lot more average life expectancy can be achieved through assuring availability of pure air and pure water to all.
About Vince Giuliano
Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career, since 2007. I believe I am unique among the researchers and writers in the aging sciences community in one critical respect. That is, I personally practice the anti-aging interventions that I preach and that has kept me healthy, young, active and highly involved at my age, now 93. I am as productive as I was at age 45. I don’t know of anybody else active in that community in my age bracket. In particular, I have focused on the importance of controlling chronic inflammation for healthy aging, and have written a number of articles on that subject in this blog. In 2014, I created a dietary supplement to further this objective. In 2019, two family colleagues and I started up Synergy Bioherbals, a dietary supplement company that is now selling this product.
In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was Founding Dean of a graduate school and a full University Professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. Because there was no academic field of computer science at the time, to get through I had to qualify myself in hard sciences, so my studies focused heavily on quantum physics. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 430 substantive.entries in this blog, and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com.
Please note that I have recently changed my mailbox to vegiuliano@agingsciences.com.
