From the fringe to the center

Back in 1995 my friends mostly humored me when I told them I was planning to live 165 more years and the secret to my success would be connected with future research that would allow me to extend my telomeres.  “Tele-what?” they said.  “Does that have to do with communications?” This was 10 years after the discovery of telomerase in 1985 by Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider.   In 1995, the roles of telomeres and telomerase in cell biology was sometimes thought by scientists to be interesting but mostly thought to be of rather peripheral interest.  That is, except for a few visionaries like Michael Fossel who grasped the importance of these topics early-on. Now we know that telomeres and telomerase are of central relevance with respect to cancers, stem cell differentiation and longevity.  And of course Telomere shortening is one of the most important theories of aging covered in my Anti-Aging Firewalls treatise.  

Today, Rockefeller University announced the winners of the fifth annual Pearl Meister Greengard Prize to Blackburn, Greider and Vicki Lundblad of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.  The prize is being awarded for the discovery of telomerase and for studies of its regulation.  In 2008 Blackburn and Greider received the Paul Erlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the leading science prize in Germany, for the same work.  Greider won the 2007 Dickson Prize in Medicine for her contribution. Blackburn and Greider also received the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences in 2006.  The two shared the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize 1n 2007, and with Jack W. Szostak received the Lasker Prize in 2006.  The honors and prizes are likely to keep rolling in.  It is interesting that it has required more than 20 years for the seminal work of Blackburn and Greider to receive the acknowledgement it deserves.  Some of the other advanced longevity research going on today may likewise not be fully acknowledged until 20 or more years from now.

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.
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