I thought I would point your attention to a pair of interesting discussion threads presently ongoing in the Immortality Institute forums. Firstly, commentary by S. Jay Olshansky and others on a very rare developmental abnormality:

I came across this story a few months ago as well, and didn't believe it. A colleague decided to check into it -- it is indeed a true story, and I agree with you that it is certainly a very interesting phenomenon. I actually have seen a picture of the girl with her grandmother and siblings as well as a series of pictures during most of her life. Her pediatrician has been contacted for a life history; someone is looking at her telomeres; and an inquiry has been made about her mental development. The price to pay for her apparent arrested physical development is an arrested mental development. In the one other case of this kind that we know of, the girl died at about age 15 because of problems with her intestines, and she too faced severe problems of mental development. Nevertheless, to have a teenager exhibit the phenotype of a 4-year old is astonishing. I'm encouraging my colleague to write up the details of his work and publish it in a high profile journal -- to our knowledge we have not seen this as a recognized syndrome. It may have considerable relevance to research in gerontology. Hopefully you'll see more on this by the end of this year.

Developmental abnormalities may or may not shed light on aging, but at the present time it's still very important to grasp at any such mutations for their potential to provide a short cut through some portion of genetic science. Studies of progeria recently led to important advances in understanding, for example.

The second discussion of interest can be found in John Schloendorn's LysoSENS thread; he's providing updates of experiments on the soil samples sent in by volunteers, seeking non-toxic bacterial enzymes capable of breaking down damaging age-related chemical byproducts.

Earlier than I had dared to hope, we have obtained two new cultures that efficiently degrade one of our major targets, 7-ketocholesterol. They reproducibly deplete it from the medium within 10 days, which is more rapid than anything we have seen before, and utilize it as a growth substrate. Now the fun will start to isolate the bugs from the mixed cultures and take them apart. One of the cultures originated from a mixed inoculum containing the early samples submitted by QJones and Mind and a few other donated garden samples. We cannot tell in which submission precisely they originated, since we pool several samples for efficiency. (you have to submit a couple of them to get your own exclusive pool ;-) The other culture came from cemetary samples collected by ourselves. Both cultures seem equally efficient, look alike and it could be the same organism.

Eternal thanks to our soil donors who made this wonderful result possible, together.

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please keep in mind that failure can come in many ways. The organisms might not grow on plates, compromising isolation, the genetics might not work out as we hope, the enzyme may be toxic and so on...

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Posted by Reason at January 16, 2006 12:22 PM | TrackBack (0)