Rest of volume 2, Issue 2

The rest of issue 2 of 1999 consists of:

Some book reviews:

• "Gray dawn: How the coming age wave will transform America and the world", by PG Peterson. Populist-sounding book warning that the US is getting old. Not reading it going by that review.
• "Living to 100: Lessons in living to your maximum potential at any age", by TT Perls, M Hutter Silver, JF Lauerman and M Hutter-Silver. Book about how life at 100 can still be good. Feel-good book? Not reading it going by that review.
• "Life without disease: The pursuit of medical utopia", by WB Schwartz. Using genes to predict and prevent disease. Sounds populist. Not reading it going by that review.
• "The causes of aging", by AP Wickens. Sounds like introduction to biology of aging. Maybe ok.
• "Super T: The complete guide to creating an effective, save, and natural testosterone enhancement program for men and women", by K Ullis, J Shackman, and G Ptacek. Guide on how to use testosterone as a supplement. Even though it sounds like marketing crap, it could be interesting.

The gerontology literature review:

• "The centenarians are coming", by CG Wagner, in The Futurist. Usual Futurist content. Sounds similar to the "Living to 100" book above.
• "Longevity: The ultimate gender gap", by HB Simon, in Scientific American. Reviewer didn't like it and mostly gave differing explanations and recommendations for the reasons of why men and women have different life expectancies. I don't like the alternative explanations offered.
• "Aging: A message from the gonads", by DL Riddle, in Nature. Burning bits of somatic gonadal tissue in some worms extended their lifespan by 60% compared to standard. Paper-suggested theoretical background: fecundity and longevity are inversely proportional, controlled by hormones. IGF-1 signals lots of food. Interesting. (Further below *).
  
• "Analysis of telomere lengths in cloned sheep", by PG Shiels, AJ Kind, KHS Campbell, D Waddington, I Wilmut, A Colman, and AE Schnieke, in Nature. Dolly, and two other cloned sheep, have 20% shorter telomeres than expected for their age. Theorised that telomere length not reset. Other people (that the reviewer contacted?) not convinced the result is not a fluke, or just experimental error (supposedly hard to distinguish telomeres 19kB long from ones 24 kB long)

The usual other sections: web watch, literature watch and calendar.

* On reading the article/letter, the description above is a bit wrong. The note is a theoretical justification for the gonad ablation result from another group. The 60% longevity expansion effect only happens when they get rid of the germline precursor cells (that generate sperm and eggs) and leave the gonad precursor cells alone, but not when they blast both sets. He interprets this as sperm shortening life and gonads extending it (I didn't get the teleological reasoning). There's more gene analysis ending with DAF-12 and DAF-16 upregulation extending lifespan, maybe through catalase upregulation, and DAF-2 shortening it by inhibiting DAF-16.