Review of the Gerontology Literature in Volume 3, Issue 3

To be clear, this is the summary of the reviews, not the reviews themselves. Reviews by Barry Flanary

Subsenescent telomere lengths in fibroblasts immortalized by limiting amounts of telomerase, by Ouellette MM, Liao M, Herbert BS, Johnson M, Holt SE, Liss HS, Shay JW, Wright WE, in Biol Chem 2000;275:10072-10076

I don't think I understand this result. They transfected cells in-vitro with telomerase reverse transcriptase. Those cells had decreasing telomerase activity as they got older, and then lived longer (their number of doublings went from 60-70 to 250-400). Their telomeres shortened from the 1.5kb-10kb range to the 1.5kb-6kb range. Some theorising that the telomerase was preferentially taken up by the shorter telomeres, thus keeping it from hitting the criticial length at which the cells would go senescent.


Cytotoxic T cell immunity against telomerase reverse transcriptase in humans, by Minev B, Hipp J, Firat H, Schmidt JD, Langlade-Demoyen P, Zanetti M, in Proc Nati Acad Sci USA 2000;97:4796-4801.

Experimenting with using the immune system that naturally attacks hTERT to hammer tumor cells, since they produce hTERT. T cells from prostate cancer patient hammered some tumour lines.


Extension of cell life-span and telomere length in animals cloned from senescent somatic cells, by Lanza RP, Cibelli JB, Blackwell C, Cristofalo VJ, Francis MK, Baerlocher GM, Mak J, Schertzer M, Chavez EA, Sawyer N, Lansdorp PM, West MD, in Science 2000;288:665-669.


Cloning of cows from a 45 day old fetus. Resulting cells extracted from fibroblasts had higher replicative capacity and telomere lengths than controls. I'm sure we know much more about cloning now, so this has probably been overturned and back a hundred times.