September 2003 issue

Another one mostly by the abstracts. A couple of interesting things in this one.

"An Ethical Assessment of Anti-Aging Medicine". Ethics.

"A Telomere-Binding Protein (TRF2/MTBP) from Mouse Nuclear Matrix with Motives of an Intermediate Filament-Type Rod Domain". telomere membrane binding protein = telomere repeat factor 2 = (?) protein that binds telomere to nuclear membrane.

"Apparent Induction of Partial Thymic Regeneration in a Normal Human Subject: A Case Report". Growth hormone plus DHEA maybe made the thymus in one person larger and with a larger active region. Rare growth hormone article that I'd be interested in reading.

Report on a meeting for the association and politics for life science. Sounds like mainly ethics.

Report on the 10th congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology, which also seemed to function as a SENS meeting. Found the summary of highlights on the net. Impossible to summarise, but LOTS of interesting papers presented.

Review of the books "The iron factor of aging: why do americans age faster?" which seems to suggest that iron supplementation helps (!?) and one on ethics.

A review of a paper that looks at the link between telomere length and telomerase activity in glioblastomas.

The dissertations section, or at least the first page which I can see, looks at a thesis that compares the hydrogen peroxide production in a bat, a shrew and a mouse, and comes up with them all having similar lifetime free radical production per mitochondrial protein.  It also says free radical production in the bat is higher in youth than in old age, which the author says contradicts the free radical theory of aging.  She suggests this is due to selection of efficient mitochondria during the lifetime.  As far as I understand it, this contradicts de Grey's version of the FRTA too. The thesis was easy to find online from the university's site but I haven't read it properly yet. Interesting nevertheless.  The thesis is titled "Aging and mitochondrial efficiency in the little brown bat, Myotis Lucifugus".

The second dissertation mentioned was about the effects of HIV on CD8+ T cell senescence.