the harvey lectures, series 100 my adventures with genes from the fountain of youth（哈维的讲座、系列100我从青春之泉的冒险的基因）.pdfVIP

THE HArvEY LECTurES, SErIES 100 MY ADVENTURES WITH GENES FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH CYNTHIA KENYON Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California I. Beginnings hen I gave my Harvey lecture, which was a great honor for me, I Wtold the story of our efforts to understand aging. We began our studies in the early 1990s. At that time, and for years before, many people assumed that aging was a haphazard process, not subject to regulation. Our tissues just break down, and we die. But the more I thought about it, the more I started to question this view. A mouse lives two years, whereas a bat can live 30 years or more. A rat lives three years; a squirrel, 25 (Fig. 2.1). These animals differ by their genes, so there must be genes that affect aging. Also, nothing in biology seems to “just happen”; every- thing seems to be regulated, often in quite an extraordinary way. My experience as a developmental biologist sharpened my thoughts about aging. People were once very skeptical about looking for develop- mental genes. Treating frog embryos with acid can produce a second head, and inhibiting pyrimidine synthesis in flies produces small wings, so many people thought that genes affecting development would also affect things like the Krebs cycle, or pH. They were wrong. There is a dedicated regulatory circuitry for pattern formation. In addition, many people thought that developmental mechanisms would differ completely in different