Xeno Factor

Chapter 1The Origins of LifeIn the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void....And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life...and every living creature that moveth...: and God saw that it was good.-- GENESIS, CHAPTER 1On the last day of February 1953, students and faculty members from the Cavendish Laboratory at England's University of Cambridge were having lunch at the Eagle pub, drinking Green King beer and enjoying the bar, with its graffiti from World War II airmen. At the top of the lunch hour, Francis Crick, a thirty-seven-year-old physicist turned biologist who had not yet earned his PhD, bounded in and loudly announced to his colleague, the zoologist turned geneticist James Watson, "We have found the secret of life!" Indeed they had. That morning, the two young scientists had deciphered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) -- two strands of sugar connected by paired molecules called bases -- an accomplishment for which they would later win the Nobel Prize.That structure, a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself, was the finding that confirmed that DNA carried the hereditary code of life. Crick and Watson immediately published their findings in the scientific journalNature, and capped a rather academic, dry account of DNA's structure with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairings we have postulated immediately suggest a possible copying mechanism for genetic material" -- that is, of life.Fifty years later, in 2003, another landmark paper appeared in the same prestigious international journal, also from a Cambridge laboratory, but this time in Massachusetts. The head of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School, David Sinclair, and his associates published a paper entitled "Small Molecule Activators of Sirtuins ExtendSaccharomyces cerevisiaeLifespan." A year later, another peer-reviewed journal,Molecular Microbiology, published their follow-up article, "Small Molecules That Regulate Lifespan: Evidence for Xenohormesis."Sinclair explained that certain plants can increase production of specialized molecules during times of stress, such as drought or increased ultraviolet radiation from the sun. When consumed by animals, these plant molecules, which Sinclair called xeno factors, were found to interact with the animals' genes and impart amazing health benefits. Most astonishing was the observation that these laboratory animals lived substantially longer -- in some cases, up to 50 percent longer -- than their average expected life span. Tests for cell damage indicated that they were also much healthier, with fewer occurrences of cancer, heart disease, and brain cell deterioration than is normally seen with aging (see figure 1).This discovery, which has since been confirmed in laboratories at MIT and the University of California, San Francisco, is revolutionizing our ideas of how and why we age. Because human DNA has important basic similarities with animal DNA, we also possess similar genes that can be activated by eating these specialized plant molecules. For the first time in human history, there is real evidence that we can use this process to slow aging and live not only longer but healthier.In the BeginningWhen I considered that the same stressed plant molecules could prolong life in yeast (evolutionarily approximately one billion years old), fish (500 million years old), and mammals (200 million years old), I became perplexed. What could possibly be the biological connection between the lowly yeast and humankind? To solve this scientific conundrum, I found myself going farther and farther back in time, asking more questions. What are the most basic molecular factorsMaroon, Joseph C. is the author of 'Xeno Factor ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416551072 and ISBN 1416551077.