Word: geron
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since telomerase keeps these tenacious cells going, is it reasonable to assume that the same enzyme could be used artificially to help mortal cells--and the body itself--exceed their programmed life-span? At Geron Corp., a San Francisco-based biomedical firm, biologist Calvin Harley is trying to find out. Harley, who collaborated with Greider on her later telomere work, is looking for the genes that direct telomerase production, believing he might be able to manipulate them so that the spigot for the enzyme can be turned on and off at will. "I think we are going to see fundamental...
...discovery announced last week that cancer cells rely on the enzyme telomerase to stay alive opens up a different attack strategy. The leader of that research team, Calvin Harley, has taken a leave from McMaster University to work at Geron Corp. in Menlo Park, California. The company is trying to craft a drug that will block the action of telomerase. "The cancer cell," explains Harley, "is already very old. If we can inhibit telomerase, we might cause the tumor to die after a few doublings." Even better, the fact that cancer cells produce telomerase and that normal cells (save...
...science, gerontology. Properly the study of aging in all living things, and involving social as well as medical sciences, it has focused most sharply on the aging human since 1903, when Elie Metchnikoff suggested in The Nature of Man that "this science may be called gerontology" (from the Greek geron, an old man). In 1909 Internist Ignatz L. Nascher coined the word geriatrics (from geras, old age, and iatreia, cure) for the medical care of the old. Geriatrics has grown as a sub-specialty of internal medicine, but is not yet recognized as a fully distinct specialty-and many geriatricians...
...Gerontology, from Greek geron, old man: study of the aged. Geriatrics, from geras, old age: healing of the aged...