Word: greider
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...World, Ready or Not (Simon & Schuster; 528 pages; $27.50) William Greider examines the forces behind this global economic revolution, comparing them to a giant agricultural machine that "throws off enormous mows of wealth and bounty while it leaves behind great furrows of wreckage." Greider, the national editor of Rolling Stone magazine, has a remarkable talent for spotting the economic trends that buffet and baffle ordinary people. He explains cogently why jobs move rapidly from country to country and what impact that has on both the losers and the winners. Drawing on expertise and sources he developed while writing Secrets...
...Greider argues that the economic machine also sows the seeds of its own destruction by generating an ever increasing bounty of goods while impoverishing the workers who might buy them: "Crudely stated, the technology competition leads companies to invest in more output of goods than the global marketplace of consumers can possibly absorb." The inevitable result, he predicts, will be a global depression...
Unfortunately, Greider's solutions could well do more harm than good. He hails West European efforts to protect existing jobs, but doesn't deal with the fact that those policies make employers reluctant to create new jobs, thus driving unemployment rates in those economies to postwar highs. Similarly, his schemes for slowing the flow of money from country to country would punish serious investors as well as speculators. His insistence that peasants in developing nations need protection from inhumane labor practices ignores the overriding desire of many of those people to escape from the grinding poverty of subsistence farming. Greider...
...next step for scientists was obvious: study the cells with little or no replication limit and find out what mechanism kept their telomeres--and their lives--so long. In 1984 molecular biologists Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn, then with the University of California, Berkeley, did just that. Working with a single-cell pond organism, they discovered a telomere-preserving enzyme they dubbed telomerase. Five years later, Gregg Morin at Yale University confirmed their work, identifying the same substance in cancer cells. In the Petri dish, the agent of eternal life had been found...
...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 medicines for aging," Harley says...