Word: mice
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gene can do that much for flies (or worms or mice--genetic engineering has created a growing zoo of Methuselahs), then what can our genes do for us? Maybe there really is a clock of clocks, and maybe, just maybe, 21st century biologists will figure out how to twiddle and reset the hands. They might concoct Methuselah pills or inject Methuselah genes into fertilized eggs and fool our mortal bodies into believing that we are forever young. "Perhaps," Benzer muses, "aging can be better described not as a clock but as a scenario, which we can hope to edit...
...have supposedly isolated every predisposition from breast cancer to sugar addiction - a group of California doctors claim to have found the DNA strand responsible for the industrialized world's number one killer, heart failure. In a report released Thursday, the team of UC San Diego doctors told of mating mice genetically engineered to contain the gene phospholamban, or PLB, which they believed was responsible for heart failure, with mice that lacked the PLB gene. The resulting offspring did not develop heart failure. They also created mice carrying a defective form of PLB; in that experiment, the offspring produced by mating...
...TIME science reporter Janice Horowitz cautions that while speculating on medical cures can be as tempting as a hunk of cheddar to a mouse, the public shouldn't get trapped into generalizing about research performed on mice. "What goes on with lab mice is many, many steps away from what goes on with humans," says Horowitz. "And the work we're doing now with gene therapy is only the tip of the iceberg. It'll be a long time before these things pan out into medical cures...
Susan Craig, spokesperson for the Children's Hospital, Boston, where Folkman conducts his research, says that endostatin has been successful in studies on mice, reducing cancerous tumors to nearly microscopic size with no observable side effects...
...only a first step, but scientists may be a hair closer to a cure for baldness. Using injections of a gene--nicknamed the Sonic hedgehog--they have been able to awaken hair follicles from a resting state and force them into an active one. Alas, that's just in mice. Whether the therapy works on human pates remains to be seen. One potential problem: the Sonic hedgehog gene is linked to basal-cell carcinoma, a common, treatable skin cancer...