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 GENETICS: Life Span May Depend on Shifting Toward Survival, Not Putting Brakes on Metabolism
Severely cutting calories has been shown to lengthen the lives of organisms from rats to worms to flies to yeast. But researchers have struggled to explain why. A study led by David Sinclair and published in the May 8 Nature finds that a specific gene in yeast regulates the organism's ability to live longer with less food. The gene is also highly responsive to other environmental stresses that extend life in yeast. By pinpointing a link between an organism's environment and longevity, the discovery suggests that the prolonged life reached through calorie restriction may be the result of a genetic survival program designed to protect organisms in stressful situations--a program that could, in theory, be manipulated.
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 MEDICAL EDUCATION: Survey of Medical Students Affirms Value of Student Body Diversity
Research assessing medical students' views on racial and ethnic diversity in their educational experience showed that they strongly favor diversity in general and affirmative action in particular. The findings became part of a brief submitted to the Supreme Court in two University of Michigan cases on affirmative action that may define the policy's role for a new generation of students. The study, published in the May Academic Medicine by Joan Reede and her colleagues, was based on telephone interviews with medical students at Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco.
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 PATHOLOGY: Surprising Likeness Found in Genetic Profiles of Invasive and Noninvasive Breast Tumors
From a molecular point of view, HMS researchers have found little to distinguish an invasive breast tumor from its pre-invasive predecessor. Taking a kind of molecular bird's eye view, Dennis Sgroi and his colleagues analyzed the gene expression patterns of invasive ductal carcinomas (IDC) and ductal carcinomas in situ (DCIS) taken from 36 women. Though each differed genetically from nearby swatches of normal breast tissue, invasive and pre-invasive cells were almost identical in their gene expression patterns. The findings appear online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition for the week of April 21.
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Copyright 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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