Caloric Restriction and Genetic Engineering Make Bakers Yeast Live 10 Times Longer
Fixed this to rreflect thre real 10 times longer.
The average life span for bakers yeast is roughly 8 days. For yeast there is no time like the present. But scientists through restricting food and some very creative genetic engineering have managed to get bakers yeast to live 800 days instead of 8. So not only is yeast involved in creating bread the staff of life but may provide a path way to extend human life past even vampire like terms - if you reduce you bread and other intake quite dramatically :-) I think bread yeast was the first organism to have it's genome fully discovered by genetic engineers too.
Just lop off a couple of genes, restrict the diet and you too could live for 800 years - if you could live s long as genetically engineered bread yeast in human terms.
"...without apparent side effects"
And therein lies the "apparent" frightening aspect of many genetically modified organisms. I'll go with the organisms formerly known as natural.
Jeff
I'll take the extra 720 years any day. Since I'm retired, I'm going to have to make a lot more plans for a much longer retirement than I first thought possible. That would let me bake another 525,600 extra loaves of bread at 2 a week - I'm not sure there are that many different ones . I should be able to bake some of them while vacationing at a condo or Sandals Resort on Mars - several dozen times by then. Hope Social Security hangs around long enough to pay for my bread baking and I'm glad I'm not 23 and facing having to pay for it - retirement age might be 780 by then :-)
Far too much attention has been given to increasing the span of a lifetime without nearly enough given to increasing the quality of same (and yes, I'm talking H. sapiens here, not S. cerevisiae!).
SteveB
www.breadcetera.com
not to worry: it's only a 10X increase, not 800. :)
of us who are older, and realize we won't live as forever as we thought forever once was, anything that extends life is a blessing - I'll take the 10 times and 800 years :-) I want to know where you sign up to have the genes lopped off - time is short ! I already restrict my diet - well, a little bit anyway but probably not near enough according to this experiment :-)
Nice catch Peter