Most people look for the key to postponing old age in mega-antioxidant-loaded juices, extreme exercise regimens, or expensive skin creams. Not Michael Rose. Rose, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine and one of the panelists for the World Science Festival's From Dust to…The Radical New Science of Longevity session on Thursday, June 2, turned to fruit flies.
He and his colleagues have spent many fruit fly lifetimes studying the short-lived insects. And in the past thirty years, they have found that by manually selecting the longest-living flies from each generation of a group, they could extend the amount of time later generations lived. The experiment, which has been running since 1981, has generated fruit flies that live nearly four times the length of the first average flies.
But rather than argue for some sort of dystopian global human breeding program—which wouldn't likely see extreme benefits for hundreds or thousands of generations anyway—Rose has discerned a more subtle lesson. He found that fruit flies had genes that worked in two different ways to determine life span. The genes functioned one way in the flies' younger years and another way in their insect-lives' twilight years (which are closer to our weeks).
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