“Your age
is your number one risk factor for almost every disease,” says Dr. J Craig
Venter in an interview about his new idea. Dr. Venter is a 67 year-old entrepreneur
in search of a way to figure out how people can live longer and healthier lives;
he has recently started a new company, Human Longevity, in order to do so. His
plan is to sequence the genomes of both sick and healthy people, ranging in age
from children to His company has paired up with Metabolon, another company, in
hopes of measuring the chemicals in their blood as well. Dr. Venter thinks that
all of these tests in collaboration may lead to some actual findings. The more
they can find out about the body and what age does to it, the better. However,
the goal is not to make people live forever, but to make “100 years old be the
next 60.” Combining all of these processes with the ability to examine over
40,000 human genomes a year, there may actually be a path leading to the
answers. If slowing the process of aging can successfully be done, this could
lead to preventing many diseases instead of treating one disease at a time. The
key to all of this is we need more information about the molecular causes of
aging in order to be able to experiment with increasing life years.
This article was extraordinarily interesting and was written
really well. It really makes you wonder
what exactly we will be able to do in the future. I never thought it would even
be a possibility to extend human life, but apparently they are slowing
discovering an answer to this.
Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/business/in-pursuit-of-longevity-a-plan-to-harness-dna-sequencing.html?hpw&rref=health&action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults%230&version=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%23%2Fmicrobiome%2F30days%2Farticles%2F
Image:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/business/in-pursuit-of-longevity-a-plan-to-harness-dna-sequencing.html?hpw&rref=health&action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults%230&version=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%23%2Fmicrobiome%2F30days%2Farticles%2F
