by S. Mar­vin Fried­man — The quest to live longer is not only the stuff of myths and leg­ends, it is also the goal of some se­ri­ous sci­en­tific re­search. An ex­ten­sive lit­er­a­ture in this area re­sults from nu­mer­ous ex­per­i­ments with pri­mates, mice, worms, flies, and yeast. Ag­ing is char­ac­ter­ized by an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of cel­lu­lar in­sults caused by non-func­tional pro­teins, dys­func­tional or­ganelles, and dam­aged DNA...