Just in time for aging boomers like myself, new drugs to treat aging on the horizon.
The general public has no idea what's coming," said David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School professor who has made headlines with research into the health benefits of a substance found in red wine called resveratrol.
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Sinclair said treatments could be a few years or a decade away, but they're "really close. It's not something (from) science fiction and it's not something for the next generation."
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He described how his research found that mice given large doses of resveratrol "live longer, they're almost immune to the effects of obesity. They don't get diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's as frequently. We delay the diseases of aging."
Sinclair showed video of mice on resveratrol running on a treadmill far more vigorously than those who didn't get the substance. He called them "our Lance Armstrong mice."
A large dose meant the equivalent of a human drinking about 1,000 bottles of red wine daily, he said.
The New York Times looks into it and finds New Hints That Red Wine May Slow Aging.
The secret appears to be protein agents that in people are called sirtuins.
And it seems Dr. Sinclair is co-founder of Sirtris, a start-up company seeking to develop drugs that activate sirtuins.
"The upside is so huge that if we are right, the company that dominates the sirtuin space could dominate the pharmaceutical industry and change medicine,” Dr. David Sinclair said.
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the door has now been opened to drugs that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases of aging.
I wonder whether the recent change in Burgundy resulting in a surge of quality will have any effect .
The quality of Burgundy — red Burgundy in particular — has risen strikingly over the last two decades. From the smallest growers to the biggest houses, the standards of grape-growing and winemaking have surpassed anybody’s expectations. These days, Burgundy has very few bad vintages, and among good producers, surprisingly few bad wines.
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“It’s not so much an improvement as a blooming,” said Becky Wasserman, an American wine broker who has lived in Burgundy since 1968. “It’s a realization of potential."
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Most striking of all was the number of young producers making superb wines, whether they have taken charge of their family domains or started out new.
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Few could have envisioned such a level of quality back in the early 1980s, a time when Claude Bourguignon, a French soil scientist who, with his wife, Lydia, works with numerous wine estates, famously said that the soil of the Sahara had more life in it than the soil of Burgundy.
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Their first order of business was to wean the soil off two decades worth of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.
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Over the next 20 years a great many producers turned to organic farming, and others adopted biodynamic viticulture, a particularly demanding system that takes a sort of homeopathic approach to farming. These days it’s the rare farmer who still uses chemical herbicides in the vineyard.
“The soils are alive again,” Mr. Bourguignon said by telephone last week. “They’ve really changed, and it’s one of the reasons the wine has changed.”
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“We can now understand what our grandparents were doing,” said Jean-Marie Fourrier of Domaine Fourrier in Gevrey-Chambertin. “We’re rediscovering the logic of the past.”