Aging – Page 13 – artdiamondblog.com

The Young, with Managerial Experience, Are Most Likely to Become Entrepreneurs

(p. A13) In a current study analyzing the most recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) survey, my colleagues James Liang, Jackie Wang and I found that there is a strong correlation between youth and entrepreneurship. The GEM survey is an annual assessment of the “entrepreneurial activity, aspirations and attitudes” of thousands of individuals across 65 countries.
In our study of GEM data, which will be issued early next year, we found that young societies tend to generate more new businesses than older societies. Young people are more energetic and have many innovative ideas. But starting a successful business requires more than ideas. Business acumen is essential to the entrepreneur. Previous positions of responsibility in companies provide the skills needed to successfully start businesses, and young workers often do not hold those positions in aging societies, where managerial slots are clogged with older workers.
In earlier work (published in the Journal of Labor Economics, 2005), I found that Stanford MBAs who became entrepreneurs typically worked for others for five to 10 years before starting their own businesses. The GEM data reveal that in the U.S. the entrepreneurship rate peaks for individuals in their late 20s and stays high throughout the 30s. Those in their early 20s have new business ownership rates that are only two-thirds of peak rates. Those in their 50s start businesses at about half the rate of 30-year-olds.
Silicon Valley provides a case in point. Especially during the dot-com era, the Valley was filled with young people who had senior positions in startups. Some of the firms succeeded, but even those that failed provided their managers with valuable business lessons.
My co-author on the GEM study, James Liang, is an example. After spending his early years as a manager at the young and rapidly growing Oracle, he moved back to China to start Ctrip, one of the country’s largest Internet travel sites.

For the full commentary, see:
EDWARD P. LAZEAR. “The Young, the Restless and Economic Growth; Countries with a younger population have far higher rates of entrepreneurship.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 23, 2013): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 22, 2013.)

The Lazear paper mentioned above, is:
Lazear, Edward P. “Entrepreneurship.” Journal of Labor Economics 23, no. 4 (October 2005): 649-80.

Stem Cells Used to Create Tiny, Simple Human Livers

“Researchers from Japan used human stem cells to create “liver buds,” rudimentary livers that, when transplanted into mice, grew and functioned.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) Researchers in Japan have used human stem cells to create tiny human livers like those that arise early in fetal life. When the scientists transplanted the rudimentary livers into mice, the little organs grew, made human liver proteins, and metabolized drugs as human livers do.

They and others caution that these are early days and this is still very much basic research. The liver buds, as they are called, did not turn into complete livers, and the method would have to be scaled up enormously to make enough replacement liver buds to treat a patient. Even then, the investigators say, they expect to replace only 30 percent of a patient’s liver. What they are making is more like a patch than a full liver.
But the promise, in a field that has seen a great deal of dashed hopes, is immense, medical experts said.
“This is a major breakthrough of monumental significance,” said Dr. Hillel Tobias, director of transplantation at the New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Tobias is chairman of the American Liver Foundation’s national medical advisory committee.

For the full story, see:
GINA KOLATA. “Scientists Fabricate Rudimentary Human Livers.” The New York Times (Thurs., July 4, 2013): A3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 3, 2013.)

The research article is:
Takebe, Takanori, Keisuke Sekine, Masahiro Enomura, Hiroyuki Koike, Masaki Kimura, Takunori Ogaeri, Ran-Ran Zhang, Yasuharu Ueno, Yun-Wen Zheng, Naoto Koike, Shinsuke Aoyama, Yasuhisa Adachi, and Hideki Taniguchi. “Vascularized and Functional Human Liver from an iPSC-Derived Organ Bud Transplant.” Nature (July 3, 2013) DOI: 10.1038/nature12271.

Foreign Aid Frees Despots from Having to Seek the Consent of the Governed

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) IN his new book, Angus Deaton, an expert’s expert on global poverty and foreign aid, puts his considerable reputation on the line and declares that foreign aid does more harm than good. It corrupts governments and rarely reaches the poor, he argues, and it is high time for the paternalistic West to step away and allow the developing world to solve its own problems.

It is a provocative and cogently argued claim. The only odd part is how it is made. It is tacked on as the concluding section of “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality” (Princeton University Press, 360 pages), an illuminating and inspiring history of how mankind’s longevity and prosperity have soared to breathtaking heights in modern times.
. . .
THE author has found no credible evidence that foreign aid promotes economic growth; indeed, he says, signs show that the relationship is negative. Regretfully, he identifies a “central dilemma”: When the conditions for development are present, aid is not required. When they do not exist, aid is not useful and probably damaging.
Professor Deaton makes the case that foreign aid is antidemocratic because it frees local leaders from having to obtain the consent of the governed. “Western-led population control, often with the assistance of nondemocratic or well-rewarded recipient governments, is the most egregious example of antidemocratic and oppressive aid,” he writes. In its day, it seemed like a no-brainer. Yet the global population grew by four billion in half a century, and the vast majority of the seven billion people now on the planet live longer and more prosperous lives than their parents did.

For the full review, see:
FRED ANDREWS. “OFF THE SHELF; A Surprising Case Against Foreign Aid.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., October 13, 2013): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 12, 2013.)

The book reviewed is:
Deaton, Angus. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Gene-Altered Mice Live 20% Longer

“NIH researchers found that lowering the expression of a single gene helped extend the life of mice by about 20%. A mouse with a manipulated gene on the right and an unchanged mouse on the left.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) By reducing the activity of one type of gene, scientists said they increased the average life span of mice by about 20%, a feat that in human terms is akin to extending life by about 15 years.

Moreover, the researchers at the National Institutes of Health found that memory, cognition and some other important traits were better preserved in the mice as they aged, compared with a control group of mice that had normal levels of a protein put out by the gene.
The findings, published Thursday [August 29, 2013] in the journal Cell Reports, strengthen the case that the gene, called mTOR, is a major regulator of the aging process.
. . .
The results . . . build on a growing body of research challenging the belief that aging is an intractable biological process, prompting scientists to think of slowing aging as a possible way to prevent disease.
“What we need right now is for scientists and the public to wake up to the concept that you can slow aging,” said Brian Kennedy, president of the Buck Institute for Aging Research in Novato, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the new study. “If you do, you prevent many of the diseases that we’re so scared of and that are associated with aging.” They include cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

For the full story, see:
RON WINSLOW. “Altered Gene Points Toward Longer Life Spans; Successful Experiment With Mice May One Day Play Role in Slowing Human Aging; Side Effects Could Be Problematic.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri, August 30, 2013): A3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 29, 2013, and has the title “Genetic Manipulation Extends Life of Mice 20%; But Translating Findings to Humans Faces Many Hurdles.”)

The scientific article being discussed above, is:
Wu, J. Julie, Jie Liu, Edmund B Chen, Jennifer J Wang, Liu Cao, Nisha Narayan, Marie M Fergusson, Ilsa I Rovira, Michele Allen, Danielle A Springer, Cory U Lago, Shuling Zhang, Wendy DuBois, Theresa Ward, Rafael deCabo, Oksana Gavrilova, Beverly Mock, and Toren Finkel. “Increased Mammalian Lifespan and a Segmental and Tissue-Specific Slowing of Aging after Genetic Reduction of mTor Expression.” Cell Reports 4, no. 5 (Aug. 29, 2013): 913-20.

Google’s Calico Company Seeks to Expand the Human Life Span

(p. B4) Google Inc.is backing a new company to research aging, taking an unusual business swing at the burgeoning science of extending the human life span.
The venture, which is long on goals but short on specifics, is known as Calico, and will operate separately from Google, the online search giant said on Wednesday.
“We believe we can make good progress within reasonable time scales with the right goals and the right people,” Google CEO Larry Page said in a blog post. “This is clearly a longer-term bet.”
. . .
Google provided scant details about how Calico would operate or how it would tackle its ambitions of improving the health of “millions of lives.” But Jay Olshansky, an expert on aging at the University of Illinois of Chicago, said one potentially promising path is to research therapies that target the aging process itself.
While medical research typically focuses on finding treatments and cures for individual ailments such as cardiovascular disease and cancer, “if you’re going to have an impact on human health and longevity in the future, the way to go is to go after aging itself,” Dr. Olshansky said.
A founder of a consortium called the Longevity Dividend Initiative, Dr. Olshansky said [he gave a talk at conference (sic) in 2010 in which he said that finding a cure for cancer would only extend human life span by about three and one-half years. The reason is, he said, is (sic) it would “expose people who were saved from dying of cancer to all the other diseases and disorders” that are the result of aging.]
. . .
{He said Mr. Brin attended the meeting and asked him questions about the talk. He hasn’t discussed Calico with anyone at Google–the first he’d heard of the venture was Wednesday– though he described the formation of Calico as “great news.”}

For the full story, see:
GREG BENSINGER and RON WINSLOW. “Google Backs New Venture to Research Aging.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., September 19, 2013): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added; square-bracketed words are in the print, but not the online, version of the article; curly-bracketed words are in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date September 18, 2013, and has the title “Google Backs Venture to Research Aging.”)

Hunter-Gatherers Had High Child Mortality and Died Before Age 40

(p. 31) Child mortality in foraging tribes was severe. A survey of 25 hunter-gatherer tribes in historical times from various continents revealed that, on average, 25 percent of children died before they were 1, and 37 percent died before they were 15. In one traditional hunter-gatherer tribe, child mortality was found to be 60 percent. Most historical tribes had a population growth rate of approximately zero. This stagnation is evident, says Robert Kelly in his survey of hunting-gathering peoples, because “when formerly mobile people become sedentary, the rate of population growth increases.” All things being equal, the constancy of farmed food breeds more people.
While many children died young, older hunter-gatherers did not have (p. 32) it much better. It was a tough life. Based on an analysis of bone stress and cuts, one archaeologist said the distribution of injuries on the bodies of Neanderthals was similar to that found on rodeo professionals–lots of head, trunk, and arm injuries like the ones you might get from close encounters with large, angry animals. There are no known remains of an early hominin who lived to be older than 40. Because extremely high child mortality rates depress average life expectancy, if the oldest outlier is only 40, the median age was almost certainly less than 20.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Stem-Cell Researchers Developing Experimental Personalized Medicine

(p. C4) Last month a team at Johns Hopkins University and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, using a version of Dr. Yamanaka’s technique, successfully grew nerve cells from a patient suffering from a rare disease called Riley-Day syndrome, which is linked to early mortality, seizures and other symptoms and caused by a fault in one gene.
But the purpose was not to put these cells back into the patient. Instead the scientists tested 6,912 chemical compounds on the cells to see if they could find one that “rescued” the “expression” of the gene: that is to say, caused it to produce the protein it is supposed to produce. One of the compounds worked, inducing the gene to be actively transcribed by the cell.
In the not-very-distant future, when something is going wrong in one of your organs, one treatment may be to create some stem cells from your body in the laboratory, turn them into cells of that organ, or even rudimentary structures, and then subject them to experimental treatments to see if something cures the problem. The goal of personalized medicine, in other words, may be reached by stem-cell researchers before it’s reached by geneticists.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; Stem-Cell Cures Without the Controversy.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 8, 2012): C4.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 7, 2012.)

Sometimes There Are Second Acts in American Lives

“In the foreground, Ian Wolfe, Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in 1935’s ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.'” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. D10) In 1947 Charles Laughton’s career, if not quite on the skids, was definitely in the doldrums. Long acclaimed as Hollywood’s foremost character actor, he had made only one film of any artistic consequence, Jean Renoir’s “This Land Is Mine,” in the past seven years. The rest of the time he coasted, frequently indulging in self-parody–and nobody was easier to spoof than the man who played Captain Bligh in “Mutiny on the Bounty” and Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” He wouldn’t have been the first actor to sell his soul for a swimming pool (or, in his case, an art collection). But with Mr. Laughton the waste would have been unforgivable, since he was, in Laurence Olivier’s words, “the only actor I ever knew who was a genius.”

Instead, Mr. Laughton fooled everyone by returning to the stage for the first time since 1936. Nor did he choose a safe star vehicle for his return: He played the title role in the U.S. premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” and he translated the play himself.
. . .
Except for “The Night of the Hunter,” Mr. Laughton’s post-“Galileo” career is no longer widely remembered save by scholars. But enough of it survives on sound recordings and kinescopes to prove that F. Scott Fitzgerald was all wet when he claimed that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Charles Laughton, who moved from England to America to seek fame and fortune and came perilously close to losing his soul along the way, had a second act that redeemed all that came before it. No actor could ask for a better curtain.

For the full commentary, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “SIGHTINGS; Charles Laughton’s Late Bounty.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 2, 2012): D10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 1, 2012.)

Longer Life Spans “Allowed More Time to Invent New Tools”

(p. 33) The primary long-term consequence of . . . slightly better nutrition was a steady increase in longevity. Anthropologist Rachel Caspari studied the dental fossils of 768 hominin individuals in Europe, Asia, and Africa, dated from 5 million years ago until the great leap. She determined that a “dramatic increase in longevity in the modern humans” began about 50,000 years ago. Increasing longevity allowed grandparenting, creating what is called the grandmother effect: In a virtuous circle, via the communication of grandparents, ever more powerful innovations carried forward were able to lengthen life spans further, which allowed more time to invent new tools, which increased population. Not only that: Increased longevity “provide[d] a selective advantage promoting further population increase,” because a higher density of humans increased the rate and influence of innovations, which contributed to increased populations. Caspari claims that the most fundamental biological factor that underlies the behavioral innovations of modernity maybe the increase in adult survivorship. It is no coincidence that increased longevity is the most measurable consequence of the acquisition of technology. It is also the most consequential.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added; bracketed “d” in Kelly’s original.)

Jobs’ Protest Against Mortality: Omit the On-Off Switches on Apple Devices

(p. 571) . . . [Jobs] admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”
He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.”
Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis and bracketed “Jobs” added; italics in original.)

Resveratrol Activates Sirtuins to Switch on Energy Producing Mitochondria

A new study, just published in the prestigious journal Science, appears to substantially vindicate the recently beleaguered resveratrol longevity research of David Sinclair:

. . . a new study led by David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School, who in 2003 was a discoverer resveratrol’s role in activating sirtuins, found that resveratrol did indeed influence sirtuin directly, though in a more complicated way than previously thought. . . . . . . activated, the sirtuins do several things, one of which is to switch on a second protein that spurs production of the mitochondria, which provide the cell’s energy. This would explain why mice treated with resveratrol ran twice as far on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion as untreated mice.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “New Optimism on Resveratrol.” New York Times “Well” Blog Posted on MARCH 11, 2013. URL: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/new-optimism-on-resveratrol/
(Note: ellipses added.)

The Sinclair article (see last-listed co-author) is:
Hubbard, Basil P., Ana P. Gomes, Han Dai, Jun Li, April W. Case, Thomas Considine, Thomas V. Riera, Jessica E. Lee, Sook Yen E (sic), Dudley W. Lamming, Bradley L. Pentelute, Eli R. Schuman, Linda A. Stevens, Alvin J. Y. Ling, Sean M. Armour, Shaday Michan, Huizhen Zhao, Yong Jiang, Sharon M. Sweitzer, Charles A. Blum, Jeremy S. Disch, Pui Yee Ng, Konrad T. Howitz, Anabela P. Rolo, Yoshitomo Hamuro, Joel Moss, Robert B. Perni, James L. Ellis, George P. Vlasuk, and David A. Sinclair. “Evidence for a Common Mechanism of Sirt1 Regulation by Allosteric Activators.” Science 339, no. 6124 (March 8, 2013): 1216-19.