[Aging, oxygen and the gene].

Abstract

There are several aspects and approaches to aging research, depending on researchers and their situations. We attempted to elucidate the origin of aging phenomenon but not to investigate the apparent aging phenomenon itself. An important thing to be considered at first was to recognize that the most generally adopted approach to aging research, namely comparison between young and aged men or animals, will give nothing about relationship between the cause and the result of aging. So that we started aging research on genetic basis using the nematode, C. elegans, as experimental animals. This paper gives the story of our investigations over the past 20 years: the planning of investigations that we made before starting actual activity, choice of experimental animal (why the nematode?), the summary of the present state of our investigation and future prospects. In brief, after many difficulties we isolated a mutant of C. elegans, which was named as mev-1. The mutant was found to have a shorter life span than the wild type. In addition, it was hypersensitive to the oxygen atmosphere. The mutant gene was found to correspond to succinate-reductase cytochrome b. In view of the widely accepted evidence, showing intervention of oxygen stress (present research) and perhaps of apoptosis in aging. We can safely say that aging, including natural death, is certainly the result of "life" itself. This contradictory situation might be explainable as, God did not give an eternal advantage to life.