Premad.

So, our lecturer yesterday was basically an infomercial for his billion dollar company. It was pretty annoying, but aparently about half of our class loved it, neglecting the fact that he presented us very soft data about monkey aging that isn’t actually statistically significant, was preformed on about 30 monkeys, and didn’t make the monkeys actually live longer. But he’s still worth 1 billion dollars. 

Each week a few of us go through an make short explanations for the learning objectives (LOs) for the lectures, and then share them with the class. This is my explanation for one of the LOs for Mr. Pharma’s Billion Dollar No Science Lecture, and I included the picture of Hitman Monkey.

Understand: That in mammals, CR (calorie restriction) can prevent diseases of aging such as cancer, atherosclerosis and type 2 diabetes.

Ok, so there are two monkeys. One monkey is named Canto, he is 25 years old, on a CR diet, and looks kind of chipper, like he just had a haircut and nice bath and a latte, no foam. The other monkey is named Owen, he is 26 years old, eats whatever is not CR (maybe they feed him pizza each day, who can tell), and he looks kind of deflated, like I look now, whilst hunched over my laptop typing out these LOs. Owen needs a haircut, mainly. And a supportive chair.

Anyway, Dr. Weindruch, who is the man with the greatest patience of any scientist (NB: it said this on the slide), saw that CR monkeys had less diseases of aging, including diabetes (type II), cardiovascular disease, brain atrophy, and cancer. Good for Canto, bad for Owen. The monkey in picture C is totally an HMS monkey (NB: I included a picture of the monkeys from the paper he was ‘citing.’ Pictures of monkeys. This is SCIENCE, people). Fierce, determined, and hairy. However, the monkeys on CR don’t actually live longer than those not on CR. They just die less of ‘age-related causes.’ So, CR: You will still die at the same time, but not of age! Just of being a monkey. (NB: Hitman Monkey will kill you. This was implied, but I did not explicitly state this.)

This is the pathway by which CR works:

CR + Monkey -> Longevity Genes -> Mitochondria -> Higher ATP, Increased Endurance, and Slower Aging (NB: Verbatim from the actual lecture slide. Again, science all day long.)

This seems analogous to the pathways for South Park’s underwear gnomes:

Collect Underpants -> ??? -> Profit