MORE REASON TO READ THE ECONOMIST

Hiking in Scotland, 1999

There are back-to-back interesting medical articles in the most recent Economist.  (Well, maybe not the most recent.  The magazine is forwarded down here from Bellingham, and I forget to pick up my mail for three or four days sometimes.  Anyway, it’s the January 18^th edition.)

The first article reports that the “longevity gap” between men and women is narrowing, at least in developed countries.  For instance, the life expectancy of women in England and Wales born in 1967 was 6.7 years greater than that of comparable men.  Now the gap is less than three years. 

Some of the causes are obvious.  In former times men smoked much more than women, and died as a result.  Now, men are smoking less.  So are women, but at a lesser rate than men.  This is an important driver.  Another important driver is alcohol use – not all of us can have white wine for breakfast, champaign with every dinner, Scotch in between,  live to be 90 AND retain your marbles.  That would be Winston Churchill; the rest of us are human.  Formerly women drank tap water and implored their husbands to do the same.  Now they slam back the good stuff regularly.

However, there are good reasons to believe that men will never catch up.  For instance, if you are female you are XX (chromosomes), if male, XY.  The Y chromosome is a dimunitive little runt that carries few functional genes.  Thus, for traits coded for by genes on the X chromosome, males have only one shot at getting it right.  That is why, for instance, that  hemophilia is mostly found in men.  Another dirty trick nature has played on men is to give them shorter telomeres than the ladies.  Why this should be seems to be a mystery, but it is true.  That means that cells in men shrivel up and die sooner than comparable cells in women. 

And, of course, testosterone.  An excess of this hormone gets us males into trouble in all sorts of ways.  This accounts for he fact that death rates between men and women are most different in their 20s, when males are busy advertising their evolutionary fitness by doing all sorts of things that are stupid, dangerous, ill-advised and, usually, counter-productive.

The second article is equally interesting, but I’ve spent so much time on the first that I will just tell you what it is about.  It is about the researchers that have succeeded in converting normal specialized stem cells into “pluripotent” stem cells, of the type we are reluctant to “harvest” from embryos.  The method was discovered by two groups in 2007, and now is beginning to be utilized by some of the bigger drug companies.  The potential benefits – and profits, of course – are enormous.  A picture shows one of the scientists involved in this transformation smiling at something in a test tube.  The caption is “I will now turn these cells into gold.”