Using yeast to discover the fountain of youth

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has long served as a model organism for the study of basic cellular processes. Its short generation time, well-established molecular genetics, and fully sequenced genome have made this organism a favorite of researchers in diverse fields. Much of the information obtained has been shown to apply to higher eukaryotes, including humans. Recently, researchers have begun using yeast to tackle one of the outstanding questions in science: How and why do organisms age? The identification of individual genes in yeast that can affect the aging process itself has elevated this single-celled fungus to full contender status in the aging field. In this Perspective, we present two fundamentally different measures of aging in yeast: replicative life-span and stationary phase survival (chronological life-span). We describe the benefits and limitations of each and present models that attempt to explain these "aging" phenomena. Finally, we present compelling evidence that the use of yeast as a model system will ultimately prove beneficial to the study of human aging.     

Medicalizing the optimal: Anti-aging medicine and the quandary of intervention

The emergence of anti-aging medicine over the past two decades has posed tremendous challenges for traditional categories that define the relationship between aging and biomedicine. The frameworks of nature and disease have been critical in marking how biomedicine can and should intervene. Anti-aging advocates posit that because aging is a predictable, biological universal, it is natural and can therefore be understandable. Moreover, proponents accept and perpetuate the pervasive construction that aging is a painful decline. Here, its undesirability coupled with its knowability render the process of aging ameliorable. Thus, anti-aging advocates argue that aging is natural, not a disease, but should nonetheless serve as a site of intervention. Situating the optimization of the aging process as their primary goal, many anti-aging advocates assert that it is more emblematic of human nature to liberate the body from its perceived biological constraints than it is natural to age.     

Sociobiology misses the mark: An essay on why biology but not sociobiology is very relevant to sociology

This essay takes the position that sociologists need to pay more attention to biology, but that the biological perspective provided by sociobiology is not the perspective that is the most relevant. The reductionist nature of sociobiology is noted and the treatment by sociobiology of altruism, religion, homosexuality, the maximization of inclusive fitness, group versus individual inheritance, and the genetic inheritance process itself is critiqued. Sociobiology’s strong emphasis on ultimate causation and the denigration of proximate causation is treated as particularly problematic. The paper ends with a plea that sociologists pay more attention to the research that shows the interactional effects of biological, psychological and social processes. Best known for his work on mental illness and on gender and marital roles, he also has published extensively in the area of family, crime, and aging. While an undergraduate student in the 1950s, he was trained in biology and has had a strong interest in biological issues since that time.     

Process of precocious functional aging in workers of laundries

The World Health Organization (WHO), as well as researchers of the whole world, it has been demonstrating concern with the subject of the aging related to the work and it recognizes that modifications in the several systems of the human body take to the gradual decrease in the effectiveness of each one of them, because the aging caused by the work advances apprenticeships of the cycle of the man's life, not respecting the natural state of that process. In this sense, it was aimed at with this research to investigate the relative aspects to the capacity for the work and to the workers' with responsibility to realize the work in the laundries service, verifying if they present signs of precocious functional aging.     

‘Exercise is medicine’: Understanding the exercise beliefs and practices of older Chinese women immigrants in British Columbia, Canada

In this paper we examine how Western biomedical beliefs around exercise and related health practices compare and contrast with traditional Chinese medicine's (TCM) conceptions of health and exercise in a globalizing society, and how these narratives about health and physical activity are understood and taken up by 15 aging Chinese immigrant women (aged 65+) living in the multicultural city of Vancouver. Drawing upon theoretical work around the body and society to guide our analysis (including the ideas of Bourdieu and Foucault), we outline how the participants in our project take a pragmatic approach to their use of medicine, combining TCM with Western biomedicine in creative ways. However, understandings of the body are underpinned, we argue, by Eastern narratives of the ‘oneness’ of mind-body and the need for ‘balance’ in order to achieve health. Towards this end, we found that many of the participants view (and use) traditional Chinese body practices as an extension of TCM, a technique to help them achieve balance. We conclude that the neoliberal narrative of personal responsibility for health does not fuel the exercise practices of many of the participants, but rather that they perceive exercise as a pleasurable activity that improves their levels of happiness (and balance) and enhances their lives.     

Biomarkers of aging: combinatorial or systems model?

Systemwide functional and structural changes caused by the aging process encourage the implementation of new bioinformatics search strategies for markers of aging. Combinatorial biomarkers should be particularly favored, as they can quantify processes on multiple levels of biological organization and overcome an otherwise limited ability to access heterogeneities in populations. An even more challenging but rational approach is the development of systems biology models to describe molecular pathways and key networks mechanistically as they relate to age. Such reverse engineered models not only indicate critical and diagnostic components (that is, potential biomarkers) but also should be able to predict the progression of aging through computer simulation.     

A life course approach: research orientations and future challenges

The need to study lifelong changes in health and functioning has resulted in increasing emphasis on a life course approach in different fields of inquiry. The aim of this approach is to explore how biological, psychological, and social risk factor trajectories, acting across the entire life course, influence age-related diseases, functional decline, and disability. The importance of the first years of life upon later development and adult characteristics was generally recognized already in the first half of the twentieth century, but it was not until the 1990s that different strands of medical and social research converge in the field of life course epidemiology, in which epidemiological processes are approached using different models such as biological programming, critical periods, pathways, and accumulation. The biological programming model holds that organ development in utero and early infancy determines the maximum functional capacity that an individual can attain and influences the development of certain chronic diseases later in life. The critical period model extends the idea to include child development and key social transitions over the entire life course. The pathway model focuses on the cumulative effect of life events along the developmental trajectories, with early advantage or disadvantage setting a person on a pathway to a later etiologically important exposure. The accumulation model describes the underlying social, behavioral, and biological processes that drive the impact of the life course on health. The growing focus on life course determinants of aging also has implications for studies of long-term changes in physical activity and their role in determining both gains and losses of health and functioning with aging. A life course approach presents great challenges for the continued development of testable theoretical models and effective study design and analysis.     

Sexology in Portugal: Narratives by Portuguese Sexologists

This article presents the emergence and development of modern sexology in Portugal through the analysis of Portuguese sexologists’ narratives, to explore how they commit to a professional identity as sexologists, and to discuss how they integrate their professional role into the vast multidisciplinary field of sexology. In-depth interviews were conducted with 44 key professionals, purposefully recruited to guarantee heterogeneity concerning generation, gender, training, and practice. Content analysis focused on highlighting differences and articulations among the main professionals making up the field. The findings indicate that sexology is not seen as a full-fledged profession but rather as a specialization or a secondary field of action. The sexual medicine perspective is prevalent and more visible among physicians, thus reflecting the gap between psychosocial and biomedical approaches. A close link between clinical work and research and a gap between clinical work and health promotion were found. Despite the multidisciplinary nature of sexology being acknowledged, it is not fully implemented by the experts in the field. However, it is this characteristic that permitted sexology to institutionalize and to legitimate itself as a discourse of truth about sex, in Portugal as in other countries.     

Problems associated with choice and quality of life for an individual with intellectual disability: a personal assistant's reflexive ethnography

A gap exists between research and practice within the field of intellectual disability. In particular, researchers suggest that personal choice enhances quality of life. Following Bourdieu's suggestion to focus on improving the practice of theory rather than the theory of practice, this paper is a reflexive ethnography detailing my struggles to provide choice to an individual who, it turned out, cannot think in the ways necessary to make choices that would improve his subjective quality of life. A narrative is included with the hope of revealing social processes outside and within the field of intellectual disability and to provoke discussion regarding problems with choice and quality of life in the field.     

Relational Victimization and Telomere Length in Adolescent Girls

An emerging body of research suggests that telomere length (TL)—a measure of cellular aging—is inversely associated with experiences of childhood stress. Given the salience of peer relationships in childhood and adolescence, we tested whether relational victimization is a unique and specific predictor of salivary TL in girls. Results examining 122 girls (ages 9–15) revealed that greater relational victimization was related to shorter TL but that similar associations were not evident for other measures of social relationships nor accounted for by factors related to depression, life stress, or 5‐HTTLPR genotype. The present findings suggest that relational victimization is uniquely associated with TL in adolescence, revealing a link between key aspects of social relationships and biological processes.     

Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge

It is not uncommon for women researchers to experience sexualized interactions, sexual objectification, and harassment as they conduct fieldwork. Nevertheless, these experiences are often left out of ethnographers’ “tales from the field” and remain unaddressed within our discipline. In this article, we use women's experiences with harassment in the field to interrogate the epistemological foundations of ethnographic methodology within the discipline of sociology. Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews, we examine three “fixations” of contemporary ethnography that inform women ethnographers’ understandings of and reactions to harassment in the field. These fixations are solitude, danger, and intimacy. Our data show that these fixations not only put researchers in danger but also have implications for the construction of ethnographic knowledge. They contribute to silence surrounding sexual harassment, and are motivated by and reproduce androcentric norms that valorize certain types of fieldwork. We argue that acknowledging and analyzing experiences with harassment and other unwanted sexual attention in the field is part of a more fully developed understanding of ethnographic research itself.     

THE EMERGING ROLE OF THE MEDICAL SOCIOLOGIST IN PALLIATIVE CARE SETTINGS

The demographics of a rapidly aging society and the chronic nature of contemporary illness intersect in the twenty-first century to confront medicine with the challenge of reenvisioning health care at life's end. Using analytic, interpretive, and reflexive tools, the medical sociologist can assist health care teams in improving quality of life terminally ill patients and their caregivers. In this article, we explore the role of the medical sociologist in palliative care settings, discuss ways to integrate that role into the day-to-day processes of palliative medicine, and identify three areas of intervention where medical sociologists can bring a unique perspective to end-of-life settings. We conclude by examining impediments to the inclusion of the medical sociologist on the clinical team and discussing how these barriers can be addressed.     

Does the prevention of brain ageing constitute anti-ageing medicine? Outline of a new space of representation for Alzheimer's Disease

In this paper we pose the question: Does the prevention of brain ageing constitute anti-ageing medicine? We answer the question by looking at recent changes in the knowledge and organisational structure of dementia research, practice and policy and investigating the boundary relations between this disease-specific field and anti-ageing medicine. Drawing on a qualitative study of the ways in which different clinical and scientific constituencies work to define, organise and negotiate the boundaries between normal and abnormal cognitive aging, we suggest that the field of dementia research, practice and policy has experienced internal diversification forming a ‘new space of representation'. We show how this space is structured by two axes: one that relates to how AD is conceptualised and another that concerns the modes of intervention or actions that will prevent the condition in individuals or populations. We argue that while these changes have blurred the epistemic boundaries between dementia and other fields of research, there are still strong institutional, economic and political factors that glue the field together.     

The Impact of Question and Respondent Characteristics on Comprehension and Mapping Difficulties

Behavior coding is one technique researchers use to detect problemsin survey questions, but it has been primarily explored as apractical tool rather than a source of insight into the theoreticalunderstanding of the cognitive processes by which respondentsanswer survey questions. The latter is the focus of the currentinvestigation. Using data from a large study in which face-to-faceinterviews were taped and extensive behavior coding was done,we tested whether sets of respondent behavior codes could beused to distinguish respondent difficulties with comprehensionof the question from difficulties associated with mapping ajudgment onto the response format provided, and whether characteristicsof the survey questions and respondents could be used to predictwhen and for whom such difficulties would occur. Sets of behaviorcodes were identified that reflected comprehension and mappingdifficulties, and these two types of difficulties were associatedwith different question and respondent characteristics. Thisevidence suggests that behavior coding shows promise as a toolfor researchers studying the cognitive processes involved inanswering survey questions.     

Toward a discourse shift in social gerontology: From successful aging to harmonious aging

Successful aging, though controversial, is used as an overarching conceptual framework in social gerontology. In this theory critique, the discourse of successful aging is identified as problematic with respect to four dimensions. First, successful aging is ageist in nature, and it produces a disharmony between body and mind. Second, successful aging, with the emphasis on quantifiable activities driven by the “busy ethic,” overlooks the deeper concern of quality experience. Third, the capitalist and consumerist components of successful aging are under-addressed. Fourth, successful aging is a discourse developed upon Western (specifically American) values and thus may not readily apply to other cultures.Harmonious aging, as proposed, is inspired by the Yin–Yang philosophy. Harmony refers to the balance based on differences instead of uniformity. This new discourse aims to recognize the challenges and opportunities of old age itself, ease the tension between activity and disengagement theories, heal the integrity of body and mind, and emphasize the interdependent nature of human beings. The call for the discourse shift attempts to promote intellectual exploration of what constitutes a good old age and to capture more cross-cultural diversities in the context of global aging. This theoretical endeavor is important to change the status quo of gerontology as being “data rich but theory poor,” and to contribute to cross-cultural gerontological research, education and communication.     

Aging as intracohort differentiation: Accentuation,the Matthew effect,and the life course

Recent contributions of sociologists and others have brought a new awareness and new theoretical understanding of the extent to which human aging and life-course patterns are shaped by social conditions and influenced by social change. Yet the potential of many social processes to account for individual aging patterns remains untapped, because research and theory have focused heavily upon comparisons between cohorts rather than the internal differentiation of cohorts. This paper shows that focusing upon intracohort differentiation over the life course leads to a mobilization of sociological findings whose age-related implications have not been exploited. Using the phenomenon of aged heterogeneity as an illustrative case, it is suggested that intracohort differentiation—operating through macro-level, organizational, and micro-level processes—can explain significant phenomena of aging previously neglected by theory, or else assumed to be psychological in origin. These processes specify Merton's Matthew effect. Implications for biological aging and for research are briefly discussed.     

More than a sum of our cells

Cells in the body grow and die, cells in lab dishes grow and die, and individual organisms grow and die. The parallels seem maddeningly obvious, but scores of scientists still labor to draw the correct connections, to uncover the mechanisms that underlie aging in cell culture flasks and in whole animals. Do our cells stop growing, quit working, cease dividing, or start dying as we age? Do we die when our cells do, or are we somehow more than the sum of our cells? For decades, scientists have searched for evidence that links changes in cell growth, cell function, cell division, and cell death to the phenomenon we call aging. Although definitive proof eludes them, researchers continue to conduct experiments in tissue culture and in animal models, amassing information that points us toward a greater understanding of what aging is--and is not.