to learn
more about the SRF.Welcome to our Home Page ...
(Last updated on Thursday, February 2, 2012; 8:59 PM PST)
Click for the formal XML-definition of the GRG universal time/date stamp
TDS.
By definition, a Supercentenarian is anyone who has been validated to have lived
to be 110 years or older.
Record Highs: Three years ago, on December 25, 2008, we achieved a record high
of "92" Supercentenarians. On November 9, 2006, our record high was "87." During 2005, our
record high was just "75." However, the numbers of Supercentenarians may not be growing
because people are living longer but rather because the GRG is getting better at the process of
validation, thereby identifying more cases that were previously unsupported.
Also,
the record-keeping in many countries that facilitates our validation process is expected to
improve significantly in the next few years.
Commercial Message: November 9, 2011; Click for a new website called the Bridge Plan: An inexpensive, modest step toward extending one's personal life expectancy by means of nutritional supplements and life-style modifications, while awaiting the arrival of Ray Kuzweil's Singularity (2038), a hyperexponential increase in human knowledge and technology, when really extraordinary nanotechnology and genetic-engineering solutions to the problem of aging are expected to arrive. It would be a shame if this presumed singularity were to arrive on schedule, but you had departed just before hand and you weren't here to benefit from it. This is Plan A, not Plan B or Plan C.
August 20, 2011; Benjamin Goertzel, Ph.D., CEO of Novamente, LLC of
Rockville, MD; USA and Belo Horizonte, BRAZIL has just sent us this one-page Systems
Biology Interaction Network of the genetics (and
biochemistry) of mammalian cellular aging and senescence.
Editorial:
Evolutionary Biology teaches us that for a typical human life history, aging is the phase
that follows embryogenesis, adolescence, adulthood, and the raising of progeny to reproductive
independence (grandparenting). This serves to sustain the non- extinction of our particular
species but that's all it does. Aging rarely occurs in the wild, only within civilization or in zoos,
whenever there is protection from predators. Under the regime of a life history and the
continuation of a species across several generations, there is no regard for the survival of
singleton individuals. Once they have already (or possibly not) exploited the opportunity to
reproduce, they are subsequently ignored by their own DNA programs, which have essentially
run out of things to do. After individuals are past the age of menopause/andropause, aging
strengthens relentlessly until we have systemic cellular and catastrophic tissue failure. After the
antagonistic/protagonistic pleiotropy inherent in the human genome has played itself out, the
force of natural selection weakens to the point that it is overtaken by the natural force of entropy
[the Second Law of Thermodynamics operating at the molecular level]). So are we doomed,
while the human race moves on (so long as it doesn't cause its own premature global extinction).
When one finally dies, the only thing that's different about the world is that "you're not in it
anymore."
However, if we become smart enough to intervene therapeutically in the
genomic program itself, aging could be conquered (such wouldn't violate the laws of physics,
chemistry, or biology).
Hypothesis: Therapeutic adult stem cells grown and amplified in culture, containing
pristine DNA with synthetic chromosomes, for each tissue type and subsequently infused into the
body on a continuing basis could, in principle, rejuvenate aged organs, so long as we don't
obliterate the architecture of the tissues in the process. At that time, mortality would be
secondary to extrinsic aging (accidents, suicides, homicides, obstetrical complications of
child birth, global pestilence, famine, etc.). Mortality secondary to intrinsic aging would
become a thing of the past. The distribution of causes of death as written on today's Death
Certificates (Heart Failure, Cancer, Stroke, COPD, Diabetes, Alzheimer's Disease, etc.) would
then look very different. And so all bets are off!
But, of course, we would have to
live long enough for this sort of intervention to become standard medical practice. This would
require us to develop a "Bridge Plan" to get us from where we are today to a singular event in
biotechnology, sometimes referred to as "Biological Escape Velocity." The contemplated Bridge
Plan would involve a phased program of nutrition, diet, exercise, and stress reduction, followed
later by biotechnology, and ultimately therapeutic nanotechnology. How long do we have to
wait? In a way, it depends on you and the funding that it will take to make it possible sooner (in
our lifetimes) rather than later (in our children's or grandchildren's lifetimes). It would be a
shame if we were among the last to live and die before the benefits of this envisaged
biotechnology were to become generally available to our progeny as it surely will. It's not a
matter of if but when.
- - L. Stephen Coles; Los Angeles, California; USA
Breaking News: June 21, 2011; A 114 year-old Brazilian woman, Maria Gomes Valentim, ranked as the Oldest Person in the World, died today of pneumonia. See Photo File 9 of 9 for more details.
June 22, 2011; Click on Supercentenarians for a short YouTube Video-Clip (TRT = 2:34 min.) recorded in Mexico City on Wednesday afternoon, June 8th before the passing of the Oldest Living Person in the world, Brazilian Maria Gomes Valentim. If necessary, use the search phrase "Supercentenarians June 22".
March 21, 2011; Click for a YouTube Video from Reason-TV on Who Wants to Live Forever? Dr. Stephen Coles on the Secrets of the World's Oldest People . If you get a generic YouTube Search Box, type-in "Reason TV Stephen Coles," and the correct video should pop-up as one of the first videos to be selected. There were 11,964 views as of August 17th.
March 7, 2011; Click for the GRG Discussion Group List of the Top 100 Gerontologists throughout history.
Click for more details in the form of an Editorial.
September 18, 2011; "The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering."
-- Bruce Lee, martial arts film star
But here are three additional, perhaps more important, keys to immortality...
1. Not
dying;
2. Living in good health for as long as one wishes to do so; and
3.
a. Upload
(extend) one's consciousness to several different moderately-distant locations capable of mutual
communication/synchronization on an on-going basis in such a manner that
b. Separate
instantiations of one's identity can replace any one of them were it to fall victim to a fatal
accident. [*]
For example, a mild earthquake caused a large eucalyptus tree to fall over and kill a driver from
Tustin, CA while she was waiting for a red light to change to green [**]. This is not a case of
"when your time comes..." It's simply "the laws of physics." Fate, as it were, is often cruel if
you're "an accident waiting to happen," but what if you're innocent and careful and nobody was
at fault and you still die anyway? (Sigh!) Whom can you blame? The idea of revenge seems
hollow.
Dualing Quotes-of-the-Day:
"Death is an imposition on the human race and can no longer be tolerated."
- - Alan
Harrington, The Immortalist: An Approach to the Engineering of Man's Divinity
(Random House, New York; 1967).
Q: "[Given the expected advances in biomedical technology,] is living forever a distinct
possibility?"
A: "I hope not. A cure for death would be a disaster."
- - Freeman Dyson, 86, Professor
Emeritus of Physics
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University
and
member of The Jasons [US Department of Defense University-based Advisory
Group]
on the occasion of the 2009 UCLA Jacob Marschak Memorial Lecture, entitled "The
Domestication of Biotechnology"
with ~90 persons in the audience at ~3:00 PM on Friday, May 8, 2009.
September 11, 2011; "The idea of retirement is like death to me. You work until your last
day on this Earth. I don't know any other way." [1] -- Tony Bennett (born August 3, 1926, with a
singing career spanning 59 years and counting.)
Ref.: 1. The Los Angeles Times, p. E7 (September 11, 2011).
Saturday, October 1, 2011; As with many other small non-profit organizations without a major benefactor, the GRG has bills to pay but limited resources. Our organization is sustained by the generosity of interested contributors who believe in the importance of our work. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the GRG. Click on the "Donate" button on the left column. In exchange, you will be among the first to know if there is an imminent breakthrough in anti-aging medicine.
Friday, September 11, 2009; We are sad to report that the oldest person in the world, Mrs. Gertrude Baines, 115 of Los Angeles, passed away early this morning at 7:20 AM PDT. Her autopsy was performed on Wednesday afternoon, September 16th, at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. An interview with Anchor Marco Werman of Public Radio International's The World produced in Boston, MA, aired on Public Radio at 1:20 PM PDT on Monday, September 14th about the passing of the world's oldest person. Click on The World to listen to the interview. (TRT = 4:23 min.)
"Who Are the World's Oldest Living Twins?"
January 18, 2012; GRG experts Messrs. E. A. Kral of Wilber, Nebraska, Robert Young of Atlanta, Georgia,and Louis Epstein of New York have compiled a list of the oldest singleton twins in history. Note that Ruth Anderson of Minnesota, born July 24, 1899 passed away at age 112 years, 149 days. Click for their complete list of the Oldest Twins in History Worldwide. For many more details about twins, click on twinstuff.com. These records were first compiled starting in the year 2000.
Click on the logo,
to learn
more about the SRF.
April 2, 2011; Click to consider making a contribution to the Supercentenarian
Research Foundation. We seek to further scientific research into to why
Supercentenarians live as long as they do? (And, conversely, why they don't live longer still?)
We are incorporated and have held many meetings of our Board of Directors. We have received
approval for our 501(c)(3) non profit, tax-exempt status from the US Internal Revenue Service.
Nevertheless, we are urgently in need of "seed money" to fund the formation of an international
team of physicians and investigators who could travel to visit each of our living
Supercentenarians around the world in person before they are no longer with us. Obviously, the
data that we plan to obtain is a precious resource that could disappear from our radar screens
unless we get started soon. If you can assist us with a pledge of even as little as $100.00 to offset
the cost of maintaining this website, please click on the Donate Button on the left column to
learn the details of how to make your contribution.
-- L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D.,
Director and Treasurer of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation and Executive Director of
the GRG.
June 2, 2007; In keeping with the times, we have now created an SRF website presence on
with
access to a video clip of our CNN-TV Interview with Mrs. Gertrude
Baines,113, of Los Angeles.
Click on the MySpace Logo above, and the website should appear accompanied by classical
music (Demitri Schostakovich). BTW, if you already have a MySpace account, please add us as
a "friend." -- -- MySpace Site Administrator
April 28, 2008; For those biblical scholars curious about what God has promised humans
regarding immortality on Earth (as distinct from Heaven), Dr. Pete Estep quoted from the
Old Testament during his LA-GRG Lecture...
"He shall swallow up death forever, and
the Lord God shall wipe away tears from all faces; the rebuke of His people [mortality] He will
take away from all the Earth; for the Lord has spoken." - - Isaiah 25:8 King James
version
Thus, God seeks to abolish death hoping that we will achieve immortality on Earth, contrary to
what He seemed to fear in Genesis when he speculated about Adam and Eve eating not
only from "The Tree of Knowledge" but also from "The Tree of Life" were He not to evict these
disobedient humans from the Garden of Eden nor to post a Cherubim (an archangel) at the East
Gate with a flashing and flaming sword to prevent them from sneaking back into the Garden of
Eden without His explicit consent, "lest they eat from the second tree and become like one of
Us." [Note the use of plural pronoun "Us," the only occurrence in the Bible in which God admits
the existence of others like Himself.] ("After he drove the man out, he placed on the East side of
the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way back
to The Tree of Life." Genesis 3:24.
One of the curious things Dr. Estep explains is that religious conservatives, such as Prof. Leon
Kass, frequently ignore this text, saying instead that all attempts at human life extension are
sacrilegious (against God's will). So how can they reconcile this apparent contradiction? We
don't know.
January 30, 2008; Quote of the Day: "And to speak plainly and clearly, [the true end of knowledge] is [the] discovery of all operations [and possibilities of operations] [ranging] from the meanest mechanical practice to immortality [if it were possible]." - - Sir Francis Bacon, Chapter 1 "On the Limits and Ends of Knowledge," Valerius Terminus (1603).
Click for the current GRG Table of Worldwide Living Supercentenarians.
Our Senior Claims investigator, Mr. Robert Young of Atlanta, GA, has speculated that there are systematic seasonal variations each year with highs during the late Spring and early Summer and a fall-off in the latter part of the Summer or early Fall. This observation is purely empirical, and we have no scientific rationale for a mechanism for why this should be so. There may be statistical artifacts in the way our Japanese cases are reported to us by their government on an irregular basis.
The large ratio of women to men cannot be explained in simple terms. Although there is no shortage of hypotheses to explain why women outlive men by such a large margin at the end of human life (e.g., men are naturally more aggressive and therefore more likely to die violently or as soldiers in war, while women were always, but no longer, likely to die in child birth) none of these hypotheses are fully convincing. However, the ostensible protective effects of estrogen (and the lesser harmful effects of cortisol, as women are presumed on average to have less chronic stress) are the most plausible. However, the present differential life expectancy in favor of women for men-and-women-living-to-age-65 is expected to decline in future decades, as the rate of heart disease, our number-one killer, equilibrates once women pass menopause (and their estrogen is depleted -- in the absence of HRT. By the way, not all forms of HRT are protective, as we have sadly discovered in a surprising clinical trial with Premarin showing that it may not only be non-protective, it could actually contribute to a higher mortality compared with controls taking nothing at all (especially in women whose onset of HRT was not immediately following menopause to alleviate hot-flashes, but a few years later on)! The Route-of-Administration [pill vs. patch] and first-pass [through the liver] effects may be important. Bioidentical vs. synthetic estrogens could also be important. Clinical trials are presently underway to tease out these uncertainties. Curiously, we have seen a recent hypotheses that women have longer telomeres compared with men). Nevertheless, based on our own empirical statistics here at the GRG, the extraordinary longevity difference by gender in "the oldest old" has not shrunk over the last five years. As just one observation, the world's oldest person for the last five years has always been a woman (although this has not been true throughout history and it is not currently true following the death of Lizzie Bolden of Tennessee (December 11, 2006)). See our Table D for more details).
December 12, 2008; We presently have 210 worldwide members of the GRG Discussion Group hosted by UCLA. To join us, click on the "Join Us" Button to the left. Note: There could be as many as five to ten messages a day seven days-a-week. Some of them are about highly technical matters while some concern politics or literature, so we are a fairly eclectic, gregarious, and iconoclastic group. And even though there have been some occasional shouting-matches, we manage to maintain a high level of decorum and scholarship, with news items and abstracts from current journals that you may not discover easily by any other means.
August 27, 2006; We are sad to report that Sra. Capovilla passed away at 3:00 AM this morning due to pneumonia. See the News Section for details.
Please take a look at the website of one of our new sister organizations...
The Society for Applied Research in Aging (SARA) based in South Florida.
Dr. Richard F. Walker, Ph.D., R.Ph., Executive Director of SARA, is working on the fascinating
case of Brooke Greenberg, a 14-year-old girl who appears to defy the normal process
of aging (with a total disconnect between her chronological age and her physiological age). Her
medical diagnosis (genetic mutation or chromosomal aberration in the spectrum of
embryogenesis/maturation/senescence) has not been made. Click on the photo for an Abstract of
latest scientific paper on Brooke published in Mechanisms of Aging and Development,
Vol. 130, No. 5, pp. 350-6 (May 2009).
July 5, 2006; A team of our Senior Investigators (Dr. Tom Perls, Director of the New England Centenarian Study in Massachusetts, Mr. Robert Young of Georgia, Mr. Louis Epstein of New York, Mr. E. A. Kral of Nebraska, Ms. Emily Schoenhofen and Ms. Gayle Schlissel Riley of California) has identified two remarkable Supercentenarians -- the first confirmed pair of Mother/Child Supercentenarians in the world:
Miss Mary P.
Romero Zielke Cota, at age 22 (L) taken 1892. Born in 1870 in Montecito, CA, she died in 1982
at age 112 years, 17 days and
Miss Rosabell Zielke Champion Fenstermaker, at age 18 (R) taken 1911. Born in 1893 in
Carroll, NE, she died in 2005 at age 111 years, 344 days.
The vast majority of the nine children born to Mary Romero and Edward Zielke achieved a remarkable cluster of inherited longevity, not only by comparison with their own era but by current standards as well. Recall that average life expectancy for men in 1900 was only 47.8 years, while for women it was only 50.7 years. And one of the men was eliminated from the population by the Great Pan Flu Epidemic of 1918.
"Paradoxically," Mrs. Karen Lyons, Rosebell's Granddaughter who lives in Dove Canyon, CA in Orange County, explained, "her Mother and her Grandmother hardly knew one another (one lived in California while the other lived for a time in Nebraska), and that's why there are no known photos with both of them together at any age! More details can be found on the website of The Nebraska State Education Association's Profiles of Nationally Distinguished Nebraskans. Three additional early photos can be found in the Centenarian Section of our website.
Above
are two sample photos of the World's Oldest Person, Madam Jeanne Calment of France
who died in 1997 at the documented age of 122 years 164 days, first when she was
20
years old (in 1895) and then a century later when she was
120 years old (in 1995).
Click on the first photo to see more historical photographs of Madame Calment (13 photos with
two others elsewhere) presented in approximately chronological order (not all the photos were
dated when we received them, so we had to guess on some of them).
For further details, click on the Centenarians Button here (or on the left side of this window) for the complete set of Official GRG Tables containing considerably more information. In addition, there are now well over 100 photographs of Supercentenarians in this section and the number grows every week.
Click on the photo below at it will take you to the current GRG Table of Worldwide Living Supercentenarians
Sra. Gesuina Donati of ITALY (born June 9, 1893) on the occasion of her 111th
birthday, with our Italian Correspondent, Mr. Giovanni Alunni. Note that the piece of paper
they are holding is an official hard copy of the GRG Table of the Oldest Worldwide Living
Persons. This Table serves as an inspiration to all living Supercentenarians, as it helps
them to appreciate where they rank in comparison with other persons of their own age all around
the world.
Quote for the Day...
"The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find homes elsewhere in the universe
because there's an increasing risk that a disaster could destroy Earth as we know it. Humans
could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.
We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we were to go to another star system." [1]
-
- Stephen Hawking, Ph.D., Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University; UK (a
post once held by Sir Isaac Newton), at a Press Conference while traveling yesterday in Hong
Kong. He also said on Thursday that Pope John Paul II tried to discourage him and other
scientists, attending a cosmology conference at the Vatican, from trying to figure out how the
universe began. The British scientist joked he was lucky the Pope didn't realize he had already
delivered a paper at the gathering suggesting how the universe had been created. "I didn't fancy
the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo," Hawking said in a lecture to a
sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In particular,
the late Pope told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because "it was
the work of God." Hawking quoted the Pope as saying, "It's alright to study the universe and
where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment
of 'creation' and 'the work of God.'" [2] Later, Hawkings took center stage in Beijing as the
headliner of a a national physics conference. His mere presence was a powerful symbol of what
China is likely to become. [3]
Refs.:
1. "Hong Kong: 'Man Must Leave Earth to Survive,' Hawking Says," The Los Angeles
Times, p. A21 (June 14, 2006).
2. AP, "Stephen Hawking Touches on God and Science," MS-NBC (June 15, 2006).
3. "Hawking Takes Beijing. Will Science Follow?" The New York Times, pp. A1, D1
(June 20, 2006).
May 2, 2006; Click for a Google Internet Video of Dr. Aubrey de Grey's recent talk at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference held on Saturday morning, February 25th (TRT = 23 min. 5 sec.). In his short PowerPoint slide presentation, de Grey makes a convincing argument for why our respected academic science and medical establishments will continue to resist the idea of employing government funds to adopt a serious engineering approach to anti-aging therapeutics (out of fear that the whole field will gain a bad reputation and consequently all researchers will suffer, because the public is already convinced that the task is impossible. After all, this is what they have been told by expert apologists for the status quo since they were children.). Nevertheless, "there are other entrepreneurial pathways involving the use of prizes that could lead us down a shorter path in the brief time period of only ten years when we could achieve life spans of 1,000 years for persons who are in their 60's today!"
Click on the image to the left
for the March 2006 issue of The Scientist with an excellent article, entitled
"In
Pursuit of the Longevity Dividend: What Should We Be Doing To Prepare for the Unprecedented
Aging of Humanity?"
by
S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., Daniel Perry, Richard A. Miller, M.D., Ph.D., and Robert N. Butler,
M.D.; as well as
"Your Money for Your Life: How One Company Carved Itself a Piece of the Anti-Aging
Industry
Pie" by Alison McCook;
"Plugging the Mitochondrial Leak" by Nick Lane; and
"The Trouble with Markers" by Michael O'Neill
[Editorial Remark: A copy of the first paper in the list above will soon appear in the Resources Section with further commentary, because, in our view, it represents a significant welcome departure in attitude from establishment figures in the field of Biogerontology regarding our field's short-term promise in the next five to ten years. They are well known for their largely-correct adversity to the concept of present, commercial "Anti-Aging Medicine." Perhaps now is the time to publish a sequel to the Scientific American article in that same journal that was endorsed by a broad spectrum of nearly 50 scientists in the field. (Scroll down to the bottom and click on to the next Main Page for details "No Truth to the Fountain of Youth," Scientific American, Vol. 286, No. 6, pp. 92-5 (June 2002)). -- Steve Coles]
March 25, 2005; Sorry, this clip has now been removed form our server to conserve space. If
you still need to download it, E-mail me personally, and we will arrange to send you a copy.
Steve Coles.
Click on the photo to download a high-resolution 40-second "*.avi" video file of a clip from
the February 17th interview of Mrs. Marion Higgins and her son by The Wall Street
Journal that can be viewed with either a Real One Player or a Microsoft
Windows Media Player. [ Warning: This is not a "*.mov" file (with
streaming-video capability); because the default compression parameters were inadvertently set
to such a high-resolution (for a full-screen PowerPoint presentation) its size is 163.2
MB. Therefore, it could take quite a long time to download on a slower telephone modem, if you
didn't have a high-speed cable-modem as your standard Internet connection.] If you downloaded
the clip but are still having trouble understanding what she said...
Question: "Tell
us about... why you think you've lived so long..."
Mrs. Higgins: Firstly,
following George Burns's advice, "I don't smoke too many big, fat, black cigars"; and secondly,
"I've never had enough money to engage in riotous living!" [from the Bible].
Click immediately for the font-page WSJ interview or go to the News Section for more details.
May 17, 2005; Do you really believe that a woman from the Sao Paulo area of Brazil is 125 years old? Neither do we. Nevertheless, we're still investigating this interesting case and will keep you informed of our findings. Through the efforts of one of members from Florida, Mr. Stan Primmer, we have just learned by speaking to one of her sons (in Portuguese) that, given his presumed age and her alleged age, she would have had to have given birth to him in her 60's, which strikes us as fairly unlikely, unless of course she was willing to claim the title of the World's Oldest Mother (to give birth by natural means) at the same time. We will continue to keep you informed as we learn more. Click for photos and more details.
September 30, 2004; Click for the Morning Edition story on "The Secrets of America's Supercentenarians" narrated by Neenah Ellis and broadcast nationally this morning on NPR (National Public Radio). Click on the colored icon of the speaker to hear the whole segment (TRT = 8:47 min), which includes interviews with several of the members of our List, as well as the GRG Senior Investigator, Mr. Robert Young of Atlanta, Georgia. There are also a number of photos from their gallery, including Mrs. Verona Calhoun Johnston, 114, and Mrs. Marion Bigelow Higgins, 111. There were only 44 Supercentenarians on our list at the time of the interview last August. However, today, there are 59 (see below).
November 29, 2007; Quote of the Day:
"One must learn to be ruthless in dividing between 'the possible', the 'might be possible' (i.e.,
something that would require significant breakthroughs in accepted science and technology), and
'the impossible'. There is much which is 'quite possible' but currently would be considered
fantastic. Pursuit of the ' impossible fantastic' is a recipe for endless frustration; however,
pursuit of the 'possible fantastic' is a path that leads to significant rewards. The question then is
how to tell the difference."
--- Robert Bradbury, Cambridge, MA
If you are a physician and would like to earn CME credits by attending one of our cutting- edge Age Management Conferences and Expositions for Health Care Practitioners then check back with our Conference Coordinator in Chicago, IL at 312-840-8431 after May 1st to get more details about the dates and location. We hope to schedule our next conference in Las Vegas in the Fall. We will announce the Conference dates on this website as soon as we know them. The previously announced June dates for the Venetian Hotel have been canceled.
April 6, 1830; "Dear Diary: I passed these last few days in setting up my laboratory and
making further improvements to our power supplies. This time I must not fail, for I don't have
the courage to overcome further failures. But finally, I now have the means to defeat our
adversary, Death, and lack only a few more materials with which to synthesize our new
man, Homo novus, the man who will lead mankind into the dawn of a new age, the age
of immortality." - Viktor Frankenstein
Ref.: The Frankenstein Diaries, Edited and Translated from the German into
[British] English by The Rev. Hubert Venables, p. 65 (The Viking Press, New York; 1980).
Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were
supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I
would not live forever.
-- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA Contest.
Quote for the day...[Q: What makes man unique in comparison with other animals on our planet? A:] "For the longest while it was thought that we humans were the only animals possessed of -- how was it put? -- an immortal soul. Of course, those of us who have lived with Irish Wolfhounds for most of our lives know that this [notion] is preposterous..." -- Edward Albee, Playwright, Op-Ed Piece, excerpted from the Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Foundation Address delivered at the award ceremony of the American Academy of Arts and Letters earlier this May, "Chimps Don't Draw," The Los Angeles Times, p. B14 (May 30, 2006).
Last Quotes...
"Some have said to me that 'sequencing the human genome will diminish humanity by taking the
mystery out of life.' Nothing could be further from the truth. The complexities and wonder of
how the inanimate chemicals that are our genetic code give rise to the imponderables of the
human spirit should keep poets and philosophers inspired for millennia."
-- J. Craig
Venter, Ph.D., CEO Celera Genomics, Inc. of Rockville, MD; USA
"When we get
this worked out [the human genome] and we're all living to be 150, ... we will see the
unbelievable capacity of humanity to be noble. This is a great day."
-- Bill Clinton,
President USA, ~11:00 AM EDT on Monday, June 26, 2000 in the East Room of the White
House; Washington, D.C. with Drs. J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins on each side of the
President, Prime Minister Tony Blair on a large-screen monitor from London; UK, and a large
number of members of the press corps in the audience on the occasion of the announcement of
the completion of the first draft (90 percent completion) of the Human DNA Sequence. As far as
the competitors were concerned, the completion of the HGP was called a draw by the media,
even though the Celera Genomics sequence was superior (at that moment in history) and its stock
rose for a few months before it fell back afterward. In February 2001, the publications in
Science and Nature presented at the San Francisco AAAS Annual Meeting
gave equal time (on different nights) to both adversaries. To mark the occasion, Craig wore a
tuxedo; Francis didn't.
Ref.: James Shreeve, The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the
Code of Life and Save the World, pp. 356-7 (Ballantine Books, New York; 2004; also
available as an audio book read by Erik Singer on 5 CD's).
November 1, 2005;
Click for President Bush's Emergency Plan for Dealing with an Avian Flu Pandemic.
A summary of
GRG discussions on the potential threat of Avian Flu and how to prepare for a pandemic can be
found in the 2005 News Section of this website.
August 12, 2005; The Department of Homeland Security has decided to lower the Threat Level from Orange (High) back to Yellow (Elevated) as of 5:00 PM PDT.
July 7, 2005; In response to the attack earlier today in London, the US Transit System Threat Level has been raised from Yellow (Elevated) to Orange (High).
September 23, 2005; Information security executives and CIO's from private industry have given
the DHS 'low marks,' saying that "the color-coded alert system has proved virtually useless, and
the Congress should either scrap it or radically modify it." As far as INFOSEC is concerned,
when DHS declared an Orange Alert back in July, it hardly registered with US critical
infrastructure companies outside the government.
Ref.: "DHS Gets Low Marks," CIO Magazine, Vol. 18, No. 23, p. 66
(September 15, 2005).
Note: If you access this website regularly, please click for a one-time message about our backup website hosted by UCLA. This www.grg.org website has had domain name server problems on the Internet that began on June 5, 2004, and we are pleased to be back up again.
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May 28, 2008; Quote for the Day: "I don't mind dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens." - - Woody Allen
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