On Oct 19, 2005, PED Seminar Series Presents

Quantitative studies of aging

by Hunter Fraser, PhD

Aging is one of the most ubiquitous, but still most poorly understood, processes in biology. I will present results from two studies of aging. The first addresses the observation that in many species, mortality rates level off at old age, in contradiction to classical theories of aging; I will show that a simple theoretical framework can entirely account for this previously puzzling phenomenon. In the second half of the talk I will describe an empirical study of aging in the human brain, with two major conclusions: different regions of the brain show very different types of change with age, and the way that human brains change with age bears almost no resemblance to how chimpanzee brains age. These results have a number of implications for evolutionary theories of aging and our understanding of neurodegenerative disease.

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