Word: clock
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...letter sent just as the summer began in 1966, Gore wrote from his Tennessee home, "The cattle party was tonight--the sale is tomorrow. It's 11 o'clock and I have to be up at 5. That's not so bad but I didn't get any sleep last night...
...gene can do that much for flies (or worms or mice--genetic engineering has created a growing zoo of Methuselahs), then what can our genes do for us? Maybe there really is a clock of clocks, and maybe, just maybe, 21st century biologists will figure out how to twiddle and reset the hands. They might concoct Methuselah pills or inject Methuselah genes into fertilized eggs and fool our mortal bodies into believing that we are forever young. "Perhaps," Benzer muses, "aging can be better described not as a clock but as a scenario, which we can hope to edit...
Whenever I want to feel optimistic, I think about work in progress in the laboratory of Seymour Benzer of the California Institute of Technology. Benzer made the first detailed map of a gene's interior, and he and his student Ronald Konopka discovered the first so-called clock gene, which ticks away inside virtually every living cell, helping tell our bodies where we are in the daily sweep from morning to night. Now, at 77, Benzer is searching through our genes for a sort of clock of clocks that tells us where we are in the sweep from the cradle...
...spend his next career, he says, "unraveling the facts." But he hates to see the study of longevity being overblown by the press. "I hope the hype will not result in the same letdown as Nixon's all-out war on cancer." Even if there is a central clock, it may be harder to control than cancer...
July 1, 2030. Like just about everyone she knows, Angela Jefferson, 36, wakes up to the insistent patter of a HealthWatch Model 9000 alarm clock. "Today is Monday, and the time is 6 a.m.," the little box chirps. Angela stares at its smooth, blue face long enough for the embedded microlaser to scan the back of her eye. "Ocular pressure, blood pressure and carbon-dioxide levels normal," the alarm clock reports. "But you are dehydrated. I'll signal the refrigerator to fix you an electrolyte cocktail...