The Cancer of Dorian Gray
Is growing old an inescapable cost of averting malignancy?
By Ben Harder
Dorian Gray, the everlasting dandy of Oscar Wilde’s novel, halted aging. Rather than his body growing old, his portrait suffered the insults of time. In recent years, biologists have created real-life Dorian Grays: mice that don’t show certain signs of age. But in both the story and the lab, there were trade-offs. By remaining young, the fictional Dorian Gray became self-destructive. In the scientific plotline, the specially bred mice develop cancer and die young.
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Scientists create such mice by inserting mutations in one of two important tumor-suppressing genes that mice and people share. The result has revealed a deep link between cancer and aging. Cancer depends on over-enthusiastic cell replication, whereas replication typically dwindles during aging. In a sense, according to the new findings, growing old is the flip side of fending off cancer.