What If You Could Have This Particular Gene?

An intriguing gene that is associated with long life and extended mental clarity has been studied among a population of Ashkenazi Jews by scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

Dr. Barzilai and his colleagues had previously shown that this gene variant helps people live exceptionally long lives and apparently can be passed from one generation to the next. Known as CETP VV, the gene variant alters the Cholesterol Ester Protein. This protein affects the size of "good" HDL and "bad" LDL cholesterol, which are packaged into lipoprotein particles. Centenarians were three times likelier to possess CETP VV compared with a control group representative of the general population and also had significantly larger HDL and LDL lipoproteins than people in the control group.

Researchers believe that larger cholesterol particles are less likely to lodge themselves in blood vessels. So people with the CETP VV gene (and the larger cholesterol particles they produce) run a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes, which may explain their unusual longevity.

The findings of this new study suggest that CETP VV also protects the cognitive integrity of the brain--either through the same vascular "anti-clogging" benefit that prevents heart attacks and strokes or through an independent protective mechanism that remains to be found.

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Gene therapy (GT) experiments on humans have been scaled back significantly over the past 6 years due to serious side effects of GT, including cancer and death. Nevertheless, GT treatments for erectile dysfunction, osteoporosis, pulmonary artery hypertension, vascular diseases, and cancer, among other conditions including SCID, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and phenylketonuria.

Gene therapy will eventually provide safe and effective treatment and/or prophylaxis for virtually any meaningful disease and affliction. Right now, ethical and therapeutic oversight committees are stalled on the issue of safety. These issues will be overcome. And eventually, if you want genes that lend toward greater mental clarity, or extended lifespan, there will be ethical providers who can give them to you safely.