Shocked by David Casarett

Author:David Casarett [Casarett, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101637272
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

There’s another reason to be excited that the search for the secret of hibernation is shifting to metabolism. If we’re looking for something that alters metabolism specifically, it may be easier to find a trigger that works in both animals and people. Despite all of the differences between mice and bears and lemurs and people, at the level of our cells, we’re more similar than different. So if we hit upon something that could reduce metabolism at the cellular level, this could be a game-changer.

Think back to the fly-fishing example, and the guy across the stream who is catching all those fish. I said earlier that if you don’t have an exact match for whatever flies he’s using, then you’re out of luck. But that’s not quite true.

What if you don’t have to find an exact match? What if you happen to have a fly that is universally attractive to all trout, everywhere? Then you don’t need a #10 caddis or a #12 coachman or whatever that guy who thinks he’s God’s gift to trout is using. You can use that all-purpose fly.

Back when I was a resident, whenever I had a day off I’d sneak away and go fly-fishing in some of the small streams in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota. Those fish were a tough audience. They were very picky. And because I didn’t know the local streams, most of the time I had no idea what those trout liked.

But I had a trick that would often salvage a fishless day. Most of those streams ran through open meadows, and I knew that those meadows were full of grasshoppers. I also knew that trout like grasshoppers. A lot. Grasshoppers are to trout on a hot summer day what buffalo wings are to a football fan on a Monday night. So even without knowing any of the local patterns or hatches, I’d usually do pretty well with a #12 hopper.

That’s what researchers like Cheng are looking for. They aren’t hoping for an exact match of a particular animal’s physiology with ours. They don’t want a cocktail that will mimic all of the complex changes that a hibernating body undergoes. They just want the equivalent of that #12 hopper. They want something that’s close enough to trick a body into thinking that it wants to hibernate.

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