Time, Cells, and Aging: 2nd Edition

During the decade and a half since the first edition of "Times, Cells, and Aging" was published, remarkable advances have occurred in many subareas of this discipline. Some of these new insights derive from the frontal attack, per se, on the problem by a substantial number of new recruits to the field; others are the result of fallout from advances directed toward quite different objectives, e.g., the study of specific deteriorative disease processes; but the most important contributions to the understanding of aging as a biological phenomenon are, in my opinion, the indirect result of the astounding advances in the understanding of cell mechanisms which the molecular-genetic revolution has provided. Proceeding from the discovery of DNA structure by Watson and Crick in the early 1950's, through the description of the agents involved in protein synthesis (particularly the contributions of Zamecnek, Schweet, Volkin and Astrakhan, Novelli, and Kornberg, and culminating in the identification and verification of the code by Nirenberg, Ochoa, Yanofsky, Streisinger, and Khorana), the last decade and a half have furnished a rational basis for a conceptualization of the mechanics of cell function which was truly impossible until very recently.