New Scientist magazine features Wollongong team's lifespan research

Nov 04, 2003

The popular international weekly magazine, New Scientist, has run a prominent feature article in its November 1 issue focused on a University of Wollongong inter-disciplinary research team's work which it says "could be a grand unifying theory of life speed, life size and lifespan".

The article, entitled "The speed of life" focuses on the research by Associate Professor Tony Hulbert of the Department of Biological Sciences and Associate Professor Paul Else of the Department of Biomedical Sciences along with their research students, Nigel Turner and Sally Faulks.

The New Scientist article points out that Professor Hulbert believes that by measuring the two exhaled gases of ethane and pentane we will be able to "tell how quickly this candlewick we call life will burn down".

The article says: "In general, the larger the beast, the slower its metabolism and the longer its life, and vice versa. But the question of how nature imprints each creature with its assigned metabolic rate, and why some are destined to die sooner than others, is a long-standing mystery."

But it argues that Professor Hulbert and Professor Else think they have the answer saying it is our membranes -- the millionth-of-a-centimetre-thick envelopes that enclose our cells and the components within them -- that determine all of these things.

"Gunky, watertight membranes saddle elephants and whales with slow metabolic rates, but also give them long lives. Runny, leaky membranes allow mice and hummingbirds to live fast -- but also causes them to die young, their bodies ravaged by highly reactive free-radical oxygen molecules. Ethane and pentane are by-products of the radicals' relentless gnawing."