Vera Gorbunova delivers eighth Paul F. Glenn Lecture
Mice and rats rarely live more than five years. Yet some rodents, remarkably, can live up to 30. These notably long-lived rodents were the subject of Vera Gorbunova’s “Longevity and anticancer mechanisms in long-lived rodents,” the eighth annual Paul F. Glenn Distinguished Lecture on Feb. 7. The Department of Biology hosted the event at the MIT Stata Center. An expert on aging, the focus for this lecture series, Gorbunova is the Doris Johns Cherry Endowed Professor of Biology and Co-Director of the Rochester Aging Research Center at the University of Rochester. Her lecture described research performed in her laboratory on a variety of long-lived rodents, including both the naked mole rat and the blind mole rat, and the mechanisms by which they avoid cancer and regulate aging. It was a tale of careful experimentation and curious observations. As one example, when studying the very long-lived and cancer resistant naked mole...