World Health Organization

The North Korean news service has been featured here before, but it appears that the North Korean state are beyond parody now. It would be funny, if it wasn’t indicative of the most repressive and heartless regime that currently exists on earth.

The invincibility of Songun Korea ushering in the most brilliant era of prosperity in the nation’s history spanning 5,000 years, standing all tests of history under the guidance of Kim Jong Il is based on the strong mental power of its people, says Rodong Sinmun Monday in a signed article.

The Korean people are proud to have the strong mental power peculiar to them.

It is the important characteristics of the mental power of the Korean people that it has a tremendous potential and persevering might as it is given fuller play in face of manifold difficulties and trials and that it has been steadily displayed and carried forward generation after generation in the whole course of the revolution.

The Korean people’s strong mental power is based on the great revolutionary idea.

The Juche idea serves as ideological pabulum as it makes the people strongest in faith and will in the world.

The Korean people’s mental power is inexhaustible as it was created and proved in the arduous yet worthwhile revolutionary practices.

It is thanks to the peculiar nature of the Korean revolution that a great number of people with strong mental power have been produced in the revolutionary practice.

The Korean revolution is a Songun revolutionary cause that has advanced with the philosophy on army as guidelines since its start. The Songun revolution is a gigantic one unprecedented in its fierce and arduous nature and a great one as it helps train people into revolutionaries who prize arms with do-or-die spirit and indomitable fighting spirit.

The revolutionary soldier spirit created under the great banner of Songun is the most vivid expression of the Korean people’s strong mental power.

The Korean people have carried on the revolution, forming a harmonious whole with the illustrious leaders. This has been a decisive factor that enabled them to emerge a people with the strongest mental power, concludes the article.

I pointed out a paper in passing a few weeks back, in which researchers put forward a model to explain how some species can evolve extreme longevity, or even agelessless (or negligible senescence).

As it turns out, there may be some plausible scenarios - which is a good thing, given the fact that many extremely long-lived animal species exist, and that some might indeed be ageless. Problems arise for any theory that cannot explain the outliers. Chris Patil has given this work a great deal more attention over at Ouroboros, and you should take look.

The evolution of negligible senescence:

The evolution of negligible senescence, part II: Organisms that are remotely like us:

Mole rats are no less similar to humans than lab mice are. Therefore, biogerontologists are very interested in learning the detailed mechanisms by which mole rats have delayed senescence, since it’s likely (more likely than for clams and trees, anyway) that these details might be of some practical use to us.

The most important lesson to learn from an examination of the huge range in animal - even mammal - longevity is that it is possible to design better humans with the biotechnology of tomorrow. Longer lived, less diseased, less prone to aging. That is the driving goal behind much of the mainstream work in metabolism, genetics and aging these days. It'll be a long time in the making, however - a truly massive undertaking of great scope and complexity.

While that great work is underway, we should devote more resources to the easier path to longevity: learning how to repair the humans we have now.

My attention was drawn to a Spanish article on one of the many research groups investigating the role of p53 in aging and cancer. There has been a great deal of interest in finding ways around the "cancer or aging, choose one" limitation to this set of biochemical mechanisms, thought to apply until recently. This Spanish article is somewhat in advance of the scientific publication; I'm not sure why that is the case.

The translation via Google is fair (suggestions taken on a better translation automaton):

Because this extension of life, 50% in superratones is the longest that has been described in mammals.

You get the gist, despite the breakdown of translation in the last few sentences: there are combinations of metabolic and genetic states in mammals not selected for by evolution that nonetheless lead to a clearly superior beast, from our perspective at least. Well, more or less. If you head over to the Methuselah Foundation forums, you'll find that Michael Rae wrote a long piece on this research back in mid-2007, before the life span studies were complete:

There are a lot of caveats and details both prior and after that statement, many of which still apply even with these final life span study results. It's not all completely clear-cut, as is often the case, but I can see this impressive work garnering a great deal of attention in the popular press once it jumps the language gap for the English-speaking world.

Michael Fitzpatrick puts forward the case that the medical establishment failed to create a conspiracy over MMR vaccine, when one should perhaps have existed:

Dr Wakefield and his supporters have often claimed that he is a victim of a conspiracy uniting the medical establishment, Big Pharma (the vaccine manufacturers) and the government. An irony that emerges from Dr Boyce’s study is that if there was any conspiracy over MMR, it was on the side of the anti-MMR campaign. Dr Wakefield collaborated with lawyers and parent campaigners, cultivated contacts with compliant (and scientifically naive) journalists and was advised by a leading PR firm. Meanwhile supporters of MMR, fragmented and lacking any coherent media strategy, were always in the position of reacting to the latest initiative from the Wakefield campaign. Medical authorities were inclined to leave matters to the Department of Health, but, put on the defensive in face of mounting public distrust and wary of further encouraging parental anxieties over MMR, government officials were inclined to keep a low profile.

The Royal College of General Practitioners had one official spokesman on immunisation matters, but also offered to put journalists in touch with the handful of anti-MMR GPs who were profitably engaged in selling single vaccines. It also advised journalists to contact their own GPs for information about MMR. This desultory response to a major threat to the child immunisation programme – one of the great achievements of public health and primary care in postwar Britain – was typical of the medical establishment.

The BBC’s iplayer will have Primo, a film about Primo Levi, online for the next six days.

Click here to watch it.

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi, If this is a man.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day.