Michael R. Rose

Michael R. Rose is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. His advisor was Brian Charlesworth. His main area of work has been the evolution of aging. In 1991, he published Evolutionary Biology of Aging exploring a view of the subject based on Antagonistic Pleiotropy. This is the hypothesis that aging is caused by genes that have two effects, one acting early in life and the other much later. The genes are adopted by natural selection as a result of their early benefits, and the costs that accrue much later appear as incidental side-effects that we identify as aging. The phenomenon was first described by George C. Williams in 1957, but it was Rose who coined the phrase Antagonistic Pleiotropy.

Rose's laboratory has conducted the longest-running artificial selection experiment designed to test the theory of Antagonistic Pleiotropy. Fruit flies are being bred for longevity by collecting eggs from the longest-lived flies in each generation. The experiment has run since 1981, and has produced flies with quadruple the original life span. The prediction of the Antagonistic Pleiotropy hypothesis was that these long-lived flies would have much lower fertility early in life. The result has been the opposite - that the long-lived flies actually lay more eggs at every stage of life. Rose explains this result in terms of an interaction between genotype and environment. The long-lived flies show other weaknesses that would make them poor competitors in the wild, and perhaps these traits are the true areas of Antagonistic Pleiotropy.

The field of aging biology is divided between those who think that it will be very difficult to develop technology to postpone human aging and those who expect breakthroughs in this field in the near future. Rose is an outspoken advocate for the latter position.

In 1997, Rose was awarded the Busse Research Prize by the World Congress of Gerontology. His most recent book is The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging. He is one of the biologists featured in the innovative 1995 science documentary Death by Design / The Life and Times of Life and Times.

References

• Faculty page at UC Irvine [1]
• Article in the New York Times, December 6, 2005 [2]
• Google E-book The Long Tomorrow [3]

External links

• Rose's UC Irvine faculty profile
• Audio of interview with Rose

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Name	Rose, Michael R.
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