Telomerase – make your skin immortal!

Simon — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:25:21 +0000

I know that the beauty industry has made a habit of twisting science somewhat for it’s own ends (see this and this for instance), but this one takes the biscuit.
The wife spotted a piece in Harper’s Bazaar while she was in the hairdressers yesterday, about an amazing new beauty treatment (the article itself is hard to link to, but it’s number 3 in the list of “9 Skin Secrets for Spring“). Injections of telomerase for $1,500 a pop. Apparently it ‘stimulates resting stem cells’. Obviously the Harper’s piece has guff about it being Nobel-prize winning technology.

Telomerase is an enzyme that amplifies DNA repeats at the ends of chromosomes, without this activity, the telomeres would get progressively shorter until the “Hayflick limit” is reached and the cell will stop dividing, or undergo programmed cell death (there’s a reasonable review of the role of telomerase here: http://www.jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/full/18/13/2626).

Now I’m no expert, but as far as I know, telomerase is turned off in normal somatic cells, and telomerase activity has been associated with up to 90% of cancers (even its Wikipedia entry will tell me this much, a rather old paper with some concrete figures can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0959-8049(97)00062-2). I’m not suggesting for a second that injecting telomerase will give you cancer (the overwhelming probability is it will do nothing at all), but this seems to be an amazing example of abusing science in the name of ‘beauty’.

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MMR scaremongerer sicks the legal dogs on Ben Goldacre

Simon — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:48:34 +0000

Let the blogosphere and twittersphere spring to his defence!

See here for full details, but a London broadcaster had a half hour long rant on her show about the ‘dangers’ of the MMR jab on 7th January. Ben Goldacre subsequently posted the entire, repulsive, segment on his blog, to show this woman up for the scaremongerer she is. The radio station she works for has now set the lawyers on him, insisting he cease and disist.

So I am reposting his plea for help, and posting links to the relevant content (original post here, complain about the broadcast here). If you have the know-how to help him out, please do so.

EDIT – You can get the audio of the original broacast from YouTube or WikiLeaks… if you want your head to explode with frustration… Also note this graph, which illustrates the very real effect of irresponsible woo like this.

Fuzzier Logic » badscience

Telomerase – make your skin immortal!

MMR scaremongerer sicks the legal dogs on Ben Goldacre