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Extending lifespan Thanks, Mum! 延长寿命 谢啦，老妈! An obscure group of animals may reveal the secret of elongating life 一群不为人知的动物可能会揭开长寿之谜 THE one sure way to prolong an animal s life is, paradoxically, to starve it. Caloricrestriction , as it is known in the trade, works for everything from threadworms tomammals . So it is no surprise that it also works for a group of small creatures known asrotifers. If that were the only result of Shugo Watabe s experiments on the critters, at theUniversity of Tokyo, it would scarcely be worth reporting. What makes this news is that theoffspring of the rotifers in question also lived longer than normal. And thatthe inheritanceof an acquired characteristicis quite startling. 矛盾的是，延长动物寿命的方法，竟然是使其挨饿。科学界的同行都知道，有名的 热量限制 法则对小至线虫，大至哺乳动物的动物界都适用。所以当该条法则运用到一群名叫轮虫的生物上也就不足为奇了。如果东京大学的修吾渡部的轮虫实验仅是如此的话，也就没有报道的价值了。具有资讯价值的是，上述轮虫后代的生命也比普通轮虫要长。那后天的从父辈继承下的特质实在很令人吃惊。 Rotifers are unusual in that they often reproduce by parthenogenesis . A parthenogenetic population is, by definition,all female and the result, give or take the odd mutation, is that a rotifer s daughters aregenetically identical to her. That makes rotifers convenient subjects for studies of thecontroversial idea that characteristics acquired during an individual s life can be passeddown the generations in ways that are independent of mutations in the DNA. | 
