In Brief

18 December 1999

Smell of death

THE key to a long life, at least for the nematode worm Caenorhabditis
elegans, is having a poor sense of smell.

Molecular biologists Cynthia Kenyon and Javier Apted of the University of
California at San Francisco discovered that impairing the worm’s ability to
smell can double its lifespan (Nature, vol 402, p 804). According to Kenyon,
some signal in the environment influences how quickly the worms grow old, and
blocking this lengthens their lives. What that signal is remains to be