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Nature 423, 125 (8 May 2003) | doi:10.1038/423125a

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Molecular physiology: Tuned for longer life

Richard Turner

Sometime early in the sixteenth century, 40-year-old Luigi Cornaro decided to cut his food intake dramatically for health reasons — he then lived on to the age of 102, writing treatises on the merits of his abstemious lifestyle. Five centuries later it is not clear whether severely limiting food consumption can, in general, extend human life, although calorie restriction does indeed extend the lifespan of commonly studied organisms such as yeast, nematode worms and mice.