After shoveling and scraping and shivering for awhile, I drove slowly over to the Hilton Hotel to listen to those who know more about aging than I ever even thought about...(it was a conference about aging) about how the mitochondria has bits that have markers of aging parts, how older skeletal muscle recovers compared to those of the young adult...and grafts and charts after charts of data collected for many years. It's interesting to hear scientists talk of their fields, especially when you have little or no idea of what it is that obviously has them so absorbed and thrilled...it is evident that the passion is there and that they have formed their world around this little aspect of life that they have dived head first into researching. I was hoping for more stories, but there was very little of that; although some had little quirky stories of other researchers or each other...I think some of them haven't really had much of a social life with many other beings than mice. It also made me think of how mice, and maybe other species, have been giving of their bodies and minds so that these types can make their grafts and charts. (This is not to say that I am particularly fond of mice, but after I looked at many slides of their sliced and stained brains... stained with dye so that we could see that they had Alzheimer's or Parkinson's ...it made me think of their supreme sacrifice.)
Anyway, tonight might just be our coldest night yet, and I'm thinking it was not long ago I had taken pictures of sunflowers blooming in the yard. Ahh, how time marches on!!
