In this freshman seminar course, we will discuss the roles that our genes play in aging and death processes. First, we will discuss the regulation of programmed cell death. Then, we will focus our attention on organismal death and senescence. We will compare and contrast these processes and discuss how defects in such pathways lead to diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease. Required reading will be "A means to and End; the biological basis of aging and death" by William R. Clark, Ph.D. (ISBN 0-19-512593-2, Oxford University Press Hardcover: 1999 234 pages ). Each session will begin with a short quiz covering the assigned reading for that week.
