This is neat. I just started reading Greg Bear's Vitals last night -- so far it's about a scientist working on extending human lifespan by tweaking genes and protein signals between bacteria. Today I ran across a news article announing that this approach, or one nearly like that, already works on worms.

One of the side topics of Vitals is the existence of widespread and aggressive opposition to lifespan-extending research. This is something I don't understand, that I've always considered to be a crazy position based on either religious belief (don't offend God) or an extreme conservatism like Rousseau's where anything remotely new, man-made or technological is worse than man's "natural state" (note this is often an environmentalist/green position, so although I call it conservatism it's not necessary what you'd think of as the right end of the political spectrum).

A last note on Vitals is that it's set in Seattle and San Francisco (so far - only 100 pages in). I'm a sucker for settings I recognize. I like Monk and Charmed especially when they show places I know.