A team was studying the long-term toxicology of C60
(fullerene, "buckyballs") by giving it to rats as a solution in olive oil. The control groups were water and olive oil without C60. The compound has already been shown to have no noticeable short-term toxic effects, so they probably didn't expect anything dramatic in the lower-dose long-term mode.

Wrong.
What they found was that the fullerene/olive oil group had their life spans extended by some 90%, which would make this mixture perhaps the most efficacious life-extended treatment ever seen in a rodent model. This is a very odd and a very interesting result.

The most likely mechanism for the life-extension effects is through oxidative stress and free radical scavenging.
There have been several reports of C60 as an antioxidant, and other reports that hydrated C60 does the opposite.
In this study, even at very low doses, C60 appears to protect rodents against carbon tetrachloride-induced liver damage, for example, which is known to involve a radical process. Significantly, it does so while showing protection against glutathione depletion, which also suggests that it's directly scavenging reactive intermediates.

The Author,
. Derek Lowe, (derekb.lowe@gmail.com) an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke.

****My thoughts
Buckyballs prolong life? Really? I thought Buckyballs were first discovered in Candle smoke? Urrgh.


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"You will never find a real Human being - Even in a mirror." ....Mike Kremer.