To: "Carolyn Balkenhol" To: "JHIGASHI.US.ORACLE.COM" Fcc: EMF Subject: Gerigene Corp. Offering memorandum This was sent to me at behest of "Larry Ellison’s Office”. I’m not sure what I am supposed to do with it. If it’s for Larry’s personal investment, I think QBI (Dan Zurr) is a better bet. In fact I’d just sent him the following memo, which touches on similar targets of research as GeriGene; but I suspect QBI has better methodology. Gerigene wants to talk to me. Unless I get other advice I will be simply non-committal. :r /j/Mail/ESI/135 To: zurr@qbi.co.il Subject: aging hair/skin as target models Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 17:45:44 EDT From: Joshua Lederberg ‘ Dear Danny I ask your help on another topic. I was trying to think of a target for shotgunning knockdown or hyperexpressors relevant to genes to inhibit aging. This should use something more integrated than cell cultures and less than an intact mouse (too expensive, though we might come to that.) So I think of some features of skin, which certainly does age: could we find some metabolic indicator that could be seen in patches, say 1-mm-sq? Well, perhaps Nature provides one, exemplified by my own white beard. So, if black mice turn white with age, a black patch on the venerable white background would be the indicator, and one could try to recover the vector before or after retransplantation of the black patch. (Yes I shiver at the history of painted mice in the annals of fraud.) I then remember I have a few scattered black hairs in my beard, and have wondered if those were somatic mutants. This opens up lots of further questions -- do you have any colleagues in Israel you’d want to bring into this discussion? Of course the ’wild hair’ may have nothing to do with systemic aging, and may be an aberration of the demelanizing pathway. I know nothing about hormonal (MSH) control of pigmentation in aging. It _ may be a pre-neoplastic phenomenon, a first microstep towards melanoma. And that may a warning that anything we do to rejuvenate some tissues may be opening the door to cancer (for which the post-menopausal application of sex hormones is a precedent.) I could find almost nothing in medline, no leads at all about wild hairs. Here is one abstract I will- look up -- but if you can locate the right kind of dermatological expertise, there might be some fun in further enquiry. Even if it has little to do with aging generally, a treatment that could restore natural hair pigment should have some market; which makes me wonder whatr has not been published on this. Authors Nordlund JJ. Title The lives of pigment cells. [Review] [48 refs] Source Dermatologic Clinics. 4(3):407-18, 1986 Jul.