I went through the whole book using the search function on NGF, not once she talked about taking it herself, for the most part she talks about the discovery and her experience in the USA and then other researches she did in Brazil and Italy.
Now im searching for Paola, her twin sister: first thing mentioned, they were bi-ovular twins, the most common type, and biovular twins can be profoundly different from each other.
She explicitly talks about how different they were:
"La mia gemella Paola, che lo adorava, fin dalla prima infanzia aveva manifestato un grande
talento artistico che suscitava in me un'ammirazione incondizionata, senza invidia né rimpianti, forse
proprio perché di quel dono io ero invece del tutto priva.
Questa era soltanto una delle differenze, palesi sin dai primi anni di vita, tra noi. Le altre non
meno significative, che rivelavano a prima vista la nostra gemellanza biovulare, trasparivano
dall'aspetto fisico, dal carattere e dal comportamento. La forma e i lineamenti del suo viso erano
diversi dai miei. Sotto la fronte alta, leggermente convessa, gli occhi azzurri, ridenti, denotavano una
disposizione (in realtà più apparente che reale) all'allegria, che incantava nostro padre. Sebbene l'età
non permettesse di indovinare il disegno ancora recondito dei geni nel modellare i tratti (un disegno
che la pubertà avrebbe rivelato del tutto conforme alle speranze), era motivo di gioia e di orgoglio
paterno constatare la straordinaria somiglianza di quel visino infantile con il suo.
A sua volta la mamma si compiaceva di osservare che io ero invece come asseriva - il ritratto
vivente di sua madre. Rivedeva nei miei, i suoi occhi grigio-verdi dallo sguardo malinconico, la
leggera asimmetria del viso, la conformazione gracile e longilinea dell'impalcatura scheletrica. La
mia tendenza ad appartarmi e rifuggire dal confronto con altre persone di ambo i sessi, le
ricordavano il carattere triste e riservato della madre che aveva adorato e perduto nell'adolescenza."
You can google translate, but in short she's mentioning all the physical and personality differences between them, how her twin Paola resembled the father and how Rita resembled her grand-mother.
Excellent, thanks Asor,
So, that's about as authoritative as it gets, they simply weren't identical twins.
So Rita and Paola only share 50% of their genes, not 100%.
It would be as valid to compare Rita with Anna, the other sister (who lived to be 95).
The study i cited earlier (several posts ago) as the source of the twins longevity data says
this:
The intrapair difference of longevity was 6.65 +/- 5.6 years (maximum 18.0; minimum 0.04)
in the MZ pairs, and 8.66 +/- 7.2 years (maximum 18.6; minimum 2.9) in the DZ pairs"
source: http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/1302428
(published in "Acta Genet Med Gemellol (Roma)")
So the new mean and variance numbers (for non-identical siblings) are: 8.66 +/- 7.2 years
So to be outside of 2 standard deviation points Rita would have to be 15.86 years older
than her sisters. She was 12 years older than Paola and only 8 years older than Anna.
She's clearly not (statistically) significantly longer lived than Anna.
She's probably not significantly longer lived than Paola either, but, there remains a question mark,
since this study data were collected of identical twins who died aged 50+.
But we know that the 'per year' chances of living another year
are much higher at 50 than they are at 60, and 70 and 80 etc.
A more appropriate data set would be of twins aged over 90.
But those twins must be as rare as hen's teeth. So the data just isn't there.
In any case, the charm of the comparison (of Rita with Paola) rested on them sharing 100%
DNA, which, we now find, they do not.
Following this lead had the potential of teaching us a lot of useful information.
It was worth the investment of time and energy, since the implications of learning, for
example, that Rita was using the eye drops in 1988 would have strongly indicated murine NGF.
The fact that she hasn't mentioned it, however, doesn't mean she wasn't using NGF back then.
(... we still need to figure out when she started taking the eye drops)
Working collectively we've made much more progress than any one of us could
have achieved alone. It's all good stuff.
Playground.
Edited by playground, 04 June 2015 - 09:42 PM.
