Michael R. Rose

His Ph.D. advisor was Brian Charlesworth. His main area of work has been the evolution of aging, approached both theoretically and empirically via the technique of experimental evolution. In 1991, he published Evolutionary Biology of Aging exploring a view of the subject based on antagonistic pleiotropy, the hypothesis that aging is caused by genes that have two effects, one acting early in life and the other much later. The genes are favored by natural selection as a result of their early-life benefits, and the costs that accrue much later appear as incidental side-effects that we identify as aging. Dr. Rose has also suggested that aging can stop in a latter stage of life. The field of aging biology is divided between those who think that it will be very difficult to develop technology to postpone human aging and those who expect breakthroughs in this field in the near future. Rose is an outspoken advocate for the former position.

British Commonwealth Scholar, 1976–79; NATO Science Fellow, 1979-1981, NSERC of Canada University Research Fellow, 1981–88; President's Prize, American Society of Naturalists, 1992; Excellence in Teaching Award, University of California, Irvine Biological Sciences, 1996; Busse Prize, World Congress of Gerontology, 1997.

The phenomenon was first described by George C. Williams in 1957, but it was Rose who coined the phrase "antagonistic pleiotropy". Rose's laboratory has conducted the longest-running experimental evolution experiment designed to test the theory of antagonistic pleiotropy. Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are being bred for longevity by collecting eggs from the longest-lived flies in each generation. The experiment has run since 1981, and has produced flies with quadruple the original life span. The prediction of the antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis was that these long-lived flies would have much lower fertility early in life. The result has been the opposite - that the long-lived flies actually lay more eggs at every stage of life. Rose explains this result in terms of an interaction between genotype and environment. The long-lived flies show other weaknesses that would make them poor competitors in the wild, and perhaps these traits are the true areas of antagonistic pleiotropy. He is one of the biologists featured in the 1995 science documentary Death by Design/The Life and Times of Life and Times. In 1997, Rose was awarded the Busse Research Prize by the World Congress of Gerontology. He has authored The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging.

Michael Roberson Rose was born on July 25, 1955. He obtained his B.S. in 1975 from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In 1976 he obtained his M.S.. In 1978 he obtained his Ph.D from the University of Sussex.