Algerina Perna/Sun photo/2006

You might live longer if you didn’t have to worry about reproduction, or at least if you were sterile.

That’s the implication from research at Brown University.

Researchers there over-activated a gene that controls germline stem cells in fruit flies, essentially making them sterile.

They found the sterile flies lived 20 to 50 percent longer than typical flies. Other researchers found the same phenomenon 10 years ago in round worms.

For more than 50 years, scientists have suspected a link between reproduction and lifespan. The rule is that when organisms delay reproduction, they generally live longer.

And the recent work in flies by Thomas Flatt and Marc Tatar, suggests that signals from reproductive tissue directly control lifespan and metabolism, and that humans may be included in that equation, experts say.

The work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and there’s more on it here.