It is said that at the party to celebrate the late Studs Terkel's 90th birthday, someone asked "Who would want to live to be 90?" "People", Terkel said, "who are 89." Nifty reply, but the question remains: Why would anyone want to live to be 90? And beyond. The question has a long history. To quote from Euripides Alcestis. 669. "Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them." We stand no closer to beating the odds today than in the time of Euripides, despite the many advances in medicine and biology since. Still, hope, if not life itself, springs eternal. It is almost touching to believe, as so many of us do, that because we know so much about so many things that the answer to eternal life lies just over the horizon. The latest assurance comes from researchers who have correlated long life with fewer calories in our diets. As Ari LeVaux writing in Alternet has observed:
The idea that eating less can prolong life has been gaining traction in recent years, thanks to studies on many organisms, including mice, spiders, dogs and worms, that correlate fewer calories with longer life. . .A group called the Calorie Restriction Society has formed to encourage and assist people in reducing their long-term caloric intake for the sake of health. Their diet, called Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition (CRON), is intended to drastically reduce caloric intake without starving the body. CRONies, as they call themselves, claim that in addition to the possibility of living longer and retarding the effects of aging, they experience increased energy and mental clarity.
Not that the geriatric set is sitting around waiting for the next medical study to appear; most are out doing things including getting into trouble. For one thing the recession has caused a postponement to many retirement plans. From the Kansas City Star we learn:
Whatever the cause or ripple effect, two-thirds of Americans age 55 to 64 are in the work force — the highest participation rate among that age group since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track in 1948.
"Had the economy been stable, I wouldn't have given it a second thought," said Rick Wright, 60, an information technology worker for the city of Kansas City, who was eligible to retire but decided to stay.
"I'm no economic genius, but I'm afraid of inflation when they pump all this recovery money into the economy. I'll have a good retirement wage, but even then, I have to be careful."
Some elders of our tribe are not staying above the law. We owe to In These Times the report that:
Crime is generally a young person's game, but that hasn't stopped an ever-growing number of older Americans from breaking the law. Following a decline through most of the '90s, over the past 10 years arrest rates for those over 50 have shot up 85 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Experts predict that these numbers will continue to climb well into the next decade, as 35 million baby boomers expand America's graying population from 16 to nearly 25 percent.
Is America on the precipice of a geriatric crime wave?
"The numbers are definitely going to keep going up, no doubt about it," says Ronald Akers, a criminology professor at the University of Florida. "People are healthier and living longer, which may make crime an attractive option for some older people."
The picture resembles a famous painting by Bruegel more than it does a brochure for an old people's home. What is wrong with this picture? For a better perspective, there is this, entitled Can Aging Be Solved, from Technology Review, M.I.T.'s magazine about innovation. It is in the form of an interview with a gerontology pioneer, Leonard Hayflick, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. "In the 1960s, Hayflick discovered that human cells grown in a dish will multiply a finite number of times--a property now known as the Hayflick Limit. These cells later helped ignite the search for the cellular sources of aging, and Hayflick, a former president of the Gerontological Society of America, has since become well known for his skepticism toward claims that human longevity can be significantly lengthened through science. Hayflick spoke with Technology Review about his theory for the biological causes of aging and explains why he thinks that research directed at the fundamental processes of aging will yield greater returns than studying diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease." The following is excerpted from that interview.
Several people in this field believe we do understand the biological cause of aging, which is the same as the cause of nonbiological aging. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Like all molecules, biological molecules dissipate energy, losing structural integrity and functional capacity. Our bodies have enormous repair capacity, which evolved to repair dysfunctional molecules until reproductive maturation, after which the accumulation of these molecules exceeds repair capacity. Otherwise, the species would vanish. The accumulation over time of dysfunctional molecules leads to the properties of aging at the clinical level that we all recognize.
TR: So it doesn't imply that there is a solution to aging?
LH: Why would you want to do that?
TR: Some people would like to slow or halt the aging process.
LH: They haven't thought about the consequences. We relate to each other by perceptions of differences in age, which would be destroyed if some chose to increase their longevity and some did not. The social, political, and economic discontinuities that would occur would be enormous. People who say they want extended longevity say they want it to be so when life satisfaction is greatest. Yet they won't know [when that is] until late in life. If you're in your eighties and you decide you want life extended when you were happier, at fifty, it's no longer possible.
TR: So you don't want to extend life span. But do you think it's theoretically possible?
LH: I think it's highly improbable. Let's take something infinitely simpler than your body and mine: automobiles. Even if you put the car in a garage and don't use it, it won't stand there forever. Eventually, it will age and disintegrate. This is an inevitable law of physics. Some people have proposed changing the parts as they wear out. But when is the original no longer the original? Replacing your brain becomes an insurmountable problem.
TR: You have often pointed out that even in the research world, there is great confusion over the meaning of the term "aging." What is the confusion?
LH: The facts are these. There are four aspects to the finitude of life: aging, longevity determination, age-associated diseases, and death. Aging is what we call a catabolic process--the breakdown of molecules. Longevity determination is the reverse--the repair or maintenance of molecules. Aging gets confused with longevity determination. The aging process increases vulnerability to age- associated diseases. These concepts are distinguishable from each other and fundamentally different.
TR: Why is it so important to distinguish between aging and the diseases of aging?
LH: You cannot learn about the fundamental biology of aging by studying disease processes. Resolving age-associated diseases tells us nothing about the fundamental biology of aging, just as the resolution of childhood diseases, such as polio and childhood anemia, did not tell us one iota about childhood development.
TR: Why, then, is it important to do research on the fundamental processes of aging?
LH: Because the fundamental processes of aging increase vulnerability to all age-associated diseases. That is why cancer, cardiovascular disease, and stroke, the three leading causes of death in developed countries, occur in older age. The root cause of age-associated diseases implies--demands, even--that for anyone to understand the causes of age-associated diseases, they should know something about the fundamental processes of aging. Learning something about why old cells are more vulnerable to pathology is a key question for which we have little research being conducted. . .
Copyright Technology Review 2009
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Perhaps we should listen more to some oldtimers: "Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man,-- yesterday in embryo, to-morrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hair's-breadth of time assigned to thee live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it." ~ Marcus Aurelius Meditations. iv. 48.
So much for experience: Now comes Nicholas Wade, in The New York Times, to report on a new drug in the testing stage:
"It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it's on such a diet.
"It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is."
Wanna bet?
