BIOLOGY OF AGING

There are no diseases peculiar to old age and very few from which it is exempt.
-Alfred Worcester (1855-1951)

Twenty percent of all humans who have ever lived past the age of 65 are alive today. And these older individuals are biologically younger than the old of generations past: A landmark 1993 study by Duke University found that the percentage of older Americans in good health is growing at a greater rate than the percentage of those with disabilities.

Between 1960 and 1990, while the overall U.S. population grew 39%, the ranks of those 85 and older jumped 232% (the over 65 group increasing 89% while the number of those under 25 grew by only 13%). A child born today who lives to age 65 is ten times more likely to reach 100 than people born one century ago (click here to see life expectancies at age 65 from 1910 on). Now in the year 2000, there are an estimated 100,000 people aged 100+, up from 32,000 in 1990. This should keep Willard Scott busy!

THE QUEST FOR LONGEVITY (IF NOT IMMORTALITY)

The news was good in the September 1997 press release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Life expectancy of Americans reached an all-time high in 1996 of 76.1, indicating a continuing gain in the battle against premature death.

The quest for immortality seems to be an obsession of the human primate--its methodologies dating back to some of the earliest recorded messages of the past. The search for long (if not everlasting) life is implicit within Western mythology and within its scientific quests, as in:

* the antediluvian beliefs that people lived longer in some past Golden Age. Recall the supercentenarians in Genesis: Methuselah supposedly lived to a ripe 969 (5:27), Jared 962 (5:20), Noah 950 (9:29), and Adam 930 (5:5).

the hyperborean beliefs that there are remote pockets of super longevity around the world, pristine places without the stresses and pollution of modern urban societies, where the old retain valued social roles. In the 1970s, for instance, the press carried stories of people living to extraordinary ages in Vilcabamba, high in the Andes of Ecuador, and in the Azerbaijan republic of the former USSR.

In 1973, for instance, Soviet authorities reported the death of Azerbaijanian Shirali Mislimov, who supposedly lived to 168, who was from a republic where there were 63 centenarians per 100,000 population (compared to 3 in the United States).

The fountain of youth myths, where some wondrous substance or procedure would extend life, such as young Achilles being dipped in the pool of immortality by his mother. Such long-lived personalities as Pope Pius XII, Bernard Baruch, and Somerset Maugham had the cells of unborn lambs injected into their veins.

Enthusiasms were tempered with Leonard Hayflick's discovery of the finite divisions of human cells, the so-called Hayflick Limit--that, at least at the cellular level, we are somehow programmed to die.

After all, if Darwin's mechanisms of natural selection are to work, old generations must be superceded by the new. But there flickered hope in the cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks which, one-half century after whose host's death, live eternally on throughout the world.

Merchants of Immortality" (aired June 4, 2003) featuring an interview with Stephen Hall, author of Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension.

http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/ger-biol.html