As Benjamin Franklin so wisely said, “Only two things are certain: death and taxes.” Having just paid our taxes it’s time to turn our attention to death. Woody Allen, in one of his lucid moments, said, “I’m not afraid of dying; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” I suspect that anyone who has seriously considered the inevitable prospect of shuffling off this mortal coil would endorse that view, but there is, in most cases, an intermediate phase; it’s called aging.
Turn on any TV channel and see how long it is before there is a commercial break; the median time is usually about 5 minutes. Notice how many are devoted to making us look and/or feel younger. Sometimes the message is subtle and related to pharmaceutically relieving whatever is ailing you. The Madison Avenue underling who invented the phrase, “Ask your doctor if “Beauticomforte” is right for you,” is surely in the Advertising Hall of Fame.
From the toenail that attracts attention while doing the Zumba on the cruise ship to the temporary eradication of graying hair, there lays a great domain of aging that is under constant attack from those who promote everlasting youth as the goal of living.
In word “The Sopranos” made famous, “Forgiddaboutit!” The only solution for not growing old and dealing with its ravages is the singularly unattractive idea of dying young. If we are to age successfully; there are some important things to consider.
The study of gerontology has come of age (pun intended) in the last few decades. It was not until the intricate structure of the single cell began to unlock its mysteries that anyone had a clue about what happens as we grow old.
Ever since Robert Hooke published Micrographia in 1665, the complexities of intracellular life have been unraveling. Of all the astounding revelations the one of most significance to the process of aging is the understanding of chromosomes and the mapping of the human genome. Francis Collins, a native of Augusta County and currently the Director of the NIH, will surely share in a future Nobel Prize for that work.
Cells reproduce themselves by the billions each day, replacing their tired and worn out predecessors. Scientists have wondered forever why that process grinds to a halt and eventually stops. If it didn’t, could we live forever?
That question has partially been answered. Elizabeth Blackburn, along with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for Physiology and Medicine for the discovery of telomerase. That is an enzyme that protects a structure on the end of the chromosome called a telomere whose function is to allow the cell to reproduce itself when needed. That’s where aging comes into play. The telomere loses some of its strength each time it sends the message to the cell to replicate. Telomerase is said to restore the robustness to the telomere.
This is where science runs headlong into problems – some of which are junk or pseudoscience. There are those who believe that if we can teach the cell to produce more telomerase then our life span could be extended to, say, 250 years. Heaven forbid! If we are worried about funding social security and Medicare for the baby boomers, just imagine 400 billion people on the planet by the year 3000!
If this sounds like science fiction, and I hope it is, check out the online TED talk by Aubrey de Gray. It is entitled “A Roadmap to End Aging.” If the length of his beard is any indicator of the telomerase activity in his hair, he may be on to something. His credentials as a biomedical gerontologist are impressive as is his editorship of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research.
This is important since you will receive, if you have not already, emails promoting vitamin supplements that contain no less than a dozen chemicals “known” to enhance telomerase production. Before sending in your credit card information, you might consult your family concerning your housing arrangements for the next two centuries. Who knows? You might grow an extra hand out of your skull as a bonus.
Finally, there are real data in this type of research that must be carefully mined. Let’s count on Francis Collins, Elizabeth Blackburn and their kind to protect us from the hucksters hankering to fatten their wallets in the name of “science.”
Hayden Hollingsworth
