Word: ageing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...clock of clocks, and maybe, just maybe, 21st century biologists will figure out how to twiddle and reset the hands. They might concoct Methuselah pills or inject Methuselah genes into fertilized eggs and fool our mortal bodies into believing that we are forever young. "Perhaps," Benzer muses, "aging can be better described not as a clock but as a scenario, which we can hope to edit." If we died in old age at the same rate we die between ages 10 and 15, then most of us in the U.S. would live 1,200 years. We would outdo the first...
...bodies where we are in the daily sweep from morning to night. Now, at 77, Benzer is searching through our genes for a sort of clock of clocks that tells us where we are in the sweep from the cradle to the grave and decides how fast we age. Recently he discovered a mutant fruit fly that lives more than 100 days, about one-third longer than the rest of the madding crowd in a fly bottle. What makes the difference is a single gene, which Benzer calls Methuselah...
...likely to tinker with more and more of our genetic machinery, in what may be either mankind's worst folly or the most significant software upgrade of the 21st century. (Caveat emptor, users of version 1.0!) Just last month, biologists announced the discovery of mutations that accumulate in aging mitochondria, which are our cells' batteries; maybe someday they will learn how to keep our batteries from winding down. Scientists may also learn to repair our telo meres, the tiny ties at the ends of each chromosome that help hold our genetic bundles together but fray with age. Researchers may even...
...course, on this question of old age, science is still a baby. There are plenty of biologists who believe that aging and death are as inevitable as taxes. No one really knows if human longevity will come up against a fixed barrier somewhere or if, like the sound barrier, it is there only to be broken. Some gerontologists say the limit of the average life-span is 85 years; others, 95, 100, 150 and beyond. No one understands the economic barriers either. Ronald Lee, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, calculates that for each year...
...generation will consume all manner of antiaging drugs and nostrums--antioxidants, growth hormone, vitamin D, garlic, red wine, melatonin, blueberries--and in the end we'll still live only a little longer than our parents. Today in Japan a clothing company is cashing in with "antistink" underwear for middle-aged men, who (according to the company) begin to emit odors. But by the time we die, or shortly thereafter, the expansion of youth and the postponement of old age may become one of the greatest enterprises of the 21st century. "I see it as inevitable," says evolutionary biologist Michael Rose...