Word: growing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have to grow old so sadly? Before we go, do we have to lose most of the natural gifts that make life worth living? We are the first people in human history for whom this is a primary concern. For every generation before ours, the first concerns were Can I grow old? Will my baby reach a ripe old age? Please let us grow older! Now the average life expectancy in the U.S. has advanced from 47 in 1900 to better than 76 in 1999. During the next century, new biological discoveries should ensure that even more of us will...
...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 learn to grow whole new hearts and livers from stem cells, a prospect I find slightly dispiriting. Will we walk off the stage at last elaborately disguised, a living prosthesis--false teeth, false eyes, false taste buds, false everything...
...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 we add to the average life-span, the economy will have to grow 1% to pay for our care...
...Alzheimer's, as well as brain damage caused by strokes and head injuries. Even a year ago, such a sweeping claim might have been dismissed as nonsense. But that was before last fall's discovery that the fetal human brain contains master cells (called neural stem cells) that can grow into any kind of brain cell. Snyder extracted these cells and "mass-produced" them in the lab. His hope is that the cells, when injected into a damaged adult brain, will turn themselves into replacements for cells that are dead or diseased...
Also close to reality are the so-called antiangiogenic factors, relatively nontoxic compounds that inhibit the growth of new capillaries. The idea behind this new class of drugs is that tumors cannot grow bigger than a few hundred thousand cells--about the size of a peppercorn--without growing their own blood-supply system. Researchers and patients, not to mention the owners of stock in half a dozen biotech companies, are eagerly awaiting results of clinical trials of antiangiogenic factors, which might be used in combination with chemotherapy to knock down big tumors and then prevent any surviving tumors from growing...