Word: us
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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GIRTH OF A NATION Just look around: Americans are getting fatter. And now a government report confirms not only that more than half of us are overweight but also that the number who are obese--at least 30% heavier than the ideal weight--has skyrocketed from 12% of the population in 1991 to 18% today. Who is likeliest to put on pounds? Surprisingly, 18- to 29-year-olds and folks in the South, where the hot climate easily wilts enthusiasm for exercise...
...gene can do that much for flies (or worms or mice--genetic engineering has created a growing zoo of Methuselahs), then what can our genes do for us? Maybe there really is a 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...
Yogi Berra, as usual, said it best: "Prediction is very hard, especially when it's about the future." Yet as we come to the end of the 20th century--a century that saw us split the atom, crack the genetic code and allow Aunt Martha to auction off her turquoise Fiesta ware online--it is only natural to ask what the 21st century will hold for us. We trust that the future will outmarvel the past, but all we can say for sure is that our lives will change more swiftly than ever. In the following pages we ask what...
...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 live to see old age and will encourage us to dream, in wild...
...Konopka discovered the first so-called clock gene, which ticks away inside virtually every living cell, helping tell our 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...