Eternity for dummies

Ever wondered why those time travel sci-fi series would have people coming in and out of different times only as young men and women? You hardly have anyone in their 60s, 70s, or 80s zooming in and out of time machines making the journey. We dream of experiencing everything in youthful vigor, when the body is supple and the daring at its peak. People, mostly women, especially when they notice that their bodies are starting to follow the biological life lanes that all head south, try all sorts of ways, surgical even, to turn the traffic back up north. They troop to enclaves that promise youth in a package, scraping here and there, stretching this and that, to defy gravity and the pull of the years. This was exemplified in a good movie years back, Death Becomes Her, when two women take the elixir of life and stay alive forever even as their bodies deteriorated. This was quite ironic since the character who gave those women the elixir of life in the movie was Isabella Rosellini, whom later, in real life was retired from being the model for some designer cosmetics because she had become too old. It is not my business to judge the intentions of whoever chooses to put time, money and trust in these anti-aging enclaves but it is important for everyone to know that no matter the hype of any clinic, drug or procedure, if they promise that they will defy age and make you young for a longer amount of time, then you should think again because science has not figured out a formula to stop or even slow the aging process. You may get rid of your wrinkles, your love handles, stretch marks, or age spots but your cells do not care. They will age anyway at the same rate, regardless of how you look, and unless you are a fruit fly, yeast, a worm, a mouse or a rhesus monkey, which scientists have tried experiments on and found that by twitching this or that gene or starve them a third as much seem to hold promise as far as slowing the aging process is concerned, nothing, I repeat, nothing yet has been found to work on humans. This is the consensus of foremost scientists worldwide, who spent all their lives studying the aging process, who recently came up with a position paper categorically stating that we should not be duped into anything in the market that promises youthful eternity (The Scientific American. The Science of Aging. Special Edition, 2004).

Why is it that we can probe Saturn and Mars, land humans on the moon, but we can’t seem to get a handle on this curse of our own innerspace, of not being able to live for as long as we want, in the age we want? It’s because unlike the diseases we associate with aging like arthritis, Alzheimer’s, heart attacks, etc., aging itself is not a disease. It is the most basic of life’s processes. Aging, in biological terms, is the molecular weakening of your cells overtime. It simply means wear and tear. It is not a disease because the same set of cellular processes that keeps you alive and powers your biological life is the same one that over time, causes it to weaken, rendering it vulnerable to diseases like those I mentioned above. When you breathe, taking in oxygen, this mixes with the carbohydrates and fats in your cells that convert these to energy you need to live. This is not a "pure" process as this also creates byproducts called free-radicals that over time, accumulate and attack the very processes that created them in the first place, causing your cells to weaken. This is the nature of things inside you. The result – an older you.

Also, you cannot recalibrate the rate at which your cells will divide. It seems that there is a limit on how many times our cells will do so, renewing themselves, renewing us, until they will split no more and weaken. In the lab, this is known to be around 50 times and this has come to be called the Hayflick limit, named after scientist Dr. Leonard Hayflick who determined it. Furthermore, as our cells divide over our lifetimes, the ends of chromosomes called telomeres, like spindly legs, shorten and it has been observed by Dr. Titia de Lange of the Rockefeller University, that when these become too short, cells seem to have a difficult time, maintaining their usual life-sustaining processes.

These are the things science has tried so far. Antioxidants like vitamins C and E that line up long shelves in health stores are things that our cells themselves have and release to combat the free radicals. Most cases, you get them in your regular diet and the body can absorb only as much and just dispose of the rest. Scientists have identified the superhero of antioxidants and called it superoxide dismutase (SOD) and have tried to turn the notch up of SOD higher in fruit flies and it seemed to really combat the wear-and-tear process caused by oxidation but they have not found a safe way to try these manipulations on humans. Not only does that dampen human hopes of staying forever young but also renders very real the possibility of eternally youthful flies, annoyingly hovering and gloating at human efforts to achieve the same. Some experiments tried to limit the oxidation process in rats, which seemed to slow their aging, but they were "asleep" all that time. So if at all applicable to humans, which it is not (not yet anyway), this process will just let you have an extra couple of years in your youth but you will be asleep during those bonus years. So what then of being in your 20s a couple of more years if you will be asleep anyway? The latest scientific promise is caloric restriction which means about a 30 percent reduction in your daily calorie requirements over a good span of your life affecting insulin and glucose levels in your cells. In monkeys, this seem to have postponed aging but scientists realize that this is almost impossible to achieve in humans due to our embedded desire and culturally conditioned appetites to feed ourselves to death, so to speak. So the quest for the pill that will mimic instead the benefits of caloric restriction has started. The problem they encountered is that at the amount that the active compound in the pill called 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2DG) will matter, it becomes toxic for humans, so at this point, it becomes self-defeating because in the quest to defy aging, you poison yourself to death.

When I was a teenager and surrounded by people in their 40s, they all told me to wait till I reach their age and I would want my youth back. I am now pushing 40 and have learned to be aware and to respect the music of my biology ticking "like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face…" It is futile to turn it back and I really don’t want it back. So until breaking news launches the elixir of life, we just exercise, drink lots of water, laugh more and learn, oh learn lots, to make new connections in our brains, not to defy the aging process but to seize life, a delicious quality of it, whole in all its seasons, for as long as it takes. It makes sense for now to take the path of least resistance and not defy the years but ride them like the wind. So that eventually when all wrinkled, hair in a bun, sitting on a porch, dressed in white, donning a summer hat and reading a good book, and cells say "time’s up," one could say: "Sure, gladly and gratefully. T’was a good ride."

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