The business of graying

I personally find aging to be an extremely interesting enterprise. I was quite amazed when my eyes started to fail to read printed words unless I wore reading glasses. And I cannot help it - I usually stare at a strand of white hair that I have just spotted in my own head, remembering the time when I used to marvel seeing white hairs invade my aging grandma’s crown. I know I am aging, just like everybody else. Some mourn it, some regret it but I find it deeply fascinating. I have seen a Progeria patient a couple of times in my life. Progeria patients are those whose physical lives are on a fast-forward. They grow old in terms of age-associated diseases without having to age as much, in years. They are living testaments that there is something deep within us that is fleshing out the story of our biological time on high-speed toward old age.

Science has always thought “aging” to be a fascinating problem so that they have not stopped trying to find out what makes us age. We humans have also been remarkably ungraceful and obstinate in accepting the realities of aging. We hide our age, we feel bad when people say we have aged, and in extreme cases, we just employ the skillful and artful touch of surgeons and the multibillion-dollar cosmetic industry.

In order for science to probe into our inner clocks, we have to look at animals that may provide clues to our own. Recently, two separate studies have looked at worms and mice to find out if aging is really written in our natural destinies. In a study done on worms, published in the journal Cell (July 24 issue), it confirmed a standing theory that there are molecular switches that set our genes to go on our journey forward to old age. They found that these molecular switches just grow in numbers as we age. This means that there seems to be inner triggers inside that are attuned to time’s arrow moving forward. But just when it seemed like there was really no way we can cheat biological time, I found another recent study.

This other study sacrificed rats so we humans could have clues on how to fool time. The study came out in the journal Nature Medicine recently and reported in BBC last Aug. 10 and it found that when they altered some genes that made the livers of the older mice recycle proteins more efficiently, they worked as well as the ones of younger mice. This is significant because proteins have to die to keep us alive — a 2004 Nobel Prize winner Aaron Ciechanover taught us that. Now this living and dying of proteins take a toll on our bodies and it is largely credited for the eventual breakdown of major organs, associated with aging. This experiment on rats just made the recycling of proteins more efficient. This experiment seemed to say that we may be able to tinker with the mechanism of the clock inside our genes.

It seems like even if the story of aging is pre-scribbled deep within us all, there may be a way to use up the ink of biological life to do more and waste less so we could in effect, have more time. That is, if we were worms and mice. Science tinkers with these creatures because we share genetic similarities with them but there are also differences which may change the findings altogether in humans. Until there is a conclusive study that applies to humans, you cannot ask your doctor to do this procedure for you.

I have written quite a number of columns on the various aspects of aging and up to now, I have not come across anything that could really be said to have stopped the aging process in humans. Science is still in consensus about this. I know, the supermarkets and beauty shelves are lined up with jars bearing this anti-aging claim but sell as much as they do, you are still as old as your cells say and as a human being, you only grow old when you have stopped questioning and learning new things.

I was a young woman when the Golden Girls became a hit. They showed me that while you age, it is good to be interested in it — in the whole process of graying, and even more, if you are still able to move into silver shine like one of my readers, Lola Nora, in her 80s, a Zen student. I thought those were the kinds of women whose stories are worth every gray and silver strand they wear, every sliver of time they spent living it. So age as you must but maybe try harder not to grow old too fast.

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