Life Expectancy |
Friday Dec 07 2007
By Shae Hadden | Bio
I'm intrigued by the popularity of online life expectancy calculators. Like reading tea leaves, tarot cards or astrological charts, many people seem to be fascinated with the idea of predicting their future. This compulsion to 'know how much time we have' is closely tied with a desire to re-engineer our lives to reduce or eliminate aging altogether. As if each of us has an expiry date that we can scan so we can know when we'll be used up!
The concept of 'life expectancy' is based on statistical projections, which are based on past history. When you think about it, the whole idea is based on the premise that the past is an accurate predictor of the future. And yet we know this is not the case. Even within the last few decades, the key indicators for life expectancy keep shifting the stats. As we look back in time to evaluate how long we've been living, we know that what we see today will not be what we witness tomorrow. We are looking into the rearview mirror in an attempt to navigate the road ahead.
Admittedly, gene therapy, stem cell research and the biotech revolution may push average life expectancy numbers up in the next decade. Some scientists are even looking to cure aging itself. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Gray has proposed a controversial program called engineered negligible senescence that would have us focus on addressing what he considers to be the seven causes of aging:
- Cell loss or atrophy (develop therapies to replace lost cells)
- Functional mutations of genes in a cell (develop cure for cancers)
- Mutant mitochondria (move the DNA of mitochondria within a cell to avoid cellular degeneration)
- Cellular senescence (develop a vaccine or therapy to destroy senescent cells)
- Extracellular cross-links (develop drugs or enzymes to break links that are weak or brittle)
- Junk outside cells (develop ways to eliminate toxins and accumulations of useless things which cannot be removed by natural digestive/elimination processes)
- Junk inside cells (develop therapies that allow enzymes to eliminate useless things accumulated inside cells)
I'd suggest we not focus on how much time do we as individuals have left...but what will we do right now to ensure the unborn generations that could follow us will have a life.
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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