The amazing Dr. Atul Gawande who has elevated popular medical writing to the level of fine literary enterprise, has a very interesting and worthwhile article in the New Yorker about aging, death and geriatric care. He asks many questions and presents the case for what constitutes compassionate and common sense medical care for the elderly.
From the biological / physiological angle, there is debate on whether our death is due to wear and tear or a genetically programmed event that would occur, no matter what our state of health. I am no expert but I suspect that some human events and abilities, like the child bearing age of women, diminishing of physical and mental faculties are for the most part, genetically dictated. It doesn't change much across the diverse population of the world and probably hasn't changed much over time. Even though human longevity is now way greater than it was even a fifty years ago, the trajectory of certain human events has not changed drastically. Death itself is probably more complex - programming, plus wear and tear. Gawande asks if enhanced human longevity is an unmixed blessing. It is surely a triumph of modern medicine but is it commensurate with the quality of life and the human spirit and longings?
(Do read the whole article if you have the time. It is multi-layered, informative and thought provoking for the young and the old alike.)
Why we age is the subject of vigorous debate. The classical view is that aging happens because of random wear and tear. A newer view holds that aging is more orderly and genetically driven. Proponents of this view point out that animals of similar species and exposure to wear and tear have markedly different life spans. The Canada goose has a longevity of 23.5 years; the emperor goose only 6.3 years. Perhaps animals are like plants, with lives that are, to a large extent, internally governed. Certain species of bamboo, for instance, form a dense stand that grows and flourishes for a hundred years, flowers all at once, and then dies.
The idea that living things shut down and not just wear down has received substantial support in the past decade. Researchers working with the now famous worm C. elegans (two of the last five Nobel Prizes in medicine went to scientists doing work on the little nematode) were able to produce worms that live more than twice as long and age more slowly by altering a single gene. Scientists have since come up with single-gene alterations that increase the life spans of Drosophila fruit flies, mice, and yeast.
These findings notwithstanding, scientists do not believe that our life spans are actually programmed into us. After all, for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence—all but the past couple of hundred years—the average life span of human beings has been thirty years or less. (Research suggests that subjects of the Roman Empire had an average life expectancy of twenty-eight years.) Today, the average life span in developed countries is almost eighty years. If human life spans depend on our genetics, then medicine has got the upper hand. We are, in a way, freaks living well beyond our appointed time. So when we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one. Inheritance has surprisingly little influence on longevity. .........
Thank you for your interesting comments!
I thought perhaps you may also find this related post and a subsequent discussion interesting to you:
Longevity Science: The Way We Age
http://longevity-science.blogspot.com/2007/04/way-we-age.html "> http://longevity-science.blogspot.com/2007/04/way-we-age.html
Posted by: Longevity Science | May 26, 2007 at 12:55 PM