Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

I will also tell you why I have come to see aging as a disease—the most common disease—one that not only can but should be aggressively treated. That’s part I.

Science has since demonstrated that the positive health effects attainable from an antioxidant-rich diet are more likely caused by stimulating the body’s natural defenses against aging, including boosting the production of the body’s enzymes that eliminate free radicals, not as a result of the antioxidant activity itself.

What’s the upward limit? I don’t think there is one. Many of my colleagues agree.14 There is no biological law that says we must age.15 Those who say there is don’t know what they’re talking about. We’re probably still a long way off from a world in which death is a rarity, but we’re not far from pushing it ever farther into the future.

It’s a misconception that cloned animals age prematurely. It has been widely perpetuated in the media and even the National Institutes of Health website says so.19 Yes, it’s true that Dolly, the first cloned sheep, created by Keith Campbell and Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, lived only half a normal lifespan and ... See more

if we are to make real progress in the effort to alleviate the suffering that comes with aging, what is needed is a unified explanation for why we age, not just at the evolutionary level but at the fundamental level.

She died at the age of 92. And, in the way we’ve been taught to think about these things, she’d had a good, long life. But the more I have thought about it, the more I have come to believe that the person she truly was had been dead many years at that point.

Arlan Richardson and Holly Van Remmen spent about a decade at the University of Texas at San Antonio testing if increasing free-radical damage or mutations in mice led to aging; it didn’t.16 In my lab and others, it has proven surprisingly simple to restore the function of mitochondria in old mice, indicating that a large part of aging is not due t... See more

Like Adam and Eve, we don’t know if M. superstes ever existed. But my research over the past twenty-five years suggests that every living thing we see around us today is a product of this great survivor, or at least a primitive organism very much like it. The fossil record in our genes goes a long way to proving that every living thing that shares ... See more

Often, we realize it too late. When it comes knocking, and we are not prepared, it can be devastating.