Living Forever: Is It Possible?

No one ever said it would be easy to live forever. We may need ultralow-calorie diets—think baked soybeans, sardines and protein powders—and we’ll certainly need to break a sweat at the gym. Throw in a generous helping of scientific advances, however, and beating the current world record of 122 1/2 years starts to look downright doable. You might even live to 150 or longer—perhaps much, much longer.

A growing number of maverick scientists, doctors, researchers, biogeneticists and nanotechnologists—many with impeccable academic credentials—insist that the war against aging can be won. All believe significantly longer life spans—and perhaps eventually true biological immortality—are not only possible but also scientifically achievable. What’s more, it could happen in time to aid those now living.

“The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today; indeed, he or she may be about to turn 60,” says Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge University geneticist who has become the de facto spokesman of the anti­aging crusade. “Whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.” Nutty? Some scientists do dismiss de Grey as a wildly optimistic crank. Plenty of others, though not necessarily accepting all his predictions, have joined in the search for a real fountain of youth. “I am working on immortality,” says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who’s already achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. “Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off the wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.”

The most tantalizing findings have been coming out of the genetics labs of big universities, where anti­aging researchers are tinkering with living organisms ranging from yeast to worms and mice. Some are trying to breed for longevity, and others are seeking to alter genes in existing organisms to extend life. Still others are studying how mice and flies, when put on a near-starvation diet, seem to switch on an anti­aging mechanism connected with a gene called SIR2.

Just in the past year, researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Davis, have detected four “cousins” of SIR2 that also seem to play a role in aging. David Sinclair, director of the aging-research lab at Harvard, has called the SIR2 group “as important as any longevity genes discovered so far.”

Molecular geneticists at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, stunned colleagues when they reported finding that deleting a gene known to prolong aging somehow ended up greatly extending life span. At the University of Washington, researchers have successfully lengthened the lives of laboratory mice by 20 percent by boosting natural antioxidants. The hope is that these findings and others could point the way to entirely new classes of drugs to lengthen lives or treat specific, age-related ailments like cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Note: The above is an excerpt; for the complete article, visit the Web site below.

—Dr. Bob Goldman
www.WorldHealth.net

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