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June 27, 2006
I Have Good Genes
Whenever the subject of life-extending, age-reversing biomedicine comes up, someone always has to say, "Well, I'm not worried about aging because I have good genes."
To which I ask one question:
"Has anyone in your family ever died?"
If anyone at any point in your family has died or is currently dead, then I suggest that your genes are not so great. They may have lived a long time or danced the polka through their nineties, but they eventually grew old and died. The whole point of the research that Aubrey de Grey is doing and that MR is working with him on is to find therapies that actually reverse the aging process, making death, well, not absolutely unavoidable but a lot less likely to come as soon as it comes now.
CR won't get us there. Max, CR may buy us 10 or 15 years. We hope that CR is a bridge to the day when radical anti-aging biomedicine will be in its early stages. In the meantime, CR makes us feel great, invinicible in the face of germs, and look fab in a bikini. Well, more me with the bikini thing than MR, but the point remains. We can slow our aging with CR but we can neither reverse nor stop it. Let us hope that SENS and related initiatives bring about something better soon.
Let's face it: nobody's genes are that good.
Posted by april at June 27, 2006 8:16 PM
Comments
Hear hear!
I just hope I live long enough to see that radical life-extension future. I've lots of life to live yet..
Posted by: gregg m. at June 30, 2006 9:08 PM
I like this idea of "has anyone in your family ever died" because I think it sets the right standard to measure against. Genes *are* only going to take us so far. But I'm looking forward to the time when we talk to our kids about death by aging the same way we talk about the world before TV remotes, mobile phones and the Internet, or the way we view death in the 1800s and before, with a sort of vague, theoretical understanding that misses the true horror of the reality that it was.
Posted by: Andrew E at July 3, 2006 4:52 PM