The cowardly continue their search for the Fountain of Youth:
Who would have thought it? The quest for eternal life, or at least prolonged youthfulness, has now migrated from the outer fringes of alternative medicine to the halls of Harvard Medical School.
At a conference on aging held here last week, the medical school’s dean, Jeffrey Flier, was to be seen greeting participants who ranged from members of the 120 club (they intend to live at least that long) to devotees of very low calorie diets…
…“In five or six or seven years,” said Christoph Westphal, Sirtris’s other co-founder, “there will be drugs that prolong longevity.”
But neither Dr. Sinclair nor Dr. Westphal was the most optimistic person at the conference. That status belonged to the English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who sports a beard so luxuriant that it is hard to see if he is wearing a tie. His goal is “negligible senescence.”
Some attendees were so convinced of the virtues of less food that they have begun severe diets of various kinds. Cynthia Kenyon, of the University of California, San Francisco, said she had gone on a low-carb diet in 2002 after finding that food with even 2 percent sugar reduced the lifespan of the laboratory roundworms she studies. “Basically I try to steer clear of desserts and starches, though I do eat chocolate,” she said.
Her willowy figure makes her look at least a decade younger than her age. But a practitioner of more severe caloric restriction who was at the conference looked gaunt and a little frail.
Eat right, exercise, die anyway. Go for it – get a 1,000 year life span, if you like…what are you going to do with it? Just live and live and live…but to what purpose? Even the smartest scientist, I think, won’t get you a billion years of life…and even if he did, you’d still die because the universe, as it is, is doomed. Believe in God or believe in pure materialism, this world is gonna die. Now, believers hold that a new world will replace it – the life of the world to come. And the cost of living for ages? Being very boring – have to watch what you eat with great care, exercise with great diligence, avoid all risks…in short, live by not living.
No, thanks; I’ll keep my three score year and ten; four score if I’m a strong man. That is plenty enough for me on this world. One of my regrets in this life is that I didn’t manage to get my dad that last scotch he wanted…and one of the last things he said to me was, “I’m ready to go home”. He drained the cup of this life to the last drop, and then was ready to let it go – as a believer, of course, I hold that he’s quite a lot better off than I am now…but even if he wasn’t a believer, what would be the point of clinging to life here on earth? No matter what you do, your life here will never be that perfection you want…why stay for ages in a place you can never be fully happy with? Believe or don’t believe – its still better to exit after a reasonable amount of time.
I see a future – supposing Our Lord doesn’t return for some centuries, yet – where normal people will live to be, say, 100 (given the more common advances in health care) while a select group of doubters will fretfully cling on to life at great cost and great pain, just because they can’t bear the thought of not being here tomorrow…that they might have to go away from here, and not matter any longer on this earth.
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