How long would you like to live? Three score years and ten, as the Bible suggests? Long enough to see your great-grandchildren graduate from college or get married? Longer? Forever? Or maybe you would settle for living as long as humanly possible—a span which might depend on how young you are now, and hence how likely you are to reap the benefits of longevity breakthroughs to come.
Before you answer, you also need to consider what you are willing to do for those extra years. Are you willing to religiously eat right—however nutritionists currently define “right”—or even semi-starve yourself? Exercise, either moderately or intensely, depending on the wisdom of the day? Are you prepared to take resveratrol or coenzyme Q10? Add the proper dose of green tea to your diet? Would you give up coffee? You name it, someone has probably suggested it over the years as a means of delaying death.
And since the newest research suggests that extreme longevity is determined largely by genes, you might also want to know, as I do, whose genes you’ve inherited (my father died at 93, my mother at 71) and which aspects of lifestyle, diet, and the environment influence those genes most. Researchers have been busier than ever lately decoding the genes of longevity, all in hopes of bottling the formula for those less well-endowed.
It’s not easy figuring out how to maximize your years on this planet.
Until the 1990s, questions of how we age, how long we’ll last, and what we can do about it were mostly the purview of quacks, philosophers, and the odd evolutionary biologist speculating on why different animals age at vastly different rates. Medical researchers were not all that interested. Aging, after all, is not a disease but a natural process, the accumulation of defects that our bodies simply do not have the wherewithal to repair. And medicine was traditionally taught, studied, and practiced in disciplines, divided up by organ, body part, and disease. As a result, neither researchers nor physicians nor the government agencies that fund medical research saw fit to study aging itself. In the early 1990s, when Nir Barzilai, now the director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, decided to study aging, he did so in part because the competition was so sparse. “Why compete with 100,000 people studying cancer,” he asks, “when maybe 10 people were doing aging research?”
