In September of last year, I had the opportunity to attend a health journalism conference. Over dinner one night, our speaker was S. Jay Olshansky, who aroused everyone’s interest by passing around a vial of pills. The pills were offered to anyone who wanted one, and the company who made them claimed that with this pill, you could live forever. It turns out the pills were Tic-Tacs. You gotta be flashy when you’re a dinner speaker, I guess.
Olshansky went on to detail the ways that humans have tried to find immortality and prevent aging over history. He detailed a few of the key theories out there now about postponing aging, so that we live longer, but with fewer of the infirmities and frailties of old age. Then he proposed that a pill that could just that might be available on the market within our lifetimes. It was terribly exciting stuff.
Which was why I had high hopes for a book that S. Jay Olshansky co-authored with Bruce A. Carnes, entitled “The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging.” I’ve been writing about some aging-related issues at work lately, and I have an upcoming article about whether we could end aging, the central theme of Olshansky’s speech. I’ve been looking forward to reading this book, churning out a magnum opus of an article, and then sitting back and waiting for this immortality pill to appear.
Well, this book had very little of that optimism and fun that I remember from Olshansky’s speech; perhaps the wine and chocolate cake served with dinner had me too giddy for my own good. Instead, this book is kind of a Debbie Downer sort of book, that basically tells us that we’re lucky we live so long in the first place, because none of our ancestors did. And the only reason we live longer is because we figured out the issues of sanitation and malnutrition and immunization that were affecting newborn babies – by fixing the conditions for babies, the average lifespan for everyone went up. But once it did, and more people aged, then we realized that aging sucks because it includes things like dementia and convalescence and cancer. Whoopee.
Olshansky and Carnes review the work of scientists who view aging as yet another disease, something we can conquer, and they don’t turn up much in the way of a solution. The only thing we could conceivably do, based on my reading of the book, is freeze our eggs and sperm, sit around and see who lives the longest and healthiest, and then only use their eggs and sperm to continue the species. Not too appealing. Once we hit puberty, we are ticking time bombs. We need to reproduce, and once those years are over, then nature doesn’t care if we live or die.
So, to review, this is what I got from this book:
1. Why are you complaining about aging, you punk? The people alive today are the only people who have ever gotten to. WHY CAN’T YOU BE HAPPY ABOUT THAT?
2. Have a baby! It’s what you’re here for. Then go ahead and die, because you’ve served your evolutionary purpose and your baby needs the resources.
3. Okay, if you are looking into ways to live longer, better not believe anything anyone tells you because no one but S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes can read scientific data correctly, so what everyone else tells you is just a LIE to get your money.
4. Also, even if you imagine a cutting-edge world where doctors can fix things in your body that go wrong, then they will probably inadvertently make tweaks that screw up something else.
Hooray! So that’s what I have to write about in the coming week in a simplified nutshell. I guess I’m ultimately not too concerned about it. We’ll probably all evolve into robots that won’t have to worry about disease sometime soon anyways.
And if anyone wants to know, I read 230 pages to find out that regular exercise is the only thing that can truly be proven to be good for you, and that I personally, as a 27-year old, have 19,577 days of life left.
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2 comments:
Thanks for the comment on the talk and the book -- you were right on target in some areas, but missed a few points because of timing of the publication of the book (2001) and when I gave the talk (2008). Your comments on our book are absolutely right, and our conclusions about the history of anti-aging quackery and its rise today have not changed. There are more worthless anti-aging potions today than 8 years ago, and it is true that none have been proven to work, so the only control we now have over our duration of life is to shorten it. I'm sorry that the truth about human aging is a bit sobering, but if you want the hype that we're on the verge of living forever to make you feel better, I can give you references to a few dozen books where these claims are made (and many of the authors are already dead by the way). Although reading these books might lighten your mood, they would be giving you a false sense of control. Although the truth about human aging today is sobering at one level, ongoing research in the field is extraordinarily exciting at another level, which is why you and I shared a time of excitement at that meeting. A number of advances have occurred since our 2001 book was published, leading me and many fellow scientists to believe that a breakthrough is forthcoming. We discuss these developments in recent articles in The Scientist and the British Medical Journal -- two articles you probably should read to understand why I passed around those hypothetical anti-aging pills at the dinner that night. Your comment that we're the only authors to trust to read the literature correctly is not true -- the vast majority of scientists in the field agree with us -- as indicated by a position statement on human aging we published several years ago in Scientific American that was signed by many of the world's top researchers in the field.
The bottom line is this -- your emotions were right on target because at one level you came to realize that our existing biology is limited -- this is the sobering reality you came to by reading our book. Your excitement about prospects for the future accurately reflected my own, which an accurate reflection of the excitement in the field of aging today. There is no reason to reject the sobering reality of aging today just because the interventions that slow aging aren't here yet. The tic tac you sampled will hopefully soon be replaced by the real thing.
Best,
S. Jay Olshansky
My oh my. Never in a million years did I think S. Jay Olshansky would actually see this blog. I guess I would just like to say that parts of this entry were sarcastic, and not things I actually believe, such as the comments about you and Bruce Carnes being the only ones able to decipher this material. Also, I meant to note in this entry that seven years had indeed passed between the book and the speech but I forgot to, cause I was all hopped up on candy.
Rest assured that this personal blog does not reflect the serious approach I am taking with the anti-aging articles I am writing for work; in the professional sphere, I am using your book along with numerous scientific articles to present what will hopefully be a balanced look at the state of the anti-aging industry today.
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