Thus, scientists have not so far found any viable method of extending life span at will. They realized that it is not as easy as liberating a gas in the laboratory. They can now liberate awesome atomic energy, they can send a man to the moon and bring him back, and they can make wonderful devices like computers but, alas! They are not able to extend the life span of human beings.
Even if they succeed in extending the life span either by telomere therapy or by some other method, which can be used on a mass scale, the consequences of that so called success will be far from favorable. A host of stupendous social and economic problems will follow and it will not be easy to solve them. If there is a made-easy method to longevity, the first and foremost problem we have to face will be long-living societies. Current social institutions are designed to cater to people of limited life not exceeding hundred years. If communities consisting of people with limitless desires begin living longer, the burden of human population on earth will be so severe that the ecological system of our small planet will not be able to carry. If it is said that the successful longevity medicines will be used only selectively on a limited scale, the question of choice arises. Who chooses the candidates for receiving longevity therapy and on what criteria? It is an intractable problem.
This kind of problems are inevitable as long as longevity is treated as an objective problem i.e., expecting somebody to provide drugs and elixirs to give you as many years as you want. A better solution would be to make the concept of longevity a subjective affair. If there is a method, which succeeds or fails depending on one’s own choices and deservedness, many of the foregoing problems can be tackled. In the first place, it is for the individual to choose whether he (she) wants to live for overlong period. The burden of choice should be left on the individual, as he (she) alone knows how to trade off between longer life with its attendant problems and a normal life. Once life longer than usual is chosen, the method involved should require higher price in the shape of superior qualities of head and heart. One such longevity scheme is presented in this book. The four-fold scheme presented here emphasizes right food, right exercise, right state of mind, and right choices.
Right food implies the appropriateness of both quality and quantity of food ingested. Though scientifically designed experiments on the effects of caloric under nutrition on human beings are not yet completed, we can say it is a commendable method, as we know from studies in nutrition theory that we eat generally wrong quality of food and in quantities more than necessary and invite all sorts of ailments. This topic is dealt with elaborately in a chapter on nutrition. In modern medical practice, mind is considered a separate entity unrelated to the rest of the body. It has been well known for a long time that mind can act on the tiniest parts like the muscles of eyelids. Charles Darwin demonstrated how mental states produce physical gestures and postures in animals including human beings. Results of recent studies on mind-body relation have started to change that absurd position. Right state of mind is a necessary ingredient in the longevity recipe.
Exercise as an unavoidable routine in health maintenance is well established but it is widely misunderstood. Health promoting exercises are not the same as muscle building exercises. By discriminating between the two and following a regime of Right exercise along with Right food, health and longevity can be promoted.
Finally, we are the arbiters of our lives. If we make wrong choices, we lose. The choices we make every hour of the day affect us. If you choose to jaywalk on the road and you are hit by a speeding vehicle, no longevity elixir can save your life. You will have to face hundreds of such choices that will have impact on your longevity. Right from your routine household chores to choosing and pursuing a career, you have to exercise your common sense and act properly to protect your life. With every wrong choice, the probability of long life diminishes. They are all common sense choices in making which you trade off longevity with some other desired objective. The choice I make may not be good enough for you. You have to make your choices with longevity in view.
The final chapter discusses the limitations of using an inadequate scientific paradigm to achieve our goals. It provides insights into the idea of immortality and leaves the reader pondering whether science can take him there.
As repeatedly observed in this book, it is a strange irony of life that biochemical mechanisms themselves, required to sustain and operate the machinery of life, sow the seeds of its destruction. Biologists should recognize this phenomenon, before making tall claims of achieving immortality or adding hundreds of years to human life every time they get some impressive result in their experiments with a worm or a small creature.
What is the significance of this to gerontologists? It is bad news to them because the gains in life expectancy will be made at snail’s pace, no matter what the improvements are, in living conditions. Reputed demographers computed that life expectancy at birth will not exceed 85 years in the near future, unless some extraordinary inventions take place and drastically reduce the death rates of large groups of people. The question is whether they will ever take place. Those that contend that there are no limits to human life span base their assertions on the recently observed trend of deceleration of death rates and consequent increase in life expectancies in some advanced countries. They use this fact to extrapolate the trend into future using mathematical models and claim that there is no upper limit to human lifespan.
However, even lay people know that a mathematical trend depends on actual biological conditions and does not determine them. We can never say a trend is not reversible.
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