Thoughts on Medical Progress and Living Longer

This article expresses sentiments regarding medical technology and human longevity that we'd all like to see more of in the mainstream media. At some point, it will come to be seen by the average person as basically sensible to work towards minimizing the tide of suffering and death caused aging and age-related disease. It has been, in hindsight, a strange thing to live in a world in which most people were reflexively opposed to that goal. Death and aging constitute a mystery. Some of us die more quickly. We often ask about it as children, deny it in youth, and reluctantly come to accept it as adults. Aging is universal across all species. In the bare-fact of our aging and dying, we resemble all other animals; in the details, however, we've improved considerably over the course of our history. At some point, our bodies decide to grow senescent and then to die. It's intrinsic, initiated from within the organism. The repeated shuffling of sirtuins and other epigenetic factors away from genes to sites of broken DNA, then back again (while helpful in the short term) is ultimately what causes us to age. Over time the wrong genes come on at the wrong time and in the wrong place. When you disrupt the epigenome by dealing with DNA breaks, it results in an erosion of the epigenetic landscape of misguided and malfunctioning cells. A malady that impacts less than half the population is a 'disease'. Aging impacts everyone and therefore is an inevitable, irreversible decl...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs