|
|
|
Cover Feature
|
|
|
|
|
FUTURE PERFECT?
Life is beautiful
At 81, british zoologist and ethologist, dr. desmond morris thinks that life is worth clinging on to forever. despite the risks that run with the possibility of eternal life for the mortal human race, this author of the seminal bestseller on the human animal, "the naked ape," dicusses with swati hora how scientific inquiry to stop the process of ageing must go on and so would life for all of us...
|
| |
 80 going on 20
What the scientists mean by immortality is this – as we grow older, the cell replacement efficiency declines and this is a built-in obsolescence because evolution relies on the fact that there are new generations coming along so that all the time there is a flexibility in the species implying that with each new generation there are new combinations of genes and new possibilities of developing in different directions. So this lack of efficiency when we get old in terms of cell replacement, that’s what they can help with. So, your cell replacement at 80 will be as good as when you were 20, which means that at 80 you would have a body which is as efficient as when you were 20. It is not really immortality, it is contextual immortality because the person can still be knocked down by a truck, can still catch a disease and die of it, or be bitten by a snake. So, you are not immortal but you would be able to avoid the ageing process. And that would mean that you will be able to stay young physically and mentally as you grow older, and if you don’t have an accident or catch a disease, you should be able to go on living forever.
The result of this would be that far more people will live for longer, increasing the population even more than it is at the moment. When that happens, sooner or later we will run out of resources and we will become so crowded that we will suffer from epidemics of various kinds. May be wars will get more frequent because of the crowding but essentially, we will be vulnerable to epidemics. They will be able to sweep through our population more quickly because we will be so crowded. And that will be the hazard we face in a few 100 years. The question is whether they can develop medication to protect us. And in future, that should be possible. So it is possible that we will be able to develop modern medicines
to a point where the epidemics would not spread and where we could go on living for a very long time and then, the problem we will face would be of overcrowding and depleting natural resources.
|
| |
200-year-old grandparents or 200-year-old parents-to-be?
In the present times, grandparents play the role of helping their offspring and they will be more energetic and efficient at that. They wouldn’t be that tired and that old. Physically they would be younger, so they will be able to help more efficiently with the family and it should improve family life.
The interesting question arises when one lives to be 300-years-old without the body ageing – will women suffer from menopause at 55 or can they go on bleeding (sic!)? We don’t know the answer to that one. At the moment, there is a mechanism which stops women from bleeding when they are 55 and males produce less sperms when they are older and can’t become fathers. Now, whether those factors will change – I don’t know. It is possible if you make genetic changes that can actually extend the bleeding period, so that you can have children when you are 200-years-old. But I don’t know. That hasn’t been discussed as far as I know. All they are looking at is the way of stopping the increased inefficiency of cell replacement in very old people so that your body stays younger. Whether it stays younger reproductively – I don’t know.
Having old people who are more healthy and active can only help the family. Also, the older generations would have a stronger influence on the younger ones and the older values would be passed on more efficiently to the younger generations. But it does rather beg the question, whether these people are going to get to breed when they are 200...
|
|
| |
Comments
|
|
| |
Leave your first comment
| |
|
| |
|
|
