Domesticated animals live much longer than their counterparts in the wild. Cats, dogs, even birds live two to three times longer--as long as they stay close to man.
It's true for us, too. Our lifespan began to climb dramatically as we moved further away from the 'nasty, brutish and short' lifestyles of our ancestors. As recently as 2,000 years ago, the average lifespan was about 21.
Now that the average lifespan in the developed world is pushing 80, what more can we expect? Life expectancy rose from 48 to 78 in between 1900 and 2000 in this country--is it reasonable to hope that it will reach 108 by 2100? Is it possible that that's an underestimate? Cats generally live to be 4 in the wild, but can reach 16 in captivity...
At Sage, Chris Mooney summarises recent research:
"All things being equal, these are pretty good days to be an elderly American. Not only has average life expectancy been rising steadily since 1950, but, over the past 2 decades, surveys have shown a steady decline in disability among older Americans, a trend that continues unabated. "We haven't seemed to reach a plateau yet," says Harvard University health economist David Cutler, who studies disability among the elderly. And the good news doesn't stop there: Scientists have discovered a number of ways to slow aging in creatures as different as yeast and mice. This ongoing research into aging and longevity has "immense potential to prevent late-life illnesses and prolong active life" in humans, wrote gerontologist Richard A. Miller of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, last November in the health care policy journal The Milbank Quarterly."
"...The discovery over the past decade of a large number of genetic changes that can prolong life in a variety of animals has spurred scientists to look deeper for explanations of what they're seeing. So far, however, there's a raft of ideas but no clear winner.
Consider just one example out of many. Martin Holzenberger of the French biomedical research agency INSERM is the lead author of a recent study showing that mice genetically engineered to respond poorly to the hormone insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which controls growth and cell division, live 26% longer on average than do normal lab mice (see "All Together Now"). In flies and worms, related genes have a similar effect, an evolutionary commonality that researchers find intriguing."
But you may have to fight for the chance to see your second century.
"...Whether one mechanism or many drive the aging process, most scientists in the field agree that the research has already shown its medical promise and deserves better federal funding--particularly because, as Miller points out, putting the brakes on aging would also reduce the incidence of a wide range of illnesses that plague the elderly. Because of the potential payback, "it's terribly important to invest more on fundamental research in the processes of aging," says George Martin, a pathologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who studies aging and Alzheimer's disease. "It will be very cost effective. You might not find a unitary mechanism for everything, but you might find some very important ones that you can deal with for a large segment of the population."
Despite the immense implications of new findings about the biology of aging for humans, Miller argues that basic research in this area remains drastically underfunded and neglected by policymakers. Miller notes in his piece in The Milbank Quarterly that research on aging "receives such a small proportion of government research funding that it cannot be seen in [the] pie chart." The overall budget of NIA is $1 billion a year, approximately 20% of which goes to basic research into the biology of aging, according to NIA's Warner. In comparison, the National Cancer Institute has a budget of roughly $4 billion a year. According to Warner, many promising research proposals in the biology of aging remain unfunded with the institute's current budget. But that's probably true of every part of the National Institutes of Health: "There's probably not a biomedical constituency that doesn't believe that it's underfunded," he points out.
Why does research into the biology of aging receive such a meager amount of funding? Miller has several ideas. First, he says, politicians tend to be most responsive to voter demands for research into specific diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's, a nearsightedness shared by pharmaceutical companies. Further complicating matters is the phenomenon of "gerontologiphobia," a fear of the social consequences of life span extension that has been on prominent display by some members of the President's Council on Bioethics and particularly its chair, Leon Kass."
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