Rebelling Against Aging

The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By altering the genes of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans, one can slow their aging. The result is that the worms live much longer and they remain youthful and healthy longer. The current record for enhancing C. elegans longevity is an astonishing tenfold increase in lifespan.

Dr. David Gems

I am at that age where age ceases to remain graffitied in the fine print of consciousness and assumes the graphic clamor of 24 point boldfaced Verdana. Any articles I happen upon that treat the topic of biogerontology—the science of aging—exert an irresistible allure, even ones that deal with lowly nematodes like C. elegans. It’s not that I fear aging, or suffer debilitating anxiety about it; rather, it angers me. I don’t like it. I consider senescence a corporeal insult and betrayal. I remain as I always have been: enchanted by the abracadabra of life, of living in the kinesthetic world of unending experiences, of sights and sounds, of savors and tangs that touch us into being. And while those experiences can abrade, they can more often rub us the right way. The Hayflick limit, that built-in restriction on the number of times a normal cell divides before it stops, strikes me as abjectly cruel. Quite simply, I resent that my body, the body that embodies experience, gradually and inexorably dysfunctions and deteriorates all the way down to the cellular and molecular levels. I take umbrage at the body’s truculence, its maddening disregard for what I want, its crassly insistent bullying to keep me trussed up within it. I take offense at its methodical unkiltering, its havocing declension.

I am not alone in this. Most of us, I suspect, are Ponce de Leoned. Myths from every culture have featured anti-aging stories of immortality, and most every religion has offered, and continues to offer, a vision of and a process for achieving it. One of the oldest written literary works, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4,500 years ago, narrates on twelve cuneiform tablets a search for immortality. Poetic treatments of the afflictions of aging abound: William Butler Yeats does not fancy being “old and gray and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire,” nor does Mathew Arnold “It is to spend long days / And not once feel that we were ever young,” or Billy Collins “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have/ drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by/ heart.” William Wordsworth notes that nature “takes away/ Our playthings one by one.” Dylan Thomas counsels his father that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Donald Hall, with bitter irony, affirms “that it is fitting/and delicious to lose everything.” A lamenting Robert Frost observes that he “craved strong sweets, . . ./ when I was young;/ . . .Now no joy but lacks salt,/ That is not dashed with pain /And weariness and fault.”


The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By identifying genes that control aging rates, we can also learn about the underlying biology of aging. We can explore the aging-related processes that the genes influence. Many aging genes are associated with a nutrient-sensitive signalling network. Dampening the signals that this network transmits slows growth, increases resistance to stress and increases lifespan.

So, when a biogerontologist like David Gems offers scientific support suggesting that senescence is a treatable disease, I pay attention. I want my golden years to be aurific, to carbon-copy the “Late Ripeness” that Czeslaw Milosz experiences as he approaches 90: "I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning." I want to stand on the prow of the ship, arms open wide, and, even if I cannot proclaim myself “king of the world,” embrace the horizon.

Of course, I know full well that the jagged jostle of an iceberg will, eventually, breech the hull. I want that “eventually” to be more eventually than the current term limit, which the Bible sets at three score plus seven and attributes to a bit of Divine jealousy tempered with irony. After noting that Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God shows them the Garden door, convinced that humans will poach “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” Still, Adam lived to be 930; his son Seth, 912; Seth’s son Enos, 905; and the record-setting Mathusale, 969. I do not wish to live that long. Just longer, a good bit longer, than three score and seven, and in good health, for the story of the unfortunate Trojan royal, Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, depicts a ghastly denouement. Unaccountably, especially for a goddess, Eos neglects to include eternal youth as part of a packaged deal when she asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. The dark and chilling result of that bit of absentmindedness surpasses even H. P. Lovecraft’s most morbid nightmare: "but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.”

No, I do not want arrested aging. I want decelerated aging. I want aging that exits the autobahn and hits a school zone. So it is that I read with avid interest about

Resveratrol: a substance found in the skin of red grapes, it has received much press for its anti-aging effects, which are controversial in animal studies and lack scientific validation in human studies. I’m inclined to think the high speed pursuit of resveratrol as an anti-aging elixir is being conducted in a clown car. Red wine sales, however, are booming.

Telomerase: an enzyme that reconstructs telomeres, a sheath at the end of DNA thought to be involved in cellular aging. Each time a cell divides, the telomere shortens, eventually disappears, and the cell, unable to divide, dies. If telomerase had a “like” button, it would be getting repeated clicks.

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): research into regenerative medical procedures to repair the damage caused by age-related diseases in the human body. Kind of like a periodic checking-under-the-hood body tune-up.

Cryonics: low-temperature preservation, irreversible at present but assumed to be possible in the future when medical advances will have discovered cures for currently incurable diseases. Ted Williams is cryonically preserved. In the movie “Forever Young” (1992), Mel Gibson was successfully revived. Perhaps, given his recent escapades, he needs a recooling.

Nanorobotics: the use of tiny medical robots injected into the bloodstream for search and destroy missions targeting life-threatening organisms. A health enforcement squad, discreetly undercover, rooting out the impediments to indefinite youthfulness.

And having broached the topic of medical machinery, special mention must be made of a version of transhumanism, which predicts that, due to exponential growth in computing power, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence around 2045, at which point it will be possible to transfer human consciousness into these HAL-ed up computers and live, forever and a day, in a virtual environment. Could there be a more viscerally appalling instance of Thoreau’s concern that we are becoming the tools of our tools? Beyond the moral and ethical issues such an upload would raise lies what looks to me to be a profound category mistake: transhumanists, in thrall to the quantitative, technical wonders of computer processing, do not appear to fully understand that the very thing we cherish in ourselves and others is the qualitative, the personal idiosyncracies and particularities, the singular and irreducibly unique individualizations that lattice our identities, the feelings and faults and needs and gratifications and graces and ingenuities and plunging sadnesses and seizing joys and exuberant ricochets of creative thinking that define us. The transhumanist idolatry of the machine is, for me anyway, haywired: it pulps, pauperizes, and degrades.

One aim of aging research is to develop drugs that can reproduce the effects of dietary restriction and also of genetic alterations that slow aging. One approach could be to use drug therapy to target the nutrient-sensitive pathways that regulate aging and that seem to mediate the effects of dietary restriction on aging. The ultimate goal would be a pill that one could take regularly from midlife onward.

Though scientific data has yet to confirm its ability to extend human life, calorie restriction (CR) has proven successful in rodent and nonhuman primate studies, in some instances extending life span by 40 %. Certainly, the 2000 members of the Calorie Restriction Society, who reduce their caloric intake anywhere from 25% to 40% of bodily requirements, believe in its promise. And because a CR diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, it does have some healthful secondary benefits. CR does exact a price, however; its adherents lose their libido, are perpetually cold, and they look, well, cadaverous. It impresses me as an overly punitive way to live, exhausting in its continual self-policing vigilance and colossal denial of hunger, self-punishing in its implacable refusal of the unsayable but richly delightful yesness of anything sweet or buttery or rich, anything taste-bud dizzying, dazzling, dallying. If John Calvin, that steeping tea of admonishment, were a foodie, a CR diet would be the grim and gloomy result. Why, I wonder, purposefully, willfully, carry a dietary November in our hearts? How is it that a superimposed layer of calculability wholly displaces those moments of appetitive spontaneity and impulse that round out the fully-inhabited integrity of our selves, that give our lives a melody as well as a song, an accent as well as a language? How is it that we are willing to trade in our culinary party clothes for sackcloth and ashes?

So, yes, a pill to do the distasteful, untasteful, business of CR seems to me the best of all possible worlds. And in the meantime that stretches between now and that panglossian future, those beset by longevity concerns might do well to follow the common sense (CS) plan: eat genuine, and genuinely healthy food; get some regular exercise, no matter what as long as it gets and keeps you moving; set goals, ambitious ones, be conscientious in working toward them, and, when they are achieved, make them the means of further goals; love well, and immerse yourself in a variety of communities. The CS plan is not new, is decidedly unsexy, scientifically speaking, but it does declaw the galling scratch of age. It’s a sensible plan to adopt, until the nanobots are ready to roll.

Snow Drifts and Mind Drifts

I have left my Christmas lights up, especially the ones strung through the bushes that line my 90-foot driveway. I say I am celebrating winter, but I am really resisting winter, for the streetlight’s beams do not illuminate the upper-part of the driveway, the part I see from the three dining room windows when, in the morning, I descend the stairs and turn toward the kitchen to make the first of several pots of coffee. The darkness of that view, the deep, implacable blackness of it, has always torpedoed my spirit. And so, this year, I have left up the Christmas lights, an aorta of multicolored luminescence entering and infusing the frozen-chambered heart of an Iowan midwinter night.

I headed into that night at 6:00 am this past Wednesday morning, bundled and layered, snow shovel in hand. Those celebratory-resistant lights revealed that the aerodynamics of blizzard winds constrained by the right-angled geometry of the house and garage had sculpted several drifted waves of snow that would need to be removed had I any hope of meeting my 8:00 am freshman composition class.

Now, I do own a snowblower, a hulking, gas-powered, eight-geared Craftsman 24-inch Snow Thrower, a gift from my wife Kathy--an act of mercy, really, prompted by her concern about the toll last winter’s frequent and punishingly abundant snowfalls were taking on my aging body. But fingers that fumble buttoning shirt cuffs should not be fiddling with complicated machinery at 6:00 am in the dim light cast by a garage’s overhead bulb, and, in any event, I would not risk waking up my neighbors, human and otherwise. Besides, there is that Puritan residue in me, that somber, sober, styptic voice that says exertion is good, is physically strengthening, bracing, edifying—a bit of saving grace to redeem the body from the sedentary drift of contemporary life. Still, the thigh-high size of those drifts would, perhaps, have caused even the most ardent Calvinist’s faith to falter. I remembered that the lowest circle of Dante’s hell did not burn. It was frozen. No fire. Ice. Well, nothing to do but settle into the labor and attack the drifts in layers, scoopful after patient scoopful, thankful, but only in a small way, for the shovel’s ergonomic handle.

Shoveling snow is a mindless task, and the mind minds being mindless; it craves stimulation, so, as I shoveled my mind wandered into wondering. I wondered about the impossibly perky young woman I had seen the previous week on a morning show showcasing the latest devices, manual and powered, for lightening the snow shoveling burden, her warning about heart attacks, and her claim that after just two minutes of shoveling heavy snow the heart hammers at such a petal-to-the-metal pace that it is liable, at any moment, to be pulled over and placed under cardiac arrest. I wondered if Emerson, who delighted in “the frolic architecture of snow,” had shoveled any.

I wondered about a Sherman Alexie story in which a group of boys, wanting to play midwinter outdoor basketball, soak the snow covering the court with kerosene and set it ablaze. I had no kerosene, but I did have a nearly full two-and-a-half-gallon gas can; however, I remember the house next door had burned down 4 years ago, and I remember the tear-streaked face of the owner, each tear lit by the light of the fire consuming his home, the first that he had purchased, and I decided that, while it may have a certain flair in a work of fiction, in the real world the inferno option was best put aside.

I wondered about the grunt, primal and somehow viscerally satisfying, that accompanied each lifted shovelful of snow and its being flung off to the side. And that caused me to wonder if the discredited “heave-ho” theory of language origin might, in fact, have merit, that language emerged from the sounds involuntarily emitted by the push and shoveness, the lift and toteness, of strenuous physical labor—a language of the body transposed to the brain, localized and made neural in the Broca and Wernicke areas.

And as I tackled the much more compacted drift thrown up on the driveway’s apron by a city snow plow passing during the night, I wondered why, with just two or three shovelsful left, the snow plow came by again, reconstituting what I had so arduously removed. The driver did slow his speed slightly, proving, I suppose, that he had a heart, a soul, but the upsprayed snow toppled the trash receptacle, spilling its contents, and I wondered how so often we seem to be holding a chance card unaware that we have rolled the dice. How often we are forced to improvise. I wondered if that was a good thing. I thought it was.
I wondered what would happen if Jesus should suddenly appear. Would he tell me that if I had a muscular faith I could command the snow to rise and remove itself, much as he tells his disciples, “if you shall say to the mountain `Arise, and hurl thyself into the sea’ it shall be done?” Would he grab the spare shovel and help, serene and self-contained, whistling a show tune perhaps? Would he comment on the Vatican’s decision to provide the Discovery Channel access to its exorcism files, or the blessing the Pope conferred on Facebook? Would he watch for a while, smile, then walk off, atop the snow, into the early morning darkness? Would I, one of the fallen away, fall back?

And I wondered, seriously, sadly, if, as the years pass, our lives announce our increasing humiliation—the debilities of age and the subsequent cultural neglect, the mad rush of befuddling technological gadgetry, the condescension of youth. Do our lives wither down to the concentrated space of a shovel’s scoop? Do we measure them with droppers, with tumblers and teaballs? Do we write them in six-point agate typeface? Speak them in a grammar of diminishment?

But no, I would have none of that. I was out for doing and being, not having done and having been. I had a job to do, and I did it; despite hands and feet that throbbed with cold, despite arms and back that muttered an achy monologue, I did it. Some hot coffee and oatmeal, and I was off to my class, where the students, hoping for canceled classes, were less than exuberant at my arrival. I felt good, though, felt vital, felt, somehow, victorious.