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http://www.bodybyscience.net/home.html/?page_id=43As many readers of my articles are aware, my primary profession is Emergency Medicine. Over the past few days I have been recovering from an unusually brutal series of shifts. Work in the ER is always demanding. There is a continuous, unscheduled influx of patients, some of whom are critically ill, and some who have minor illnesses, and even some who use the ER’s unimpeded access to healthcare professionals as an opportunity to get attention, drugs, avoid jail, or manipulate others. But some days are harder than others. In particular, Fridays, Weekends, and Mondays are high volume and high acuity days. When you are scheduled to work a stretch of shifts that encompasses Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, you can plan on being pretty crispy when it is all done. Having completed such a stretch, you often find yourself asking…Why am I doing this? In the fog of fatigue, it is often difficult to remember the answer.
I was reading a passage from Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith that reminded me of the answer. The passage is as follows:
“Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass on the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything we love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”
There in that passage was the motivator that I had forgotten. I went into Emergency Medicine to stand in the way of death, particularly premature death, and knowing that I would ultimately fail, to be kind in the meantime. Buried deeper in this premise, however, is the deeper desire to prolong life. The art and science of Medicine statistically has been very good at achieving this goal. But the goal has been achieved on a statistical/epidemiological level. The average lifespan of an adult male at the turn of the 20th century was 47; by the turn of the 21st century average lifespan had climbed to 76 years. This increase was not achieved by prolonging the lifespan of the individual, but instead by preventing the premature deaths of large numbers of people. The biggest impact was a decrease in infant and perinatal mortality. If you have any historic graveyards in your area, I suggest you visit them (particularly if some nurse midwife has convinced you to have your next child in your living room). You will find that in many cases up to half the graves belong to infants and mothers who died together during childbirth. Most men even in the early 20th century would have had several wives before they completed their child bearing years due to the problem of perinatal mortality. Technological advances as diverse as sewers and cars with crumple zones and air bags have added years to our collective life expectancy by preventing premature death in our cohorts. But the real goal of mankind has always eluded us. The goal to reverse aging in the individual is what we really want, but have been unable to achieve.
The history of anti-aging is old as mankind. The Epic of Gilgamesh is probably the earliest known literary work of man. The basis of the epic is the search for immortality. Gilgamesh probably ruled during the 3rd millennium BC, and his story was preserved on Clay tablets by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (who ruled in the 7th century BC). The story revolves around King Gilgamesh and his best friend Enkidu who go on many dangerous adventures together. When Enkidu dies on one of these adventures, Gilgamesh’s feelings of loss drive him toward a quest for immortality. Ancient Chinese emperors sent ships of young men in a quest for a magic pearl that would reverse aging. Many Chinese believe that in the process of searching for this pearl, these men sewed the seeds of what would become Japan. In the 16th Century AD Spanish Explorer Juan Ponce de Leon led an expedition through the Caribbean islands and Florida in search for the Fountain of Youth. During the middle ages Alchemists sought the Philosopher’s Stone which was believed capable of turning lead into gold, as well as prolonging life, and restoring youth. During the 20th Century, as average lifespan increased, literary works also dealt with the potential complications of life-extension. One of the major themes in works such as The Mars Trilogy is the extreme boredom that comes with infinite lifespan, or the problem of becoming one’s own ancestor as seen in Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love.
During the late 20th century the scientific community took up the cause of Life Extension. Many theories have been advanced, and promising discoveries have been announced. The general public has kept close track of these developments, and entire subcultures have lined up behind the various theories of age reversal. To provide the proper context for this article, we will review some of these theories and how they pan out when tested scientifically. Information regarding these strategies was obtained from the Wikipedia website (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiaging).
