On this glorious spring day in Cambridge, England, the heraldic flags are flying from the stone towers, and I feel like I could be in the 17th century—or, as I pop into the Eagle Pub to meet University of Cambridge longevity theorist Aubrey de Grey, the 1950s.
It was in this pub, after all, that James Watson and Francis Crick met regularly for lunch while they were divining the structure of DNA and where, in February 1953, Crick made his breathless announcement that they had succeeded.
Aubrey de Grey has no victory pronouncements to make as of yet, but he is vigorously pursuing an even more challenging project. Using the legacy that Watson and Crick bequeathed us, he proposes to tinker with the essential biochemical pathways that drive the aging process.
De Grey contends that we know enough to intelligently map out a program of anti-aging intervention research such that sometime in the next 100 years, and quite possibly much sooner, the average human life span may be 5,000 years, a figure brought short of outright immortality by the small number of people who will die from non-age-related diseases and everybody else who, given the boggling amount of time available to them on the planet, will eventually do something unlucky or stupid like walk in front of a moving rocket car. '
In de Grey time, the 400-year span between Shakespeare’s England and today would be but the blink of an eye.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicine/article/0,20967,929447-1,00.html
I see some problems with the idea of a person living to be 5000 years old. First, sheer boredom would drive me insane after about 70 years. I'm already bored most of the time. What a curse to live that long.
Second, if even 20 percent of humanity lived to be hundreds of years old, the world would soon be so crowded they would be pushed off a cliff just to make room.
It was in this pub, after all, that James Watson and Francis Crick met regularly for lunch while they were divining the structure of DNA and where, in February 1953, Crick made his breathless announcement that they had succeeded.
Aubrey de Grey has no victory pronouncements to make as of yet, but he is vigorously pursuing an even more challenging project. Using the legacy that Watson and Crick bequeathed us, he proposes to tinker with the essential biochemical pathways that drive the aging process.
De Grey contends that we know enough to intelligently map out a program of anti-aging intervention research such that sometime in the next 100 years, and quite possibly much sooner, the average human life span may be 5,000 years, a figure brought short of outright immortality by the small number of people who will die from non-age-related diseases and everybody else who, given the boggling amount of time available to them on the planet, will eventually do something unlucky or stupid like walk in front of a moving rocket car. '
In de Grey time, the 400-year span between Shakespeare’s England and today would be but the blink of an eye.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicine/article/0,20967,929447-1,00.html
I see some problems with the idea of a person living to be 5000 years old. First, sheer boredom would drive me insane after about 70 years. I'm already bored most of the time. What a curse to live that long.
Second, if even 20 percent of humanity lived to be hundreds of years old, the world would soon be so crowded they would be pushed off a cliff just to make room.
I would never be bored, there are so many things to do/learn in this world! Imagine the things you would be able to see! the things you would be able to do!
