Possibly, but not yet. Ageing — and particularly ways of stopping the process — is one of those issues that many scientists would rather not talk about because it raises disturbing moral and ethical questions. For a start, on a practical level, we do not know what ageing really is. We take it for granted that our bodies wear out as we grow older, yet this is not really the case. For the first 20 years of our lives, our bodies grow stronger, more efficient, more resistant to disease. It is only later that things start going wrong. Why? According to the evolutionary theory of ageing, our bodies start to fail us because in the ‘wild’ we would expect to die anyway, at the age of 30-50, from cold, starvation, an attack by sabretoothed tigers and so on. There was no point in our having evolved to cope with the diseases of old age, if we were never going to live that long anyway. But that doesn’t really tell us what is going on when we age, what drives the genetic ‘clock’ that makes skin dry, our hair go grey and our bones brittle. Only when we understand what truly drives these processes will we stand a chance of combating them. And then, of course, we will be faced with a huge moral problem: do we really want to live in a world where some people will never grow old? Or in a world where (inevitably) only a lucky elite will be able to afford the treatments to allow this to happen?
(Ref: Mumbai Mirror)
No comments:
Post a Comment