“’Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said, “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can:
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”
The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong.
Though each was partly in the right,
They all were in the wrong!
—John Godfrey Saxe
What can a bunch of blind men tell us about aging? In this
chapter, some blind men show us that we can disagree about
what we mean by aging if we refer to different aspects of aging. This is because aging comes about, not as a single process, but as a number of different processes. This is a great discovery of modern aging research, because it gives us the opportunity of conquering aging a bit at a time, rather than requiring that we understand everything at once.
People tend to think of aging as one degenerative process which develops over time. This is not at all the case. In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, all the blind men were right, yet none of their individual answers was a complete description of an elephant. There are at least seven
mechanisms of aging known today which have been chemically characterized to some extent. Partially successful methods of slowing all of them have-already been developed. None of these aging mechanisms entirely explains aging. Even all of them put together cannot yet entirely explain aging.
Aging is a multidimensional process in which different repair and destruction mechanisms in the body are turned on and off at different times and different rates in a single individual. These changes may vary widely between individuals.
Although there are wide differences between people in aging rates, the maximum human life span (in the absence of effective intervention) seems to be around 110 or perhaps 120 years—no claims much beyond this have been proved.
Most biologists studying aging believe that there are internal clocks which turn on certain types of aging in animals, including humans. Examples of such clocks are male pattern baldness and female menopause. Scientists have begun to find ways of successfully intervening in some of these aging clocks. By resetting the proper clocks in the correct order, we can now prevent some of this programmed aging. To quote Bernard Strehler, an eminent gerontologist, “Aging and death do seem to be what Nature has
planned for us. But what if we have other plans?”
Other plans are what this site is all about.
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