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The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging
The conquest of aging is now within our grasp. It hasn't arrived yet, writes Michael R. Rose, but a scientific juggernaut has started rolling and is picking up speed. A long tomorrow is coming.
In The Long Tomorrow , Rose offers us a delightfully written account of the modern science of aging, spiced with intriguing stories of his own career and leavened with the author's engaging sense of humor and rare ability to make contemporary research understandable to nonscientists. The book ranges from Rose's first experiments while a graduate student--counting a million fruit fly eggs, which took 3,000 hours over the course of a year--to some of his key scientific discoveries. We see how some of his earliest experiments helped demonstrate that "the force of natural selection" was key to understanding the aging process--a major breakthrough. Rose describes how he created the well-known Methuselah Flies, fruit flies that live far longer than average. Equally important, Rose surveys the entire field, offering colorful portraits of many leading scientists and shedding light on research findings from around the world. We learn that rodents given fifteen to forty percent fewer
calories live about that much longer, and that volunteers in Biosphere II, who lived on reduced caloric intake for two years, all had improved vital signs. Perhaps most interesting, we discover that aging hits a plateau and stops.
Popular accounts of Rose's work have appeared in The New Yorker, Time magazine, and Scientific American , but The Long Tomorrow is the first full account of this exciting new science written for the general reader.
"Among his peers, Rose is considered a brilliantly innovative scientist, who has almost single-handedly brought the evolutionary theory of aging from an abstract notion to one of the most exciting topics in science."--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
In The Long Tomorrow , Rose offers us a delightfully written account of the modern science of aging, spiced with intriguing stories of his own career and leavened with the author's engaging sense of humor and rare ability to make contemporary research understandable to nonscientists. The book ranges from Rose's first experiments while a graduate student--counting a million fruit fly eggs, which took 3,000 hours over the course of a year--to some of his key scientific discoveries. We see how some of his earliest experiments helped demonstrate that "the force of natural selection" was key to understanding the aging process--a major breakthrough. Rose describes how he created the well-known Methuselah Flies, fruit flies that live far longer than average. Equally important, Rose surveys the entire field, offering colorful portraits of many leading scientists and shedding light on research findings from around the world. We learn that rodents given fifteen to forty percent fewer
calories live about that much longer, and that volunteers in Biosphere II, who lived on reduced caloric intake for two years, all had improved vital signs. Perhaps most interesting, we discover that aging hits a plateau and stops.
Popular accounts of Rose's work have appeared in The New Yorker, Time magazine, and Scientific American , but The Long Tomorrow is the first full account of this exciting new science written for the general reader.
"Among his peers, Rose is considered a brilliantly innovative scientist, who has almost single-handedly brought the evolutionary theory of aging from an abstract notion to one of the most exciting topics in science."--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
- GenresScience
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
39 people want to read
About the author
Michael R. Rose
21 books9 followersMichael Rose is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Evolutionary Biology of Aging (OUP, 1991), and was awarded the Busse Research Prize by the World Congress of Gerontology in 1997.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 27, 2019
What we can learn about aging from fruit flies
This is mostly a memoir about Professor Rose's career as an evolutionary biologist who studies aging in fruit flies and extrapolates that knowledge to humans. The "Long Tomorrow" in the title refers to his belief that "it is still reasonable to hope that eventually the great mass of people will be able to control their aging through pharmaceuticals and medicine." (p. 134)
Rose sees senescence as being the inadvertent product of the evolutionary process. There is no single gene that controls aging. Instead hundreds of genes are involved so that the prospect of a single elixir or technique being developed that would magically postpone aging and death is highly unlikely. Almost as an aside and incidentally, Rose explains why we age and eventually die. His is the standard view that the evolutionary process becomes less and less in force as we get further and further from the onset of our reproductive age until "the force" (as he calls it) is not in effect at all.
This is a very tricky and subtle argument that takes a bit of reflection to fully understand. I know when I first encountered it some years ago I found it hard to follow. It is still very difficult to express. But let me give it a try.
Rose uses the analogy of Ford's Model T automobile. As the story goes Henry Ford wanted to know which parts of his cars almost never wore out. He found out what they were and directed his production staff to make them cheaper so that they would wear out at about the same time as the rest of the car, thereby making his cars cheaper to produce while increasing his profits without decreasing the longevity of his cars. Rose says that nature follows a similar parsimonious production with its organisms. For example, genes coded to allow a body part to last a thousand years would not be selected (or unselected for that matter). Indeed any gene or genes that code for processes lasting past reproductive age would exist in the genome only in a random fashion (if at all). Such genes would randomly appear and randomly die out.
What this means is that after the onset of reproduction everything begins to break down in a more or less random fashion. The environment acts upon us in a multitude of ways. Little insults pile up. Some cells go wildly reproductive and cancers develop. Other cells die due to something we ingested or because of accidents. Microorganisms use our tissues for their reproduction or subsistence (e.g., viral and bacterial infections). Toxicity kills off cells or changes their metabolism so that the cells no longer function properly. Arteries become clogged and blood fails to flow to some tissues which die of starvation...etc. Like Ford's Model T, first one thing goes wrong and then another until finally something stops us from running altogether.
Now, if we can fix one thing and then another and then another, our death can be postponed. If we become very, very good at fixing, death can be postponed for a long time. Such is the argument. The problem is that we are not really good at fixing things that go wrong with our bodies. Most of the fixing that takes place is through the body's own devices. Tissues are repaired, assaults to the skin patched up, bone tissues fused (after being set properly--that we can do). But we can't stop the growth of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the body without killing parts of the body itself. We can't repair a brain that has been deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes. We can't regrow cartilage that has worn away. And so on.
So the "long tomorrow" will be gradual in coming and the length of that day will grow by small increments.
What I don't understand is this: why isn't the reproductive age of organisms itself indefinite? Or, to put the question another way, why should the young and inexperienced have a reproductive advantage over the old and experienced?
The answer appears to be almost circular in that because older organisms have bodies that are already beginning to break down, they are at a disadvantage to younger organisms whose bodies are in peak form. This is why members of the opposite sex (especially males) choose the young for mates. Or to be more precise, this is why the young are attracted to the young; indeed why all are attracted sexually to those at the peak of their reproductive lives. The young have a longer future and so will be better able to provide for their offspring. The fact that the opposite sex is biased in its choice further accentuates the reproductive advantage of the young.
For a more detailed explanation of why we age, expressed in a different way, see my review of The Biology of Death: Origins of Mortality (2004) by Andre Klarsfeld and Frederic Revah. The point is there is no one-sentence explanation of why we age. It's like trying to explain a complex process in a single phrase. It can't be done.
Those interested in Rose's career (and its ups and downs) and the nature of his work with fruit flies will find this interesting. But for the general reader this book is not the best for understanding why we age and die. There are a number of better books (none of them completely satisfying, by the way). In addition to the opus cited above, here are three others: Austad, Steven N. Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering about the Body's Journey Through Life (1997); Clark, William R. A Means to an End: The Biological Basis of Aging and Death (1999); and Hayflick, Leonard How and Why We Age (1994).
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
This is mostly a memoir about Professor Rose's career as an evolutionary biologist who studies aging in fruit flies and extrapolates that knowledge to humans. The "Long Tomorrow" in the title refers to his belief that "it is still reasonable to hope that eventually the great mass of people will be able to control their aging through pharmaceuticals and medicine." (p. 134)
Rose sees senescence as being the inadvertent product of the evolutionary process. There is no single gene that controls aging. Instead hundreds of genes are involved so that the prospect of a single elixir or technique being developed that would magically postpone aging and death is highly unlikely. Almost as an aside and incidentally, Rose explains why we age and eventually die. His is the standard view that the evolutionary process becomes less and less in force as we get further and further from the onset of our reproductive age until "the force" (as he calls it) is not in effect at all.
This is a very tricky and subtle argument that takes a bit of reflection to fully understand. I know when I first encountered it some years ago I found it hard to follow. It is still very difficult to express. But let me give it a try.
Rose uses the analogy of Ford's Model T automobile. As the story goes Henry Ford wanted to know which parts of his cars almost never wore out. He found out what they were and directed his production staff to make them cheaper so that they would wear out at about the same time as the rest of the car, thereby making his cars cheaper to produce while increasing his profits without decreasing the longevity of his cars. Rose says that nature follows a similar parsimonious production with its organisms. For example, genes coded to allow a body part to last a thousand years would not be selected (or unselected for that matter). Indeed any gene or genes that code for processes lasting past reproductive age would exist in the genome only in a random fashion (if at all). Such genes would randomly appear and randomly die out.
What this means is that after the onset of reproduction everything begins to break down in a more or less random fashion. The environment acts upon us in a multitude of ways. Little insults pile up. Some cells go wildly reproductive and cancers develop. Other cells die due to something we ingested or because of accidents. Microorganisms use our tissues for their reproduction or subsistence (e.g., viral and bacterial infections). Toxicity kills off cells or changes their metabolism so that the cells no longer function properly. Arteries become clogged and blood fails to flow to some tissues which die of starvation...etc. Like Ford's Model T, first one thing goes wrong and then another until finally something stops us from running altogether.
Now, if we can fix one thing and then another and then another, our death can be postponed. If we become very, very good at fixing, death can be postponed for a long time. Such is the argument. The problem is that we are not really good at fixing things that go wrong with our bodies. Most of the fixing that takes place is through the body's own devices. Tissues are repaired, assaults to the skin patched up, bone tissues fused (after being set properly--that we can do). But we can't stop the growth of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the body without killing parts of the body itself. We can't repair a brain that has been deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes. We can't regrow cartilage that has worn away. And so on.
So the "long tomorrow" will be gradual in coming and the length of that day will grow by small increments.
What I don't understand is this: why isn't the reproductive age of organisms itself indefinite? Or, to put the question another way, why should the young and inexperienced have a reproductive advantage over the old and experienced?
The answer appears to be almost circular in that because older organisms have bodies that are already beginning to break down, they are at a disadvantage to younger organisms whose bodies are in peak form. This is why members of the opposite sex (especially males) choose the young for mates. Or to be more precise, this is why the young are attracted to the young; indeed why all are attracted sexually to those at the peak of their reproductive lives. The young have a longer future and so will be better able to provide for their offspring. The fact that the opposite sex is biased in its choice further accentuates the reproductive advantage of the young.
For a more detailed explanation of why we age, expressed in a different way, see my review of The Biology of Death: Origins of Mortality (2004) by Andre Klarsfeld and Frederic Revah. The point is there is no one-sentence explanation of why we age. It's like trying to explain a complex process in a single phrase. It can't be done.
Those interested in Rose's career (and its ups and downs) and the nature of his work with fruit flies will find this interesting. But for the general reader this book is not the best for understanding why we age and die. There are a number of better books (none of them completely satisfying, by the way). In addition to the opus cited above, here are three others: Austad, Steven N. Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering about the Body's Journey Through Life (1997); Clark, William R. A Means to an End: The Biological Basis of Aging and Death (1999); and Hayflick, Leonard How and Why We Age (1994).
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
February 6, 2013
Excellent work and a fascinating biography of Dr. Michael Rose.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews