How Long Do You Want To Live? Approaching Methuselah

Would you like to live to 200? To 500? To 1,000?

Such a question may strike you as absurd. But with our new and still developing technology, science may stretch the life span to limits unheard of since biblical days.

We are just at the beginning stages of genetic engineering, and ahead of us may life a brave new world. Predictions are that technicians will be able to snip out our bad DNA and replace it with more compliant bits. The caps at the end s of our chromosomes, the telomeres, shrink as we age, causing the cells to die. An enzyme called telomerase may be able to modify this process, allowing cells to reproduce many more times that they currently are able to ( Demidov 2005).

By manipulating genes, scientists have already been able to extend the life span of worms by six times. Humans have these same genes. A human life span six times longer that what we now have would take the longest living people to over 500(Chase 2003). We are only peering over the edge of the future, glimpsing what might be possible. Some optimistic geneticists predict that some people currently alive will live 1,000 years or longer (Gorman 2003). Now that's way too long.

Some geneticists say that we should think of our body as being like a house (Gorman 2003). A house keeps standing, not because it is built to last forever, but people keep repairing it. This is what science will allow us to do with our bodies. In the future, we will grow spare body parts. From the same stem cells will come livers, hearts, kidneys, fingers. As parts of our body wear out, we'll simply replace them with new ones.

In grade school, many of us heard stories about Ponce de Leon, an explorer from Spain who searched fro the fountain of youth. He eventually discoverd Florida, but the fountain of youth eluded him. In our perpetual search for immortality, could we be discovering what eluded Ponce de Leon?

Finally, is the real issue how can we live longer or how can we live better?

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