LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 12/25/07
The Other Part of Life
Back in medieval days, only the healthy and wealthy lived to reach the ancient age of 50. King Henry the Eighth, richest man in Britain, died in 1547 at the age of 55.
People aged 55 years today are no longer considered old. At 50 years in today's modern age, there is still more than a third of life left to live. Unfortunately, the human mindset has not adjusted to the increased human life span...a span which is still increasing.
We all know the facts. People over 50 don't get the job. They get passed over for promotions in favor of the sharp young college graduate. Women are not considered sexually alluring at 50. A big splashy wedding for a 50-year-old woman would seem culturally ridiculous, as would a man branching out to start a new and different career.
The problem is that people in developed nations today are still young at 50, even at 60. But human conditioning, instilled over millennia, blanks out at this extra life span. There is no cultural place for the active, healthy middle-ager. Someone seriously taking up snowboarding in their 50's is considered to be having a mid-life crisis; a problem with aging. Society doesn't consider that the snowboarder wannabe might just enjoy snowboarding and is young enough to do it.
With modern medicine, nutrition and science, we have nearly doubled our life span in the past few hundred years. Yet at no point have we actually thought about this extension. Other than paying out money to the poor and disabled elderly, there has never been a plan for the second half of life.
But now, there are too many healthy and youthful people over 50 to ignore human life extension any longer. On some subconscious level, we still think of middle age and beyond as a time requiring medicine, of aches and pains, a kind of marking time in limbo until death. But that is Pavlovian conditioning; it is no longer reality. There is more to life after 50 than going on endless cruises or being the grey-haired grandparent.
Yes, there are still some science gaps in the new youth of middle age. A broken bone or other injury takes longer to heal. Reflexes slow, eyesight and hearing deteriorate, and it's usually harder to learn new things. But medicine is working on these remaining symptoms of old-ness, and these problems will also be resolved in time. One of the big coming breakthroughs is the control of aging on a cellular level by genetic engineering.
Scientists believe the actual cause of aging has been discovered: it is senescence, or the pre-programmed death of cells after a certain number of divisions, usually 50. But not all cells die this programmed death. One of the hot subject of modern scientific study is what factor makes certain cells immortal. If all the body's cells are enabled to continue dividing and accurately replicating DNA, the body would not age. There would be no such thing as death from old age.
Whether this is a wise study in light of the ever-growing human population is not even being considered. Eventually, science will find a way to keep skin smooth and unwrinkled, to restore the speed of nerve transmissions that govern relfexes, to keep the older brain functioning as it did when younger. But the most important question remains: why would anyone want to live an even longer life span if their age effectively shuts them off from the desirable aspects of society---such as being considered a valuable part of society, rather than a drain on the taxpayer resources of social security. The person who must desperately cling to a job because they will never get another one as good at their age, the person who resorts to surgery after surgery to eliminate any sign of dreaded aging; these are the results of our denial of the second part of life.
It's way past time that all of us, especially our government and business leaders, began accepting that today's humans can be youthful, active and intelligent in their 60's and 70's. We need a social plan; not to provide money to helpless "senior citizens," but to allow them to function as a useful part of society. We all need to begin planning what we should do with the second part of life.
Wina Sturgeon