Has anyone in your family ever died?
April’s CR Diary asks “Has anyone in your family ever died?” In a post called I Have Good Genes, she responds to people who claim they do.
If anyone at any point in your family has died or is currently dead, then I suggest that your genes are not so great. They may have lived a long time or danced the polka through their nineties, but they eventually grew old and died. The whole point of the research that Aubrey de Grey is doing and that MR is working with him on is to find therapies that actually reverse the aging process, making death, well, not absolutely unavoidable but a lot less likely to come as soon as it comes now.
I like that because it sets a high standard. I want our kids and grandkids to look back at people dying the way they do now with the sort of numb lack of understanding that we look back on death the way it happened in the 1800s and before. I want the discussion of death by aging to get dumped into the same heap as the discussions we have now with our kids about life before remote controlled TVs, mobile phones, and the Internet.
Let’s hope it happens, and soon. As April says, “Nobody’s genes are that good.”
