The latest 'Awake' carries the front page title of "How Long Can You Live?" - and , as you might expect, it offers the usual carefully
crafted appearance of reason to defend the forgone conclusion of pessimism about extending human life span. Much of the article
weaves a tapestry of ultimate mystery about aging, as if its cause will never be found ( page 6). Most of this propaganda can be dismissed
by pointing out one simple fact:
you don't have to completely understand something in order to effectively use it!
Examples? Hundreds of millions of people drive cars, watch television and use the internet with only the vaguest notion of how it all
works - but that doesn't stop them from using such things effectively. People have been breeding plants and animals for decades,
perhaps centuries without our modern knowledge of genes or DNA. I strongly believe human lifespan can be greatly extended without
total, God-like knowledge of it.
Since all living things age, it is reasonable that there would be a common cause basic to the aging. Consistent with this, abundant
experiments with everything from yeast cells to baboons suggest that sternly limiting calories slows down aging ( as you get old
monkeys in excellent health always looking for something to eat!). The next step is to find out why this is and find a pill that mimics
caloric deprivation without the hunger. The inexpensive supplement resveratrol is under investigation, for example.
The 'Awake' further quotes a warning from Scientific American "issued by 51 scientists who study aging" that no therapy is proven
to exist that can stop or slow aging. While that may be technically true - in 2004 when the article was written, - and it would take
centuries to absolutely prove that humans will live longer with some particular therapy, that doesn't mean we can't use gene expression
studies to determine that something is likely to do so!
Further, the propagandists who write the 'Awake' might have bothered to notice the Scientific American article of more recent
vintage called "Unlocking the Secrets of Longevity Genes" as of Feb. 20, 2006!
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000B73EB-3380-13F6-B38083414B7F0000
Interest - and hope - in this topic is growing - and the editors of the 'Awake know this, so they are getting more desperate
to quell curiosity about it among Jehovah's Witnesses, who otherwise might "drift away" and stop contributing to this
dying and poorly researched magazine.
metatron ( le 'chaim!)