Half of the babies born this year will live to be a hundred.
Is this a temporary trend, or human kind 2.0?
According to legend, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León landed in Florida in search
of the Fountain of Youth.
Today, the closest thing we have is a water hazard on the seventeenth hole of a golf course
in Boca Raton.
So we didn't find the Fountain of Youth, but we have managed to drastically extend the
human lifespan over the last hundred years or so.
So how did we do that?
Things like improvements in agriculture, or medical breakthroughs like a doctor saying
"Hmm, maybe I should wash my hands before I perform surgery."
Now a special report from the Obvious News Network.
One way to increase your lifespan is to avoid getting sick.
In Okinawa, people often lived to the age of one hundred, so how do they do that?
It's through a combination of things such as a low calorie diet that's really rich in
omega 3s, lots of regular exercise, and good genes.
Right now, we can't really modify our genes that much, but we have the technology to analyze
our DNA through saliva samples, and determine if we're at risk for certain diseases - things
like Alzheimer's or diabetes or cancer.
But even if you're avoiding sickness, or treating anything you already had, you're still aging.
You're still getting wrinkles, you're still shaking your fist at rowdy teenagers. Which
raises the question,
"What exactly is aging anyway?"
Though aging is a complex process, one aspect is that every time your cells divide, little
DNA caps on the end of your chromosomes called telomeres get shorter.
And once they're gone, the cell dies.
Scientists at Harvard recently genetically engineered mice to have a gene with an enzyme
that reverses this shortening, and the mice essentially got younger!
It hasn't been tried yet on humans, but these short enzyme treatments might awaken sleeping
stem cells, which repair tissues from the inside.
Alright, so we're going to live healthier for a longer portion of our lives. That's
great. But what if we want to actually make our lifespans longer?
One bet might be regenerative medicine. Surgeons in Sweden recently gave a man a trachea transplant.
They scanned his trachea, and then they built a new one using stem cells taken from his
bone marrow.
That meant there was no donor, and almost no risk of his body rejecting the trachea.
Another option would be to print organs using a 3D bio printer. You know, like we talked
about back in episode three of this series.
As these things move closer and closer to reality, some hard questions come up.
If people are born, but they don't die, where do we put them?
And on a more existential level, if there is no aging, what does death mean?
We haven't found the Fountain of Youth, but maybe one day we will.
Then you have to ask yourself, am I going to jump in?
Well, my response is,
last one in is a grumpy old man.