There is a certain repetition to articles noting the death by aging of the very oldest living humans - you will see them often. Here is one of the latest:

Her nieces and nephews said she loved clothes and loved to travel. They said she was tough, feisty and self-sufficient, but kind. When her parents aged, she took care of them and invited them to live with her in her apartment, the Gazette reported Friday.

When her parents died, she moved to Montreal.

For the past 35 years, she's lived in a nursing home on Gouin Boulevard East.

She earned the distinction as the oldest living woman when 116-year-old Elizabeth Bolden of Tennessee died on Dec. 11, 2006.

Emiliano Mercado del Toro of Puerto Rico is thought to be the world's oldest person. He was born 26 days before Bertrand.

At some point in the near future the oldest person you know, a person already suffering and diminished in capabilities by the ongoing failure of their biochemistry, will die of aging. Then someone else will be the oldest person you know - and he or she will also suffer and die of aging. It will happen again, and again, and again - ever onwards, each life lost just as much a tragedy as the last.

The toll of aging will continue until we choose to develop the medical technology to stop it from continuing. We can do this now. It will take decades, but we can do it, if we can but band together and show the will and the certainty. How many lives - lives close enough to be detailed, valuable, known well and missed deeply - does it take to convince a person of the need to cure aging?

But the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.”

Technorati tags: aging, death

Posted by Reason at January 19, 2007 10:13 PM | TrackBack (0)