Interview With Michael Rose

The New York Times interviews evolutionary biologist Michael Rose: "the common assumption is that young bodies work and then they fall apart during aging. Young bodies only work because natural selection makes them healthy enough to survive and breed. As adults get older, natural selection stops caring about them, so we lose its benefits and our health. If you don't understand this, aging research is an unending riddle that goes around in circles. ... aging isn't some general breakdown process, like the way cars rust. Aging is an optional feature of life. And it can be slowed or postponed. This implies that controlling human aging does not require the violation of some absolute scientific law. Postponing human aging is not like building a perpetual motion machine or faster-than-light space travel. It is a scientifically reasonable thing to try."

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/science/06conv.html?pagewanted=print

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