100 Years Young - Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact?
100 Years Young: Part I: Musings About the Drayan Life-Cycle Part II: Is Aging an Inevitable Biological Fact? Part III: Can an Organism 'Grow' Smaller and Younger? Part IV: The Drayan Civilization Regarding this first point, let me begin with the assertion that what we know as the aging process is not the fundamental truth we presume it to be. I recently came across an intriguing short story called "Invariant" by John Pierce about a scientist who learns how to stop biological aging. As the story explains: "The regeneration of limbs in salamanders led to the idea of perfect regeneration of human parts. How, say, a cut heals, leavng not a scar, but a perfect replica of the damaged tissue. How in normal metabolism tissue can be replaced not imperfectly, as in an aging organism, but perfectly, indfinitely." (The story deals with some unexpected results of his research - you may want to find a copy of this story to see how it ends.) The idea of "perfect re...