Psychologically, aging has had a stranglehold on people ever since they became aware of its existence, and this grip has not weakened to this day..

What effect does this have on people's willingness (or unwillingness) to deal rationally with the tragedy of aging, and also tried to explain why the irrational attitude towards aging had a serious basis until there was no hope of defeating aging, and why it now presents such a formidable obstacle?

But here's the complication. As already mentioned, recently a level of knowledge has been reached when it is possible to really take up the development of therapeutic methods to defeat aging.. To be sure of conscious perception, we must first deal with one particularly insidious feature of the paradoxical relationship to aging: most people understand in their hearts that it is actually possible to defeat aging after all..

What is the problem here? At first glance, it may seem that the task is facilitated by this, since it means that the irrational attitude towards aging is superficial.. But, alas, self-sufficient delusions are not a simple thing.. Just as this attitude paradoxically interprets the desirability of aging in order to reconcile a person with it, it paradoxically understands the feasibility of defeating aging as long as the probability of an early victory remains low..

If you realize that there is even a 1% chance of beating aging while you (or someone you love) are still alive, that spark of hope will cast doubt and erode your tolerance for aging, no matter how hard you try.. Conversely, if you firmly believe that aging is immutable, you will sleep even better..

The key to what has been said is the words " When this probability grows to a significant value, it makes sense to get to work in order to further increase the chances. By work is meant here, of course, not only and not so much the actual research activity, but educational, agitational actions that help others (not least those on whom the funding of science depends) to wake up from delusions.. On the contrary, if the probability of victory over aging is really very small, despite all efforts, then the scales balancing between price and benefit will shift in the opposite direction, in favor of an irrational attitude towards the existence of a chance of victory with all the pros and cons of aging..

The conventional view of aging as a specific phenomenon, distinct from other health conditions and inaccessible even theoretically to the possibilities of medicine, does not correspond to established facts.. Aging is immutable, and therefore there is nothing to worry about because of it, but already unable to believe. The probability of defeating aging in the foreseeable future is not only non-zero, but high enough to justify a disruptive intervention in the notion of aging.. Justify - because, having lost illusions, you - yes, it is you - can influence the speed of victory over aging. And the result of these efforts will far outweigh the spiritual comfort that one would find in one's former belief that aging is invincible..

The illusory line between aging and disease.

It is a common thing to die of old age, but if you believe what is written in medical reports about death, in our time this is a rare reason for the transition to another world.. The wording " However, it is now considered unacceptably uninformative, and officials who are supposed to witness the death must provide more specific information..

But everyone knows that in fact, very few people leave this world not because of a heart attack, pneumonia, flu, cancer or stroke, but for "

Revealing a serious misrepresentation is being done - often unintentionally - by so many leading researchers in the field of biogerontology (the science of the aging process). This distortion has generally already been seen as a terrible mistake, but the disastrous consequences for biogerontology are still being felt and are likely to be felt for many years to come..

In the 50s - 70s, when gerontology took shape as a legitimate biological science, there was a habit of considering senile infirmities in two ways: on the one hand, as age-related diseases, on the other, as " The basis for this division was that everyone is aging, but not everyone suffers from age-related diseases.. However, the true motive was a purely practical consideration: by delimiting their own field of knowledge, gerontologists also counted on financial independence..

And this delimitation succeeded.. In the United States, the National Institute on Aging was created (as they say, while US President Richard Nixon did not pay much attention). It seems to be good. But - good, but not very. All gerontologists are well aware that the diseases called age-related, in fact, are only externally related to age: they are observed mainly in older people because they develop due to aging, or, in other words, because aging is nothing more and nothing less.. Gerontologists knew this even then. And they should have seen that by waving the slogan "

Those in power asked the question: \? This attitude, which began decades ago, has continued to this day, and it does not seem to be changing.. Now gerontologists are shouting from all angles that if we push back aging even a little, it will give much greater health benefits than defeating individual diseases.. But they are again and again denied financial support.. It was precisely the incorrect speeches and incorrect policies of gerontologists in previous decades that provoked a entrenched resistance to a simple, obvious (and generally recognized among specialists) truth: it is potentially beneficial to push back aging..

Age-related diseases are simply the consequences of aging.. Aging occurs at different rates both within the same organism and in different individuals and in different species of living beings..

Why Aging Doesn't Need a Clock.

From the fact that a proportion of people die from " But this reasoning is only partly true.. Indeed, older people are more susceptible to infectious diseases because the immune system deteriorates with aging..

However, age-related diseases are mostly non-infectious, and completely or predominantly internal.; infection, if present, then as an addition. Let's take cancer for example.. Some cancers affect young people, but as a rule, cancer rarely begins before the age of 40 (except in cases of genetic defects - congenital DNA repair disorders). Some cancers are caused by a viral infection; the best known in this group is cervical cancer, caused by the human papillomavirus..

However, most cancers are caused by the fact that over time, mutations accumulate in the chromosomes.. Mutations are inevitable - this is how living organisms are arranged. Most often they occur during the duplication of chromosomal DNA during cell division.. Thus, the accumulation of mutations is part of aging, and cancer is its consequence or, if you like, part of the later stages of aging..

Sounds easy, doesn't it But in the subtext of the above is the implicit assumption (common among biologists as well) that aging is a mysterious phenomenon, qualitatively different from any disease and not amenable to biological explanation.. There are several main reasons for this assumption..

First. Aging occurs much more slowly than diseases usually develop.. So slowly that we hardly notice its progression, while the more rapid development of conditions like cancer or diabetes is clearly recognized.. This difference is quite striking, but, in fact, it was to be expected, because aging goes in a downward spiral.. The older a person is, the worse the recovery mechanisms work, the less the body is able to prevent aging, the faster and faster it is.. Therefore, the late stages of aging, t. diseases that are expected to develop faster than the early stages.

Second. It is misleading that aging occurs at very different rates in different species, but at a surprisingly similar rate in different individuals of the same species.. From this circumstance, we can conclude that aging occurs according to some internal clock, which in different species sets different speeds.. It is therefore assumed that this clock is somehow immune to biomedical intervention, since in order to change its speed, one must cease to be human..

But this is wrong for two reasons.. First, even if there were an internal clock mechanism, it would still be possible in principle to postpone aging without changing its speed.. Secondly, why, in fact, the internal clock cannot be affected by? The fact that individuals of the same species age at the same rate is only a consequence of their genetic similarity.. There is nothing here that indicates the impossibility of exposure by means of biomedical technologies.

Perhaps the most common basis for the belief in " Surely this means that there really is a certain central clockwork that counts down the time for the onset of the development of these manifestations and diseases - so, it would seem? No, it's not, and also for two reasons.. Firstly, just such a seemingly timetable can be expected if the infirmities of old age are the late stages of a multifaceted process of decline, to the extent that the body as a single system has a key property - a high degree of interconnectedness of various chains of causes and effects..

If many things go wrong throughout life, and the accumulation of these feedback defects exacerbates them and accelerates each other, then inevitably all changes will develop at more or less the same speed and reach a critical level (manifested by a clinically identifiable disease) in approximately one and the same volume.. And this interconnectedness, no doubt, takes place in the aging process..

Secondly, if we think about the evolutionary basis of aging, it is easy to see that even without a significant interconnection between the chains of events leading to various age-related diseases, one should still expect them to appear at about the same age.. The fact is that if, for example, in an organism there are genes that protect against any particular cause of death so effectively that individuals who possess them die from other causes earlier than from this one, then the genes that protect against it are not subject to natural selection and. And over an evolutionarily significant time, the quality of these genes will deteriorate to a level where they no longer protect against "

Also, the usual (but incorrect) reason to consider aging as different from other pathologies is that it is " happens to every individual. Yes, if the body lives long enough, it shows signs of aging. But this is only a consequence of what I said earlier about speeds: that aging is relatively slow compared to the development of diseases associated with it..

These latter progress from the diagnosable stage to the final stage (death) rather quickly.; in many cases, a person dies from any of these diseases before other age-related pathological changes appear, or at least in their early, undiagnosed stages.. But if this individual did not have this fatal disease, he would have lived long enough for other disorders associated with aging to appear.. In fact, all age-related diseases are universal in the sense in which the question should be posed, namely, any of them you will probably "

Aging is not something mystical, fatal, inaccessible to our influence.. There is no inexorably ticking clockwork - there is only an accumulation of violations. The aging of a living organism, like the aging of a car or a building, depends on, let's say, care. There are cars made a hundred years ago that drive perfectly, and a thousand-year-old building (at least in Europe) that perfectly serves its purpose, although they were not designed for such a long service life.. The precedent of machines and buildings gives at least grounds for cautious optimism that aging can be delayed indefinitely by sufficiently thorough and regular maintenance measures..

What the Experts Overlooked.

The above is well known to those who professionally study aging - biogerontologists.. However, if you look at how they are exploring the possibilities to delay aging, it seems that they do not know anything about it.. When the possibilities of combating a disease are being explored, the development of pathological changes is being studied and ways are being sought to interrupt it.. And in gerontology, a different approach to developing interventions prevails: comparing organisms aging at different rates - representatives of different species or individuals of the same species placed in different conditions - in order to copy or extrapolate the differences found and, thereby, slow down aging.

In essence, this means admitting defeat in advance.; they don't even try to interrupt or disrupt the unwanted process, treating it like a " This is especially surprising when you consider that biogerontologists are definitely hard at work analyzing aging in an effort to understand it - but not in order to win (unfortunately, these two tasks involve different analyzes)! But the most promising way to delay aging is to stop the mechanism of its development, as is done to combat specific diseases.. Thus, since aging is an accumulation of disorders, ways should be sought to reduce their accumulation..

Why delaying aging is easier than preventing a complex machine from failing.

Now let's look at another reason for people's commitment to the idea that aging is fundamentally inaccessible to biomedical intervention.. If we consider aging only as a violation, and the body as a complex machine, then it is reasonable to believe that the same approach can be applied to weaken aging as to maintaining the efficiency of a machine..

But it is rightly noted that living organisms are capable of self-repair and self-care, but machines are not, which means that the aging of people is not at all analogous to the aging of machines.. And it is concluded that the fundamental possibility of maintaining the functionality of machines cannot be considered a basis for confidence in the existence of the fundamental possibility of maintaining the functionality of a living organism..

Is this reasoning logical Yes, we have recovery support mechanisms. Why the hell does this make it harder to keep the body functioning Obviously, the opposite is true:

if a living organism automatically maintains itself, then the less work for third-party intervention.

Living organisms are immeasurably more complex than any machine created by people, and not by a person who designed them, so we now have to understand the structure of the system by its functioning in order to understand how to maintain it.. But this remark does not change the logic of what is being discussed: the natural innate ability to self-heal is our ally, not an enemy..

dee gray aubrey medbe. en.