Want To Live Forever? Science Takes On Aging

Want more birthdays? Science can help.  

- Brooke Borel

We’ve long been drawn to immortality, or at least a version of it. In the 16th century, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León allegedly searched for the Fountain of Youth. Even further back, in Greek mythology, ambrosia granted eternal life. We’re still searching for ways to hit the biological pause button, but today’s scientists have a more practical approach: They hope to stall aging to prevent the diseases that so often come with it. If they succeed, we’ll not only live longer, we will also be healthier and more youthful. Here’s what we know now that Ponce de León didn’t.

A question of time

Life is destructive. Our environment and our internal functions all wear and tear at our body over time. Evolutionarily speaking, natural selection rewards those who can survive such hardship. So why don’t we live forever—why age at all?

There have been numerous attempts to understand how and why we age—as recently as 1990, the biologist Zhores Medvedev tallied more than 300 possible hypotheses. But according to Steven Austad, a biogerontologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one explanation has risen to the top: “Reproduction is the name of the game. Basically, we age because it’s not in nature’s best interest to perfectly repair our bodies. The main thing is to keep us reproductive as long as possible, and then let our bodies deteriorate.”