Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

WHY I JOINED THE THREEHUNDREDBYECHEFU BRIGHT IKECHUKWU

(

Chief Development Officer, Bricke International

)

E-mail: brickecenter@gmail.comWebsite:www.brickecenter.biz.nf

Dear Colleagues,Friday, July 31, 2009RE: WHY I JOINED THE THREE HUNDRED

Today, I made the decision to join The Three Hundred.This essay will explain who The Three Hundred are, why I joined them, and why I think you should do so, too.The short answer to all of the above is that The Three Hundred is a commitment tostrongly and directly support what I believe to be the most effective vehicle for fundinggenuine anti-aging research - research that could drastically delay, or even ultimatelyeliminate, the slow, but gradually accelerating downward spiral of physical and mentaldeterioration with the passing of the years.In other words, it is our best hope of substantially forestalling or escaping an otherwise-foreordained future of increasing disability, suffering and death - and of watchinghelplessly as our loved ones undergo the same terrible decline.While I am still relatively young and believe that I am indeed aging more slowly thanthose around me, I have suffered the loss of my loved ones to the aging process already.It's bad enough to watch allegedly "independently-living" aged strangers out in public,idly shuffling their feet, pushing cleverly designed wheeled walkers or balancing on their canes, unable to open the doors for themselves, faces a mask of apathy. It's much worseto spend even a few minutes in a nursing home, walking out of a world of relative healthof body and mind into an asylum of decay: men and women, once fit and optimistic aboutthe future, now tied to oxygen tanks, raving mad or sunk into almost complete retreatfrom the outside world, sitting down hours in advance of their meals for lack of any better purpose to their lives, needing help to get out of bed or clean their own wastes.But what is truly terrible is to be in such a house of horrors to visit your grandmother -watching her become increasingly passive, disengaged, and helpless; seeing her unable tocarry out the basic activities of daily living until she is a decayed funhouse mirror imageof an infant, unable to walk or even control her own bladder; wondering when she willdie, and whether that is really the worst fate that you can envision for her.I am conscious that the advancing process of cellular disorder that took a young woman -a woman that escaped poverty in Scotland, worked through two World Wars to build ahome and a family, bore my mother into the world, and cared for me through almost threedecades as a mature, increasingly wrinkly, but still proudly independent gra'ma - andslowly sapped her in body and mind ... consciousness that these same processes areinvisibly at work in my own flesh, and are now erupting visibly in my own mother andfather.2

Most people refuse to confront this reality. When the horror of aging is thrust in front of their noses, they push it away desperately, reflexively wrenching their attention towardanother subject. They pretend that it is "not so bad," that it is unusual and will not happento them, or engage in elaborate flights of intellectual apologism for the "natural,""divinely-ordained" order of things. They lie to themselves that they will be satisfied with just a few more years of life after which they will simply check out, well before the fullweight of the years begins to crush them.As even a cursory glance at previous generations would demonstrate, for better or for worse, no one will choose to give up life merely because their bodies are losing the powers and liberties without which they do not believe that they could live. Whether struck by aging or rendered paraplegic by a fall on the ice, they will grasp at the thread of life until their suffering is truly so wracking of body and soul that their will falters andthey simply cannot go on. Fundamentally, we all want to live -- in youth and health if possible, in age and misery if necessary.Many readers will know that I invest a substantial amount of my time and energy into theonly scientifically justified method of delaying the horror of biological aging: calorierestriction (CR). It is a measure of my own horror in the face of the aging process that Ispend so much of my life's energy in an intervention that I know perfectly well to becrude, weak medicine.Tragically, those around me are so put off by the bitterness in the medicine that theyrefuse to take it. But even if they were to join me in massive salads and refusing RockyRoad ice cream, CR is not, ultimately, a solution to the problem. CR will - if, as I believe,the animal experiments translate well into the human case - buy perhaps a couple of decades of middle- and late-middle-aged relative health. It has already granted meimproved vitality in many ways, even as it has come with a cost in other areas. But CR is just buying time - and not much time, at that. The specter of biological decay is still before me.I want to live forever; or if not, I will accept as a second choice to live indefinitely inyouth and in health. CR cannot deliver this dream. To do it, we will need a new biomedicine that attacks aging at its most fundamental, molecular roots, in ways thatnever naturally occurred in our genetic toolkit.There is reason for optimism in thinking that this goal can be achieved. Decades of research into the biology of aging - much of it using the CR model - have revealed thefundamental molecular lesions that are associated with aging and almost certainly driveit. Theoretically, we could remove or neutralize these toxic wastes, creating interventionsthat will not just slow down the molecular gumming-up of life's machinery, but halt or even reverse it. We could actually undo the toll of the years ([1-4]; for a very accessibleoverview, see [5]), and then aging itself could come to an end. We would spend centuriesor millennia in youth and health, only falling prey to catastrophic accident or disease.There is significant progress toward [6,7] - and in some cases even preliminary proof-of-concept for [8-10] - several interventions based on these insights. The problem is to turn3