A Means to an End: The Biological Basis of Aging and Death

Rating:
Summary: A good review with some problems
Review: Dr. Clark provides a good review of the field but fails, in my opinion, to provide a clear explanation for "The biological basis of aging and death". The theories of the evolutionary biology of aging clearly argue that "aging" cannot be "genetically programmed" or that "We are programmed to grow old and die" as other reviewers have concluded from reading this work. That points out the weakness in this book -- a failure to clearly differentiate between senescence, aging and death. There are two primary theories for why we age -- "the declining force of natural selection" (i.e. it is difficult to optimize a genetic program to produce non-aging organisms) and "antagonistic plieotropy" (i.e. the genetic program is optimized for reproduction at the expense of non-aging longevity). Dr. Clark seems to suggest that the genetic program for senescence is what causes aging and death. In fact the genetic program for senescence is largely an anti-cancer program. It may as a side effect contribute to aging and eventually death but its primary purpose is to prevent cancer. There is a very big difference between saying that aging and death result from an "incomplete" program and saying that aging and death result from a pre-programmed senescence program. One of my primary criticisms is Dr. Clark's pseudo-deathist philosophy. The tone of the book seems to suggest that aging is pre-programmed and cannot be changed. He says, on pg 218, "Will we want to go this far in our search for the fountain of youth? It is unlikely even to be proposed in the lifetime of anyone reading this book, but it is not at all beyond the realm of possibility." (He is speaking of the application of gene therapies to lifespan extension.) I have been proposing such methods for lifespan extension for most of the past decade and have conducted research and founded companies to forward these goals. The human genome is a program. It has bugs in it that result in aging. We can comprehend those bugs and apply patches to fix them allowing the extension of human longevity to the accident-rate limits which will be thousands of years. Individuals who really want to understand aging should read books by people who have studied the field for many years. The best authors, in my opinion, would be Steve Austad, Tom Kirkwood and Caleb Finch. While many of their works may be older than this book, they have a greater depth of understanding of the subtleties of the study of aging that this book fails to discuss.

Rating:
Summary: An easy book to read
Review: Easy to read book. After lengthy introduction author concentrates on the research about genes that suppress the cell senescence and control. Discussion about cancer cells where cell division is not checked.
Final chapters discusses the effects of oxidants, obesity, low calorie diet or similar things where eventually a claim comes that beside the gene control everything else does not amount more than %15 in total effect.
So unless we control the genes we will soon or later die.

Rating:
Summary: Yes, death is genetically programmed !
Review: This book embraces a rational and well explained journey in the field of aging. Here I read for the first time strong statements about the programmed nature death, that is present since fertilization. We learn the basic experiments that support Haldane theory about sex and aging and we appreaciate the beatiful connection between replicative senescence and species-specifc mortality. The book is clear and well readible and I strongly recommend it to science and non-science crowd.