I realize Death doesn’t wear a wristwatch. Everyone uses cellphones, nowadays.
Try to imagine all the stuff happening happening within you. A variety of biological processes operates on their own timescales.
We can picture the timescale of the human life fairly well. It’s more local and tons more personal.
But what about the lifecycle of cells? What about processes like sleep? Or adolescence, or reproductive systems? What about the many tens of thousands of blood and tissue cells being generated every second inside every higher lifeform?
Over at The Long Now Blog, Alex Mensing shines a spotlight on some interesting research over at Darpa. It was brought to his attention via a great piece at WIRED’s Danger Room.
The success of this research could have profound implications for long-term thinking in society. Michael West, a scientist who has been studying human aging and cell mortality since the early 1990s, spoke at The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series in 02004 about “The Prospects of Human Life Extension,” pointing out that an average life-span of 100 years or more would likely change the way that people think about time and how they plan for the future. It was none too many generations ago when few humans lived beyond their forties. (Mensing)
Heady stuff, but Darpa’s research shouldn’t be confused with the pie in the sky musings of immortality-chasing transhumanists. Nobody’s preparing any longevity patents, just yet. This is Darpa, after all.
…it’s clear that all life processes depend on some internal time keeping. This can occur once in a lifetime — say, the hormones released during puberty — or as daily occurrence, as in the regular metabolizing of food into energy. While scientists have uncovered many different components of our inner clocks, “none have been identified as the single lynchpin or master regulator of the greater system that controls temporal expression.”
Darpa wants to find the master regulator, and then use that knowledge to develop “predictive models of molecular-timed events, cell-cycle progression, lifespan, aging, and cell death, response to stress, and useful treatment strategies and drug delivery.” The key word is predictive. Darpa is no longer content with biology as a descriptive enterprise, watching cells and enzymes do their thing. Now, it wants mathematical models and algorithms and theories to tell what they’ll do next. (Shachtman & Groeger)
It’s certainly ambitious; it’s also daunting. The regulator mechanism will probably defy expectations. Or this could all be a trip down Blind Alley, but hey, that’s science, too.
While taking the long view of time has been standard practice in geology, cosmology, and physics for a while, there’s been little effort to pull it all together in the biological sciences. And though I poked fun at the trans-humanists earlier: Yes, longevity science could certainly use a boost.
As an armchair life-watcher, myself, I’ll have fun waving my little pennant. Death always seems to make a slow start, but my, how that 100% success rate creeps up on me in the end. It has my rapt attention.
