X-Message-Number: 18546 From: "mike99" <> Subject: New theory of Aging Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 18:40:00 -0700 http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/press_release.html For Release January 29, 2002 Contact: Julie Antelman, NORC 773.256.6312 A new theory on aging, living long, and dying Body System Redundancies and "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" are key to why we age and when we die Our bodies backup systems don t prevent aging, they make it more certain. This is one proposition of a new "reliability theory of aging and longevity" by two researchers at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Authors Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, in their paper, "The Reliability Theory of Aging and Longevity," published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (213, 527-545), have offered a comprehensive, groundbreaking theory to understand why people (and other biological species) deteriorate and die more often with age. Interestingly, the relative differences in mortality rates across nations and gender decrease with age. That is, although people living in the U.S. have longer life spans on average than people living in countries with poor health and high mortality, those who achieve the oldest-old age in those countries die at rates relatively similar to the oldest-old in the U.S. Humans are built from the ground up. We start off with a few cells that differentiate and multiply to form the systems that keep us operating. Even at birth, the cells that make up our systems are full of faults and defective elements that would kill primitive organisms that lack the redundancies that are built into us. " It s as if we were born with our bodies already full of garbage, " said author Gavrilov. "Then, during our life span we are assaulted by random destructive hits that accumulate in further damage. Thus we age. At some point one of those hits causes a critical system without a back-up redundancy to fail, and we die." All those in the world who have achieved the oldest-old age have very few redundancies remaining; therefore they can t accumulate many more defects. They simply die when the next random shock hits a critical system. Hence, the mortality rates tend to level off at extreme old ages, and people all over the world die at relatively similar rates on average. The initial differences in body reserves (redundancy) eventually disappear. This fundamental theory of aging and longevity is grounded in a predictive mathematical model that accounts for questions raised by previous models that have addressed the mechanisms of aging, mortality, survival, and longevity. The authors are Research Associates at the Center for Aging at the University of Chicago s National Opinion Research Center. The research was sponsored by the National Institute on Aging. The full text of the paper is available online at http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/JTB-01.pdf Contact Julie Antelman for hard-copy. Also available is a set of brief comments on the paper made by other experts who have given permission to be quoted by journalists. Michael LaTorra Member: Extropy Institute: www.extropy.org World Transhumanist Association: www.transhumanism.org Alcor Life Extension Foundation: www.alcor.org Society for Technical Communication: www.stc.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18546