As the awkward demographic bulge known as the “Baby Boomers” edges ever closer to retirement and bulging old age, there’s been an acceleration in the science of longevity.
It’s easy to see why. According to the latest studies, the average life expectancy in the United States is about 78 years. This figure is affected, obviously, by many factors, including sex, race, wealth, and region.
But we don’t need to consult the Centers for Disease Control or the U.S. Census to know that we’re living longer. All we have to do is look to our own families. My case may be unusual, but all of my grandparents lived good long lives. When all was said and done, they averaged about 85 years old.
I tried to find life expectancy statistics for 1820, the year Perry County was founded. Unfortunately, official records were pretty sketchy back then. The closest reliable figures I could find date to 1850, when the average life expectancy was 39.5.
If you were white.
If you happened to be black, you could look forward to living to the ripe old age of 23.
These are shocking numbers, and no doubt heavily weighted by infant mortality, which was such a terrible scourge in the early years of our republic.
By 1900, Americans had cracked 50; by 1930, we were up to 60; and by 1960, were living to 70.
The pace has slowed in recent decades. We should have passed 80 around 1990, if we were keeping up with advances in the rest of the 20th century.
But despite radical improvements in health care — and the exponential cost increases associated with them — we just aren’t living that much longer.
Part of this has to do with the changing nature of the U.S. population. In other words, it’s a case of statistics. On the other hand, there do seem to be certain real limits to the length of life of Homo Sapiens.
But what are they? And while we’re looking into the structural limits of the human body, here’s another tough question: why do some people live so much longer than others?
Geneticists have been going at this hot and heavy over the last decade in their quest for an “aging gene.” The idea – or rather, the fantasy – at the heart of this research isn’t much different from the search for the fountain of youth. If only we could isolate the genes responsible for the inexorable breakdown of the body’s immune system; the memory loss; the silvering of hair and general flab-ification, we could address the slow march to decrepitude with new therapies. Why, we could be eternally young!
Just last week, a story ran in the New York Times about a group of dwarfs in remote wilds of Ecuador, whose rare condition, known as Laron syndrome, protects them from cancer and diabetes. As fantastic as this may sound – after all, we’re talking here about dwarfs and magical immunity – this strange population has led geneticists to study the correlation between a lack of growth hormone and a greater resistance to the forces of aging.
You have to ask yourself, though, whether you’d want to live to be a hundred and fifty if you couldn’t reach the kitchen counter. Or even longer, if you were doomed to be even shorter. (Yoda comes to mind.)
In stories like this, a healthy dose of skepticism is advised. But still, the article – and even more than that, the photographs that ran with it, which showed these strange-looking Ecuadorean dwarfs lined up with their towering children – reminded me of a certain Greek myth.
I happened on the story by way of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, but you may have read the sad story of Tithonus in Homer’s Hymn to Aphrodite. In any case, it’s a cautionary tale of getting what you wish for. Or, more to the point, what happens to a mere mortal when a goddess fixes her erotic eye on him.
Eos, goddess of the dawn, develops a crush on a Trojan prince named Tithonus. She kidnaps him to be her lover. Apparently, things go pretty well, because she’s soon asking Zeus to make her new boyfriend immortal.
Zeus grants the request, but in an early case of divine malpractice, doesn’t bother to point out that Eos has failed to ask for a crucial codicil: that her lover’s body stay young as he infinitely ages.
Tithonus becomes immortal. Alas, his body doesn’t. Eventually, he shrivels up, loses his sex appeal, and Eos, in a ground-breaking description of a nursing home, puts him on the shelf:
“…she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs…”
My advice? Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
And, if you’re going to ask a favor of the gods, be sure to hire a good lawyer.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 24 February 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
