How can we turn back the clock? Health food, gyms and cosmetic companies promise us everlasting youth, but the effects of aging are caused by complex biological processes at the level of the cell. The author shows what we can do to protect ourselves and what exciting breakthroughs scientists are still working on, and he asks which industries benefit by peddling dubious information and dubious remedies. He also looks at why we are so keen to deny that we are aging, when indeed, aging is a part of life - for everything from bacteria to humans.

For centuries people have puzzled over the inevitability of human aging. At the end of the 20th century a remarkable scientific discovery emerged, based on a series of important interconnected insights over quite a long period of time. The aim of this book is to dispel ignorance by explaining in non-technical language what are the reasons for aging and the myth of excessive prolongation of life.

One scientist's quest to solve the mystery of human aging.

As recent articles about "the graying of America" suggest, a demographic revolution is well underway. The number of people living into extreme old age is increasing dramatically. By the year 2050 one in five of the world's population, including the developing countries, will be 65 or older, a fact which presages profound medical, biological, philosophical, and political changes in the coming century. In Time of Our Lives, Tom Kirkwood unfolds some of the deepest mysteries of medical science while demolishing some of the most persistent misconceptions. He overturns the almost universally held belief that aging is either necessary or inevitable--it isn't--and debunks the idea that there exists a "death gene" that evolved to inhibit population growth. Instead, Kirkwood shows that we age because our genes, evolving at a time when life was "nasty, brutish, and short," placed little priority on the long-term maintenance of our bodies. With such knowledge, along with new insights from genome research, we can devise ways to target the root causes of aging and of age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and osteoporosis. Expanding his thesis of the "disposable soma," developed over twenty years of research, Kirkwood makes sense of the evolution of aging, explains how aging occurs, and answers fundamental questions like why women live longer than men. He even considers the possibility that human beings will someday have greatly extended life spans or even be free from senescence altogether. Beautifully written by one of the world's pioneering researchers into the science of aging, Time of Our Lives is a clear, original and, above all, inspiring investigation of a process all of us experience but few of us understand.

Anyone who has watched a wrinkle slowly gouge their face like a strip mine, or has been disturbed by a loss of memory, has uncomfortably confronted the human ageing process. The inexorable march of time on our bodies begs an important question: why do we have to grow old? Written in everyday language, The Clock of Ages takes us on a tour of the ageing human body - all from a research scientist's point of view. From the deliberate creation of organisms that live three times their natural span to the isolation of human genes that may allow us to do the same, The Clock of Ages also examines the latest discoveries in geriatric genetics. Sprinkled throughout the pages are descriptions of the aging of many historical figures, such as Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen, Bonaparte and Casanova. These stories underscore the common bond that unites us all: they aged, even as we do. The Clock of Ages tells you why.

MUST WE AGE? A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity's greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging. Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely—technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future—is now within reach. In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine's fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.