Skip to main content

The Long Tomorrow – Michael R. Rose *****

A mixture of a book on the science of aging – gerentology (at least as applied to fruit flies) and an exploration of how a career in science develops, this title by Michael Rose joins the few really good books that give an idea of the realities of being a scientist.
The book starts at a conference discussing human aging, where Rose is shocked that some attendees wouldn’t want human lifespan increased, primarily for theological reasons – and this is very entertaining – but the really excellent part is when we get to follow his career. When he makes a start as a postgraduate, the last thing he wants to work in is aging. What’s interesting about aging to someone around the age of 20? But he takes up a post, primarily to be near his academic hero.
As often seems the case in true science, his progress is a mix of intended direction and re-focussing error as he begins what is to be a more than 30 year relationship with the fruit fly Drosophilia. Just occasionally Rose tends to lose the reader with his science – not that what he’s describing is hugely complex (he leaves out the messy maths), but there are one or two places you have to re-read to make sure what he intended. But these are rarities in what is generally both an enjoyable and very personal journey where you will discover as much about Rose himself as you will about fruit flies and about aging.
His great, and almost accidental, discovery is that it is possible to breed Methuselah flies with an unusually long lifespan, from which he hopes that it should be possible to get a bet understanding of the various genetic factors that make all animals age, and hence in the future to be able to do something about it. In the 1990s, he dabbled with biotechnology spinoffs, as everyone seemed to be at the time, and two or three times came close to being involved in a successful life extension company without ever quite making it. Somehow, the reader is glad about this – Rose keeps ending up back where he ought to be, with his fruit flies.
One of the most impressive revelations is when Rose is writing an article for a magazine, years after first starting working in the area of aging. The magazine asks him about relevance to the extension of human life, and genuinely isn’t until that point that he realizes that his work may be more than just a study of fruit flies. (It helps, as Rose points out, that by then he was getting to the sort of age when you first realize you really are going to die at some point.)
In a final chapter, Rose summarizes the position on the control of aging. We shouldn’t blindly go along with the likes of Ray Kurzweil who blithely assure us that people alive today have a chance of effectively living for ever, but even so he is very positive about the opportunities for understanding the different factors contributing to aging, and being able to do something about them, this century. A warm, highly recommended popular science book by a real scientist.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more