You can argue about their policies—who lies more, who’s taken which money from what lobbyist, who spends money more effectively—but to me the difference between likely candidates McCain and Obama is their age; the former is my dad’s age, the latter is mine.
From a biologic perspective, what does it mean “to age”? Why do some folks, like the vigorous and resilient Sen. McCain, seem to “age better” than others? Can we, as Aubrey De Grey champions in his new book, end aging? Should we? What ages us? Diet? Environment? Stress? If we relieve stress productively, through religious or other communities, will we live longer?
We’ve known for a century or so that speed of aging, across all species, is related to how much is eaten and how fast it’s metabolized (elephants have a resting heart beat of 35 beats per minute and live roughly 60 years, while rat hearts beat 400 times a minute and they live 2 years). At least part of why we age is that metabolism, while producing the energy we need, also produces oxygen radicals, which damage vital proteins in the cell. So, the more you eat, the more metabolism, the more radicals, the more damage, the more aging.
Some of that damage occurs to the enzymes (called telomerases) that maintain our chromosome ends (called telomeres), which get shorter every time our cells divide: another biologic “downside” of a necessary process. Our chromosomes, remember, contain all of our DNA, all our genes. And every time our cells divide, which can be frequent depending on the cell type, they have to make an exact copy of all our DNA. If the health of your chromosome ends suffers, the health of your cells suffers, and they die sooner. The length of your chromosome ends is thus an excellent indicator of your cellular age. Stem cells are immortal until called on to specialize, at which point they divide and age.
Is it possible to have cells younger than your years? Back to folks like Sen. McCain, whom you might describe as younger in spirit and energy than in years; people who, given their very stressful lives, seem astoundingly resilient. Here is one, still only one, amazing study that sheds some light on the question. Some telomere scientists got together with some psychologists and studied folks leading extremely stressful lives: mothers who take full-time care of their own chronically ill children.
Here’s what they found: the more stressed women (by either objective or subjective measure) had shorter telomeres, less telomerase activity, and more damage due to metabolism. The longer the mothers had been taking care of their children, the worse things were biologically. The more stressed the mothers perceived themselves to be, again the worse the biologic markers. This was true even among controls: women who matched the mothers in all ways except their high stress levels. Mothers of the same apparent age are younger or older biologically depending on their life experience and how they interpret that life experience.
Whoa. We still need to answer a few miles worth of questions before we can fully connect concepts like “life experience” and “perception” to chromosome ends and enzymes, but the door is open. This door, by the way, connecting biologic and social (or call it “scientific and religious” or “mind and body”) explanations, is being opened more and more often, courtesy of contemporary genomics, genetics, and neuroscience. This is a very exciting, very dangerous door. Just on the other side of the door, with banners waving, are folks like Dr. de Grey preaching that if we have the technology and a sufficient understanding of the mechanism, we can simply stop fill-in-the-blank (in de Grey’s case: the aging process).
Speaking of such questions: do we age more slowly if we’re religious? Though many interesting studies look at the connection between health and religion they tend to be problematic. It does appear that the more you’re around people and part of a community, formally religious or not, the healthier and less risky your behaviors tend to be. Although it’s still not clear if you’re healthier because you go to church or vice versa, it does make sense (and there’s research out there to support it) that good health requires outlets for “productive stress release”—something religious and other community groups often provide.
So, if stress, perceived or real, speeds up aging, and if religion does indeed ease stress, it does make a powerful case for the health benefits of religious practice. In fact, maybe we like religious belief in candidates because we see it as a marker of stability—in the same way marriage and a family might be.
Should we vote for someone based on their age? Probably not. But rather than question the candidates on their age, perhaps we should ask them about that door and the beliefs and policies they will inevitably help shape around it.
