Ageless Quest: One Scientist's Search for Genes that Prolong Youth
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, $19.95, 2003 ISBN 0879696524 | ISBN: 0-879-69652-4
Almost since the dawn of the human race, mortality must have struck the more imaginative individuals as something that could be overcome. The first documented example of this quest for immortality can be found in the Gilgamesh epos, in which the hero makes every attempt to rescue his lover and companion, Enkidu, from death. After Gilgamesh, many bright and resourceful individuals followed his footsteps trying to beat the odds and find ways to preserve life. With the emergence of modern science in the nineteenth century, a more down-to-earth approach became the norm, and our current focus on human disease in the biomedical sciences descends directly from that no-nonsense attitude. Quests for immortality moved out of the mainstream and became the territory of quacks and charlatans. It is often forgotten that, as Nietzsche argued in his Frohliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), scientists would not have emerged and blossomed were it not for the magicians, witches and alchemists who preceded them and whetted their appetite for hidden and forbidden powers. Indeed, creative scientists do not find their spiritual ancestors primarily among the logical and rational minds but among those individuals who had set their minds on turning lead into gold. In biology and medicine, the science of aging is probably the battlefield par excellence for investigators dreaming to be the ubermensch, climbing the summit of ultimate human fulfillment—provided, of course, that they can afford the risk of operating outside the main stream.
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