Jackson Snyder presents www.Bible-News.com

"Oh to be young again!" Aging has always been a natural side effect of longevity. The aging process eventually turns young, strong men and women into weak and wrinkled "elderly". For many, time becomes a curse that steals their energy and leaves them with a multitude of problems from achy joints to organs that just don't work reliably anymore. Michael Fossel, clinical professor of medicine at Michigan State University, believes that the aging process is a disease that causes unnecessary suffering. He and his team of researchers have been seeking to find ways to treat aging people and to renew their youths.

Fossel and his team discovered that living cells have a genetic programming that works like a clock telling time. As people grow older, there is a change in gene expression that tells the cells, ‘you're getting old' and they stop functioning as well. The scientists have learned how to "reset" the aging clock in skin tissue cells, causing those cells to work the same way that they did when they were young. Rather than treating the symptoms of aging – hair loss, osteoarthritis and so on – Fossel wants to focus on the actual cause of aging.

Australian biologist Dr Robin Holliday is skeptical. "Ageing is multi-causal," he argues. "It's built into our bodies. Things eventually go wrong. The brain has very limited capacity for repair. So has the heart. There's damage to DNA, proteins, membranes . . . it's a tall order to stop all that [being damaged]."

While Fossel has been successful in resetting the "clock" for skin cells, he is not sure how well the process will work in every other kind of cell, or in a human being as a whole. "The question that we want to ask ourselves is 'can we do this to people?'" he told a group of scientists at a Sydney conference on longevity earlier this month.

"For example," he said, "in your heart, when people die of heart attacks they die because their vessels have problems, and that clock is set right in the cells that lie in the vessels and what we can do is reset those clocks. So the question is what happens when we do it? In the lab it works beautifully, but again it's different trying it in people."

Still, he believes the technology has great potential to slow the aging process and lengthen lives, though he is not sure what the limit would be. "There's a guy at Cambridge who says it's 5000 years," he said. "Personally, at a guess I'd say it probably would be a couple of centuries."

Beyond the many ethical and practical issues involved in such research, Fossel's discoveries in working with skin cells raises interesting theories on how the aging process works. In Genesis, God created Adam and Eve with the ability to live forever. When they sinned against Him, God exiled Adam and his wife from the Garden "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever" (Gen 3:22-24). Still, even without the fruit of life, Adam lived 930 years (Gen 5:3,4). As time went on, humans progressively lived shorter lives. Noah's son Shem lived 600 years (Gen 11:10-11). Shem's grandson Salah lived "only" 433 years, and his grandson Peleg lived 239 years (Gen 11). Abraham lived to be 175 (Gen 25:7). According to Moses, 70-80 was considered a normal life expectancy by his time (Psalm 90:10).

What has caused man to age more quickly than in times past? Genetic deterioration is certainly an answer. The ancients could marry their close relatives (Abraham married his half-sister Sarah) but we can't do the same without the risk of compounding similar genetic weaknesses and producing deformed children. Nutrition and pollution are issues as well. However, it is interesting to think that perhaps our genetic clocks have been wound down. It is also worth noting that while these scientists seek to reset those clocks right now, God has promised to give His people brand new bodies that have no 'clocks' or corruption (1Cor 15:51-58). In the meanwhile, only God knows how long each of us will live in this life, and so Moses prays, "..teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom," (Psalm 90:12).

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