Immortal Turtles

Turtles - in addition to psychically being able to predict the weather - are practically immortal. In Great Britain a turtle who was documented to be two hundred and sixty two years old recently passed on. No particular cause of death was given. The reason turtles are so long lived is that they don't have cellular aging the same way most other mammals, that is they don't have the little teleomeres at the end of their cells that wear out as the cells divide.

Evolutionarily speaking, turtles are about the only animal where there is a reproductive advantage to having older parents. The advantage is that the female turtle gains experience in learning the best places to lay eggs that are safe from predators so that the older turtle parents actually have more surviving offspring. Mostly it's just the opposite with most species where it's more advantageous to breed young, breed often, then die.

So that's the way it is with turtles. What about humans? We don't live as long as turtles, but we live longer than anything else that has a heart beep. Anyways, on Sixty Minutes there was a doctor who does 'age management medicine', that is, he prescribes for his patients a level of hormone supplementation equivelant to a youthful human. The Doctor was sixty seven years old and as far as his physique: he looked pretty good. Apparently he's been a life-long body-builder and his body looked like that of a thirty or so year old body-builder. His skin looked pretty leathery and weather-beaten, but other than that he had a real spring in his step.

Supplementing hormones isn't new, but it's sort of been in the closet, mostly Hollywood stars have been hip to this. There was a book by a Doctor named Regelson called The Super Hormone promise that described this. Basically it's sort of the same as using steroids, but only to the point where they would have been normally. So far there's no real proof that it extends life at all, but it does seem to extend vitality. Dr. Regelson has, by the way, passed on and I can't find out exactly what happened. He was an old guy, for sure, but not a super old guy.

Speaking of which, have you seen Barry Bonds lately? Now that he's off the steroids he looks an awful lot like Kirby Puckett right before Kirby said Goodbye forever. Barry doesn't look like the former buff athlete that he did before the testosterone. He looks like a chubby middle-aged man - which come to think of it, is what he is. Bonds is dispairing of ever surpassing Hank Aaron's home-run record, complaining of physical stuff, like a knee injury, shoulder injury and ... oh, no steroids.

He should be allowed to get them. In fact, all athletes should be allowed to put whatever they want into their bodies so they can be the best they can be. It's their bodies and if they're willing to risk their health and their lives to break world records and become very rich in the process then let's let them do it. It'll be a whole bunch more entertaining and we won't have to spend a dime anymore on testing or pretending we care about testing.

I think I really would like to see government sponsored hormone supplementation for all senior citizens. The one thing that supplementing with hormones does is repair and rebuild tissue, and frailty is a major cause of disability in our aging population. Probably it won't extend life much, and certainly not maximum life span, but it will for sure extend the vibrant part of life. Plus - and this might be my real reason - I'd just love to see eighty year old men bench-pressing four hundred pounds.