Why would you expect better? Totally predictable, pedestrian and ill-informed... not even a token attempt to look at the larger issues and obvious direction. The writer obviously has very little knowledge of what is going on..
http://www.theglobea...YLOR18&DENIED=1===============================================
Documentary swallows too much at the fountain of youthKATE TAYLOR
October 18, 2007
Tonight, The Nature of Things (CBC; 8 p.m.) offers you the tantalizing prospect of eternal youth - and some pretty immature journalism too.
In Living Forever: The Longevity Revolution, host Michael Rose tells us that humans have always sought immortality, and charts the progress of research aimed at lengthening the human lifespan. We meet scientists who have hugely increased the lifespan of worms by tinkering with their DNA and of mice by feeding them vitamins. We meet a doctor who can regrow a patient's cancerous jaw and another who can cultivate heart muscle in his lab.
It's heady stuff, but The Nature of Things does not ask why anyone would want to live past 100 or how society would cope with the massive demographic shift it predicts. Living Forever has got a bad case of not seeing the forest for the trees, and mixes serious laboratory science with futurists' grandiose predictions and some dubious private health schemes.
The show follows Kevin Perrott, a 43-year-old cancer survivor from Edmonton as he travels to Denver to visit a so-called longevity clinic, where he undergoes a battery of tests. Confusingly, Perrott then becomes a kind of witness/interviewer in the show, talking to the various researchers.
Meanwhile, host Rose, who according to the CBC website is a "charismatic gerontologist," tells us that his own groundbreaking research extending the life of fruit flies kick-started the field. If that's necessary information, maybe somebody else should be hosting.
The overall effect is to suggest that The Nature of Things is cheering for these developments, which is odd, considering how many troubling questions they raise. Who is going to pay for these improvements in medicine and who are they going to be available to? That longevity clinic in Denver, the Frontier Medical Institute, reeks of medicine-as-business: after much talk about stopping the aging process, apparently the only advice Perrott gets is to watch his cholesterol and his sugar intake.
In another scene, a doctor who is developing a technique for freezing kidneys asks him to imagine a world where he could simply book a transplant for a specific time and day. Great, but where will all these kidneys come from?
The claims that both Dr. Terry Grossman of the Frontier Medical Institute and the U.S. futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil are allowed to make are even more inflated. The former predicts lifespans of 200 or 300 years; the latter suggests that we will soon be able to pick the biological age at which we want to remain.
Little shown here really backs that up: We see worthy medical research that is going to improve old people's quality of life by repairing and even replacing bones and organs, and we see the commonsensical techniques that are now available to younger people to encourage longevity, including "caloric reduction." Yup, eat less but eat better, and you'll lead a longer, healthier life.
Living Forever points out that in the 20th century, lifespans rose from an average of 49 to an average of 75 thanks to basic improvements in public health. Of course, if you asked any of us if we would like to reverse that progress and face death in what is now middle age, we would be appalled. This program forgets, however, that many Third World countries lag far behind. Meanwhile, the next 50-per-cent increase in lifespan looks like it is going to be based on very expensive improvements in what may remain private health.
Whether we like it or not, the longevity revolution is upon us, says Rose, promising us a future filled with millions of centenarians. It's ironic that statement is made so thoughtlessly on a program usually hosted by environmentalist David Suzuki. What is it all those extra centenarians are going to do, other than consume more fossil fuels?
================================================
Indeed.... what would all those extra centenarians going to do? Obviously, being that she is likely a feeling and loving person, she likely does not realize that she has just provided a perfect example of someone under the 'pro-aging trance' I mean... to off-handedly denigrate the value of entire swaths of humanity... my parent, your parents, PEOPLE.. is frankly unbelievable to those who think about what they're saying..
).
