Ph.D. Comics Asks: What Is Aging?

You don’t have to get older. There’s a traditional alternative, but it’s unpleasant.

Aging may appear to be inevitable, but Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães, a biologist at the University of Liverpool, disputes that. He’s devoted his scholarly life to studying the process of aging.

The artists behind Ph.D. Comics, a funny webcomic about the graduate school lifestyle, produced this video. They illustrate a talk by Dr. Magalhães on the subject of aging. What is the process of aging at the cellular level? We don’t know for sure, but Dr. Magalhães explains three major hypotheses. He also describes what we may be able to learn from age-resistant animals, such as the naked mole rat.

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While the average lifespan has been increasing, the age of longest lived humans has decreased. That is because we have more reliable information. I predict that the average lifespan of someone who reaches the age of 30 will plateau at 90-95.

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I couldn't get much past the point when he said that the lifespan 150 years ago was about 40 years old. Granted, I'm sure he was just using the statistic to make a point, but it was misleading and made it sound like no one lived past the age of 40. I understand that it was just a short video in which he needed to cover a lot of information to make his point. But I don't appreciate being fed manipulative statistics for that to happen. He could have worded it differently, or left that part out.

Ok, rant over.

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