Overview

"As recent articles about ""the graying of America"" suggest, a demographic revolution is well underway. The number of people living into extreme old age is increasing dramatically. By the year 2050 one in five of the world's population, including the developing countries, will be 65 or older, a fact which presages profound medical, biological, philosophical, and political changes in the coming century. In Time of Our Lives, Tom Kirkwood unfolds some of the deepest mysteries of medical science while demolishing some of the most persistent misconceptions. He overturns the almost universally held belief that aging is either necessary or inevitable--it isn't--and debunks the idea that there exists a ""death gene"" that evolved to inhibit population growth. Instead, Kirkwood shows that we age because our genes, evolving at a time when life was ""nasty, brutish, and short,"" placed little priority on the long-term maintenance of our bodies. With such knowledge, along with new insights from genome research, we can devise ways to target the root causes of aging and of age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and osteoporosis. Expanding his thesis of the ""disposable soma,"" developed over twenty years of research, Kirkwood makes sense of the evolution of aging, explains how aging occurs, and answers fundamental questions like why women live longer than men. He even considers the possibility that human beings will someday have greatly extended life spans or even be free from senescence altogether. Beautifully written by one of the world's pioneering researchers into the science of aging, Time of Our Lives is a clear, original and, above all, inspiring investigation of a process all of us experience but few of us understand."

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9780195128246

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Reviews

An entertaining and informative look at our current understanding of aging.... Kirkwood is an amiable, intelligent guide at the forefront of a fast-changing field. --Kirkus Reviews<br> This is a truly wonderful book. Kirkwood writes with great clarity and sensitivity about a topic that concerns us all: why we grow old and what happens to our bodies as we age.... It is an enthralling and liberating read --Frances Ashcroft, University of Oxford<br> Kirkwood, one of our leading gerontologists, has blended his breathtaking knowledge of the field with his superb wit and wisdom to achieve an engaging and comprehensive overview of what we presently know about the puzzle of human aging. --Leonard Hayflick, author of How and Why We Age<br>

Author Information

Tom Kirkwood is Professor of Biological Gerontology at the University of Manchester and Director of the Manchester-Newcastle Joint Center on Aging. He is a member of several international editorial boards and scientific committees, an adviser to the World Health Organization, and winner of the Heinz Karger Prize on cellular aging. Mr. Kirkwood lives in Manchester, England.

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