How and Why We Age
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $49.45
Availability: N/A
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Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Written By: Leonard Phd Hayflick
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 612.67
EAN: 9780345401557
ISBN: 0345401557
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 377
Publication Date: 1996-01-23
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: 1996-01-23
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Editorial Reviews for How and Why We Age
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"How long can humans live? Is immortality possible? Just what is the aging process? The aging and inevitable death of the human body have inspired more myths and outrageous quackery than anything else subject to scientific inquiry. . . . Now comes a most fascinating book, insightful and scholarly, to provide what answers have emerged so far."
--San Francisco Chronicle
Here, at last, preeminent cell biologist Leonard Hayflick presents the truth about human aging. Based on more than thirty years of pioneering research in the field, How and Why We Age explores not only how our major biological systems change as we grow older, but also examines the intangible alterations in our modes of thinking and feeling, our moods and sexual desires, our personality traits and our memories.
With the immediacy of the latest scientific discoveries, Dr. Hayflick explains how aging affects every part of the body, and dispels many of the most persistent aging myths, to show that:
* Hearts do not naturally get weaker with age.
* Regular exercise and a low-fat diet won't slow aging.
* Curing cancer would only add two years to the average sixty-five-year-old American life. Curing heart disease, however would add fourteen years.
* Only five percent of people over the age of sixty-five are in nursing homes
* No human has lived--or probably can live--past 120 years.
Gracefully written, clearly organized, and packed with essential facts and statistics, How and Why We Age is a landmark study of the aging process for readers of all ages.
"Written in clear, nontechnical language, it is an excellent introduction to the scientific and demographic literature on this multifaceted subject."
--Nature
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Consumer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: A Mature Approach
Comment: This is the best book on aging I've read. In a lucid, even-handed style, Hayflick discusses the scientific discoveries that have been made about the aging process, and presents the evidence behind a variety of different theories of aging.
This sort of unbiased approach is rare in books on the subject. So many books on aging turn out to be mere commercials for some vitamin regimen or some rejuvenation scheme. But Hayflick isn't selling any lotions, potions, or contraptions - so on most scores, he can be trusted to be more objective.
Hayflick himself is famous for having contributed to discovering that the progressive shortening of the ends of our chromosomes (the telomeres) is associated with cellular aging. However, he doesn't advance telomere research as an exclusive gateway to understanding the aging process. He gives equal time to other theories of aging, such as the theory that it's a simple matter of wear-and-tear.
Hayflick even goes back to basics and discusses whether or not we actually are living longer than our ancestors, or whether we just seem to be because of a decline in infant mortality. He also offers clues to aging from the varying life-spans of other species. He presents a number of telling but rather depressing findings that tend to confirm the theory recently advanced by a number of authors - that our bodies are designed to repair errors and malfunctions only long enough to allow us to reproduce. After that, we are dispensable and so no further time and energy is wasted on our up-keep. We coast downhill into old age.
Hayflick continues with some telling facts about cancer that I hadn't heard before. He points out that the incidence of cancer peaks during people's sixties, then declines. Also, autopsies reveal that one-half of all their subjects have cancer when they die, although cancer wasn't what killed them. Then there are good pages on the immune system and the fact that early exposure to various antigens produces more effective immunity against those foreign bodies and possibly a heightened resistance to cancer.
I was reminded here though of the opposite opinion held by Gerald Dermer, author of "The Immortal Cell." Dermer suggested that the key to fighting cancer was to weaken the immune system in order to allow various viruses to attack. It's in the nature of most viruses to specifically invade and kill rapidly dividing cells, which defines most cancer cells. When some cancer patients contracted mumps, their cancers were eradicated.
This all goes to show that there still is no consensus about what causes aging, or about how to combat some of the diseases that strike people down before they can become jolly centenarians. So you might not live longer as a result of reading this book. But you will garner some lively, possibly fruitful information. And you might save money. You might find yourself being convinced that expensive regimens of supplements and exotic lifestyle changes have been shown to contribute little or nothing to longevity.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A first-hand account on research on the biology of aging
Comment: Hayflick's book "How and Why We Age" is an excellent, first hand account on the research that has been conducted up to now on the biology of aging. It is of note that Hayflick is one of the pioneers in the field. The book is well written and can be enjoyed both by the scientist and the layperson. One flaw, in my opinion, involves Hayflick's personal- and highly biassed- account of the supposedly erroneous conclusions of Alexis Carrel regarding the immortality of cells cultured in vitro. After presenting what seems conclusive evidence opposing Carrel's claim, Hayflick describes a conversation with a technician who worked at Carrel's lab in New York in the thirties, who discloses highly questionable procedures, and describes threats to her when she reaised issues with the lab directors. It is clearly suggested that there was scientific negligence and even misconduct, and yet, the identity of this technician is not revealed, and the accusations, half a century la! ter, are foggy and impossible to challenge. This is a very serious issue, as Hayflick himself claims to have proven Carrel wrong, through his discovery of a fixed maximum number of divisions in cells grown in vitro. However, some even more recent experiments suggest that it is Hayflick who is wrong, because the cell culture conditions he uses are highly artificial, while Carrel's more primitive, but also more robust method (cultivating a chunk of tissue) are closer to physiological conditions. The issue at stakes is by no means trivial: are cells intrinsically immortal, ageless, or do they age and die like whole organisms?
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