8 04 03

Scientists
at Harvard Medical School are looking into the possibility of
extending our life spans to something like 350 years instead of
the 80 or so we now seem to be stuck with. While the likelihood
of this happening is some years away, these learned men say that
life can certainly be extended and certainly improved as the
population continues to get older. They expect to have some sort
of life extending drug out in the next five to ten years.

This new and
exciting research is based upon experiments conducted using
fruit flies. It seems that fruit flies carry some sort of twin
gene which was transplanted in conjunction with a human gene
which made the fruit flies have a 40% longer lifespan. I don’t
recall too much about fruit flies, but I seem to remember they
have a life span of about a day, so this new technology would
allow them to eat your bananas for lunch on day number two. A
vast improvement and one that would certainly put this scientist
in the Fruit Fly Hall of Fame, if ever there was one.

Another
experiment was conducted using mice which had gotten their diets
reduced by about 30% of their normal intake. The scientists
working on this part of the study noted that underfed mice were
more active and much healthier than their fat counterparts. How
any mouse in this country could be underfed and escape the
wraith of P.E.T.A. is beyond me. I suspect it won’t be long
before this testing is stopped. They also noticed similar
results in fleas, but didn’t comment on their food reduction,
which I would imagine would be hard to measure.

One of the
doctors conducting the research stated that he felt we could all
have ‘biblical’ life spans. I find this hard to believe. Mainly
because folks who lived to be very old in the Bible weren’t
exposed to the same type of stress that we have managed to
create for ourselves. To prove my point, I challenge you to find
any reference to mortgage interest rates in the Bible. Did
Methuselah have to worry about the erratic stock markets? Never
in his life time. Look at Moses; you see any concern for gas
prices? In his day it was manna from heaven. Wake up each day
and there it was, God grub just lying on the ground for you to
pick up. Oh, sure you say they had to wander around the desert
for forty years and it was hot. But that was only because they
wouldn’t stop and ask for directions and besides it’s a dry heat
over there. Or maybe they were just used to it and didn’t know
any difference.

In any case
look what we’ve done to ourselves, filled up our days with cell
phones, pages, telephones, fax machines, e-mail messages, SPAM,
and twenty four hour news coverage. Not to mention SARS, AIDS,
FBI, CIA, AT&T, the IRS and telemarketers at dinnertime. None of
these were any threat to Moses. He just had to deal with the
Angel of Death and the Pharaoh, real stress makers in and of
themselves, but these seemed to me to have been temporary and
not with him for his entire life. Try missing an installment
payment on your car and then you can talk to me about stress.