Product Description

The conquest of aging is now within our grasp. It hasn't arrived yet, writes Michael R. Rose, but a scientific juggernaut has started rolling and is picking up speed. A long tomorrow is coming.
In The Long Tomorrow, Rose offers us a delightfully written account of the modern science of aging, spiced with intriguing stories of his own career and leavened with the author's engaging sense of humor and rare ability to make contemporary research understandable to nonscientists. The book ranges from Rose's first experiments while a graduate student--counting a million fruit fly eggs, which took 3,000 hours over the course of a year--to some of his key scientific discoveries. We see how some of his earliest experiments helped demonstrate that "the force of natural selection" was key to understanding the aging process--a major breakthrough. Rose describes how he created the well-known Methuselah Flies, fruit flies that live far longer than average. Equally important, Rose surveys the entire field, offering colorful portraits of many leading scientists and shedding light on research findings from around the world. We learn that rodents given fifteen to forty percent fewer calories live about that much longer, and that volunteers in Biosphere II, who lived on reduced caloric intake for two years, all had improved vital signs. Perhaps most interesting, we discover that aging hits a plateau and stops.
Popular accounts of Rose's work have appeared in The New Yorker, Time magazine, and Scientific American, but The Long Tomorrow is the first full account of this exciting new science written for the general reader.
"Among his peers, Rose is considered a brilliantly innovative scientist, who has almost single-handedly brought the evolutionary theory of aging from an abstract notion to one of the most exciting topics in science."--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #774138 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Rose, an authority on gerontology, uses evolutionary biology to frame the problem of aging, contrasting the drive to reproduce in youth with the ability to survive into old age. In short, according to his research, the Victorians were right: sex is death. The evolutionary pressure of reproducing at an early age seems to have the side effect of causing early aging. Rose's explanation of his theory is so clear, it seems ridiculous that anyone could have conceived of another explanation. But whether this theory will ever be used to slow down human aging is unclear. Rose relates the progress of aging research in an autobiographical format. So, interspersed with experiments on long-lived fruit flies, there are almost voyeuristic glimpses into Rose's own life: the suicide of his brother, the murder of his brother-in-law, the tragic end of his first marriage. The result is a book that flops between the evocative stories of one man's life in science and the somewhat drier explanation of that science. Nevertheless, Rose gives a balanced evaluation of the study of aging and sheds a little more light on one of biology's greatest mysteries.
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Review

"Engaging and illuminating.... Rose is successful both in capturing the imagination of young people with little exposure to formal science and in convincing advanced researchers in other fields that understanding evolutionary biology is important to their science and to their careers. This is a significant achievement."--American Scientist
"Well-written and entertaining.... Rose's innovative studies of the past 25 years have revealed much about the influence of natural selection on aging and have opened up several intriguing possibilities for extending human lives. Here he relates how many of his most significant discoveries were made, interlacing lucid explanations of their significance with interesting accounts of how his own sometimes difficult life experiences influenced his research, and frankly discusses his failures and successes."--Library Journal
"In this hugely enjoyable book, Rose provides a thorough but never too technical survey of one of the most instructive strands of the biology of aging--manipulating the rate of aging by accelerating evolution. If his attempt to extend his studies to mice had succeeded, we might be much closer now to extending human lifespan."--Aubrey de Grey
"Michael Rose is more qualified than anyone currently working in the field of aging to write about the evolutionary development of aging in biological organisms, and he presents us here with a clear, easy-to-digest overview of the field. We meet the leaders and the busy-bee scientists; the believers and the nay-sayers. His final summary of the possibilities for postponing human aging is one of the most accurate and believable to appear in recent years. But most of all, Rose gives us a sense of what it is like to be a living, working scientist. Far and away one of the best-rounded, deeply satisfying accounts of a scientist and his work I have read. Warts and all!" --William R. Clark, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Sex and the Origins of Death and A Means to an End
"Michael Rose has developed novel and important views on the future of human longevity that draw from his pioneering laboratory experiments and his deep understanding of evolutionary biology. Rose's leads his readers on a fascinating journey from fly cages to the Biosphere, and beckons to the future which may not be so far ahead." --Caleb E. Finch, ARCO/ Keischnick Professor of Gerontology and Biological Science, Andrus Gerontology Center, University of Southern California, and author of Chance, Development and Aging
"Rose is not only an original scientist--he was among the first to demonstrate the extraordinary plasticity of aging in fruit flies after just a dozen generations of selective breeding--he is also a superb writer, and this book can be understood by anyone who ever took high school biology. But even those of us who are professional scientists will enjoy reading this book because of the global perspective he provides on the whole field of gerontology. By carefully reviewing his decades-long career with all the blind alleys that are commonplace for anyone who pioneers a new field, Rose gives us this perspective." --L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder, Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group, and Stem-Cell Researcher at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine

About the Author

Michael R. Rose is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Irvine and is Director of the University of California Intercampus Research Program on Experimental Evolution.

Customer Reviews

Good book to read, great with evolution
This book was amazing and awesome. You will learn a lot about aging from fruit flies. When I finished this book, I was surprised that a new author's first book was really good. I think biologist and scientist will enjoy this book.

Summary of What Causes us to Grow Old
Evolutionary biology attempts to explain how we age by looking at genes within our DNA that either allow or force our bodies to age. Unfortunately in nature's desire to populate the planet, it doesn't select for these genes as dominate. Nature makes us want to have offspring young. Just look at the teenage pregnancy rate.

Artificially we have learned that selective breeding in race horses, show dogs, prize winning cattle, and other animals have produced new animals with desirable traits. Dr. Rose's research used fruit flies to produce new generations that lived longer.

Could similar selective breeding in humans produced a longer lived race. Probably, but it would take centuries. Can we extend longevity through diet, drugs and medicine - yes, we already have, and are continuing to do so. Combining all of this, Dr. Rose has written a book that summarized the current state of knowlege in the field.

The science fiction readers of Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long books reflect a similar story, the hero is the result of centuries of such breeding.

What we can learn about aging from fruit flies
This is mostly a memoir about Professor Rose's career as an evolutionary biologist who studies aging in fruit flies and extrapolates that knowledge to humans. The "Long Tomorrow" in the title refers to his belief that "it is still reasonable to hope that eventually the great mass of people will be able to control their aging through pharmaceuticals and medicine." (p. 134)

Rose sees senescence as being the inadvertent product of the evolutionary process. There is no single gene that controls aging. Instead hundreds of genes are involved so that the prospect of a single elixir or technique being developed that would magically postpone aging and death is highly unlikely. Almost as an aside and incidentally, Rose explains why we age and eventually die. His is the standard view that the evolutionary process becomes less and less in force as we get further and further from the onset of our reproductive age until "the force" (as he calls it) is not in effect at all.

This is a very tricky and subtle argument that takes a bit of reflection to fully understand. I know when I first encountered it some years ago I found it hard to follow. It is still very difficult to express. But let me give it a try.

Rose uses the analogy of Ford's Model T automobile. As the story goes Henry Ford wanted to know which parts of his cars almost never wore out. He found out what they were and directed his production staff to make them cheaper so that they would wear out at about the same time as the rest of the car, thereby making his cars cheaper to produce while increasing his profits without decreasing the longevity of his cars. Rose says that nature follows a similar parsimonious production with its organisms. For example, genes coded to allow a body part to last a thousand years would not be selected (or unselected for that matter). Indeed any gene or genes that code for processes lasting past reproductive age would exist in the genome only in a random fashion (if at all). Such genes would randomly appear and randomly die out.

What this means is that after the onset of reproduction everything begins to break down in a more or less random fashion. The environment acts upon us in a multitude of ways. Little insults pile up. Some cells go wildly reproductive and cancers develop. Other cells die due to something we ingested or because of accidents. Microorganisms use our tissues for their reproduction or subsistence (e.g., viral and bacterial infections). Toxicity kills off cells or changes their metabolism so that the cells no longer function properly. Arteries become clogged and blood fails to flow to some tissues which die of starvation...etc. Like Ford's Model T, first one thing goes wrong and then another until finally something stops us from running altogether.

Now, if we can fix one thing and then another and then another, our death can be postponed. If we become very, very good at fixing, death can be postponed for a long time. Such is the argument. The problem is that we are not really good at fixing things that go wrong with our bodies. Most of the fixing that takes place is through the body's own devices. Tissues are repaired, assaults to the skin patched up, bone tissues fused (after being set properly--that we can do). But we can't stop the growth of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the body without killing parts of the body itself. We can't repair a brain that has been deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes. We can't regrow cartilage that has worn away. And so on.

So the "long tomorrow" will be gradual in coming and the length of that day will grow by small increments.

What I don't understand is this: why isn't the reproductive age of organisms itself indefinite? Or, to put the question another way, why should the young and inexperienced have a reproductive advantage over the old and experienced?

The answer appears to be almost circular in that because older organisms have bodies that are already beginning to break down, they are at a disadvantage to younger organisms whose bodies are in peak form. This is why members of the opposite sex (especially males) choose the young for mates. Or to be more precise, this is why the young are attracted to the young; indeed why all are attracted sexually to those at the peak of their reproductive lives. The young have a longer future and so will be better able to provide for their offspring. The fact that the opposite sex is biased in its choice further accentuates the reproductive advantage of the young.

For a more detailed explanation of why we age, expressed in a different way, see my review of The Biology of Death: Origins of Mortality (2004) by Andre Klarsfeld and Frederic Revah. The point is there is no one-sentence explanation of why we age. It's like trying to explain a complex process in a single phrase. It can't be done.

Those interested in Rose's career (and its ups and downs) and the nature of his work with fruit flies will find this interesting. But for the general reader this book is not the best for understanding why we age and die. There are a number of better books (none of them completely satisfying, by the way). In addition to the opus cited above, here are three others: Austad, Steven N. Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering about the Body's Journey Through Life (1997); Clark, William R. A Means to an End: The Biological Basis of Aging and Death (1999); and Hayflick, Leonard How and Why We Age (1994).