In a new documentary, To Age or Not to Age, which opens today in New York, filmmaker Robert Kane Pappas explores whether science might be able to extend human life span...potentially indefinitely. In the last few decades, prominent scientists have discovered genes that regulate the aging process and are working on drugs that might mimic or amplify the positive effects of these genes.
Before that, researchers (and the rest of us) just assumed that aging was pretty much inevitable. But cellular biologists have discovered that there are certain genes that can make animals—and possibly humans—resistant to the major diseases that come as you get older: Cancer, heart disease, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. Pappas raises the tantalizing possibility that medical science might be able to wipe them all out with a single drug. Whoa.
Of course, the question remains: Do you even want to live forever? One of Pappas's interview subjects laughingly asks, "Can you imagine how you'd look if you were 1,000 years old?"
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