Progeria syndrome is a disorder that manifest in children
producing premature again. Kids 14 years
old can wind up having the aged body of an 80 year-old. The disease is always fatal, usually by 12 to
14 years of age. It is an interesting
phenomenon that is mystifying to researchers and apparently caused by a
mutation in the Lamin-A gene. Promising
drugs are being tested to provide a cure, but as yet no human trials have
begun.
What interests me about this disease is that we live in a
world of opposites. Black and white, yin
and yang, old and young, etc. The bible
teaches that many people in the Old Testament lived hundreds of years. I’ve certainly struggled with that idea, as I
suspect you have, and non-believers have used it for centuries to ridicule the
Bible as a book of fairy tales.
So I ask you this question:
If a mutation caused aging that kills at 14, why couldn’t there have
been a mutation that kills at 80 that occurred long ago? And furthermore, since we are so fond of
manipulating genes these days, what will happen when they discover how to
mutate that gene back? There is an
isolated tribe of people living in the jungle that has been looked at recently
and they are believed to be extraordinarily long lived…on the order of 150
years. Now, the lack of record keeping
in that primitive society has made positive claims unsupportable, but I’m
keeping an open mind.
So the big question becomes do we want a society where no
one dies, or where they live to be 1,000.
Can the earth support the number of people that would result? (Can we even support the ones we have with
the current average life span and birth rate?)
It will certainly be a different world.
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