How Long Do You Want To Live, Anyway?

I'm not sure how long I want to live.

You know, that probably sounds silly, but I'm dead serious. (Pun intended.)

I see this trend in society that tells us we need to live as long as possible. It's like we're obsessed with longevity.

It's what drives lots of culture, politics and policy.

What's the horror of tobacco? It has the potential to shorten your life, right? Or shorten the life of the guy standing next to you when you're smoking.

Same with booze or fatty foods.

Same with risky behaviors like driving without safety belts.

So what happens? Society lashes out at the life shortening product or activity.

We make those things politically incorrect or just plain illegal.

It's against the law to ride around without a seat belt. It's certainly politically incorrect to smoke. And it probably won't be long before the fat tax kicks in and makes it costly or embarrassing to eat fast food with high fat content.

Funny thing is, virtually all those behaviors involve individual, very personal choices.

Just the kind of individual choices so many Americans have fought and died for.

I can see the potential for a reduction in freedom here, all in the name of staying alive longer.

That's what I mean when I say I am not sure how long I want to live.

Is longevity the single most important goal in life? To continue populating the planet for as long as possible?

Sometimes it seems so and it's getting more like that every day.

According to a story that moved on Scripps Howard News Service, on average, Americans now live to be almost 80.

And it seems like the goal of medical research and public health policy to increase that number.

Research released just this week bears that out.

Scientists are figuring out why low-calorie diets make people live longer. Or why thin people live longer.

They figured out long ago that mice fed a low-cal diet tend to outlive normally fed mice by about 40 percent, according to the National Institute on Aging.

The same thing happens with dogs and monkeys, too.

What happens is the low-cal diet helps the body activate certain genes that fight the aging process.

And these days, using new techniques in molecular and genetic research, scientists are starting to isolate those genes.

Some researchers hope to be able to develop drugs or supplements that will activate the longevity genes without making people go on strict diets.

You got it - a longevity pill.

Dr. Evan Hadley is associated director of the NIA. Here's what he has to say:

"'There are an increasing number of scientists who think that aging rates can be modulated ... The promise is there.'

Harvard molecular biologist David Sinclair recently released the results of a study on the topic.

"Caloric restriction has been shown to extend lifespan in almost every organism it has been tried on, from rats to fish to spiders, all the way down to worms and yeast," Sinclair said, and it is now being tested in monkeys, with preliminary positive results. "If we can understand the molecular basis of what's going on in the lower organisms, we might have a chance to understand how it works in humans, too. What we really want to do is to be able to mimic calorie restriction without having to starve ourselves."

Calorie-restricted animals remain remarkably free of the common ailments of old age, including heart disease and cancer. Applied to humans, "Instead of combating one disease at a time, we could potentially tackle numerous ones, slowing down or preventing their occurrence."

Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has discovered a gene that seems to lower the number of oxidents or free radicals. Free radicals are released when cells produce energy and have the propensity to damage the body's ability to naturally repair itself.

He formed a biotech company called Elixir that has patents on two anti-aging genes, including one called INDY, which stands for I'm Not Dead Yet.

"Our findings thus provide a model for aging that is universal and explains how calorie restriction extends life span.

"We believe that these studies could lead to the development of a drug that intervenes to strengthen the (free radical) silencing process and provides the benefits of calorie restriction without the extreme difficulty of the regimen itself," Guarente says.

Sinclair says that as more such genes are discovered, it will become feasible to develop drugs that increase these genes' activity levels. This, in theory, could significantly increase the average human life span. 'We may have the drugs as soon as five years from now,' he says.

All of this leads to my original quandary. I don't know how long I want to live.

Charlton Heston announced this week that he is suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

About 3 percent of 70-year-olds get Alzheimer's. The rate hits 50 percent by age 90.

What would the effect to society be if scientists were able to raise the average life span to 100 or so?

I suppose if the longevity guys could guarantee us an alert, productive 100 years, it might be OK.

But longevity without quality of life seems kind of useless and silly to me.

In the end, we all take what we get, but for me, I guess, 70 or 80 good years seems plenty to me.