"For scientist David Gems, it is particularly exciting to work on big questions that remain unanswered, especially ones whose solution promises great benefits for humanity. The aging field is currently a wild frontier of science, in which many of the main questions are only now beginning to be answered. In this it is akin to cosmology in the 16th century of Copernicus and Kepler, or chemistry in the 19th century of Dalton and Mendeleev. Why is understanding aging so important? These days, the main diseases that darken our days are no longer the likes of small pox and diphtheria, but rather such conditions as heart failure, cancer, and Alzheimers disease, that predominantly affect us in later life. Understanding and treating these diseases along with scores of other late-life ailments is now medicines biggest challenge. The key to curing a disease is understanding its cause. It is no special surprise that attempts to develop cures for Alzheimers disease have met with little success, since the aging process that causes it is not yet understood. Solution of the great puzzle that is aging is sure to create a wellspring of future medical benefits.
The biology of aging is field full of mystery, wonder and unanswered questions. In the natural world, animals and plants show marvelous variation in life span, ranging from creatures that age and die within days of reaching maturity, to ones that live for many hundred of years and appear not to age at all. All this teaches us that aging is, to a large extent, the alterable product of the process of evolution, and an inherited biological process specified by our genes. Yet the nature of the aging process itself, that is specified by the action of genes, has long remained a mystery - though the scientists that study it have many theories. Although the big-picture explanation of the science of aging remains elusive, the mid-2000s saw the birth of a new synthesis of knowledge of the biology of aging. This book is an effort to explain this new synthesis and even to develop it further"-- Provided by publisher.