The maximum limit of human life is generally thought to be 110 to 120 years. However, the vast majority of the population only lives to approximately 2/3 of this upper limit. The factors involved stem from a variety of areas including genetics, environmental, psychosocial, and lifestyle. The process of aging and the study of the relative involvement of these determinants has only recently become an area of intensive research and as a result little is truly understood with regard to the inherit mechanisms of aging.
In this ever changing world few things are certain, unfortunately one of these is death. From a historical perspective our Neolithic ancestors were found to elaborately bury their dead at Shanidar, in Iran more than 50,000 years ago suggesting they too were conscious of their impending fate and felt the tension of the unrelenting passage of time.
The first steps toward a scientific understanding of aging were taken by Mechnikov in Russia and Pearl in the United States; both proposing mechanisms which demons
Is aging a universal trait? Although difficult to prove, there does not seem to be a non-aging system. From a cosmological perspective our solar system has a finite life span while conversely physicists have recently concurred that most subatomic particles decay. Thus it seems quite likely that the intermediate levels of life also decay. As the saying goes "nothing is forever". One interesting caveat of all this "logic" is a chemical equilibrium which exists in a dynamic state will theoretically exist forever proved no work is done on the system. However, this seems to represent only a laboratory curiosity as it is extremely unlikely that these conditions would occur in nature. Again, biology in its enormously complex refuses to be encompassed by our limited definitions and as such its best to consider aging as a widespread but not universal property as we have yet to establish bacteria and monera as aging organisms.
What is aging and senescence? Currently, aging is viewed as not simply the sum of the total aggregated patholog
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