HEALTH To live longer, lengthen your tips Long ago, on a family trip to RICHARD BERCUSON PW/17
Florida, we stopped in St Augustine to see The Fountain of Youth. Its significance was lost on me at the time as I was a child and assumed this was a permanent state. Now with more years well behind me than ahead, I believe it’s time to revisit longevity. Hence, my fascination with a recent publication by a Nobel winner, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn (and co-author Dr. Elissa Epel), who claims our telomeres, the tips of our chromosomes, hold the key to longer life. The book is called, “The Telomere Effect: A revolutionary approach to living younger, healthier, longer.” Dr. Blackburn, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, is a molecular biologist, which simply means that, as a dinner guest, she’d ruin my self-esteem in about one sentence. Still, I’m attracted to the title for a
Science tells us lots of things,
most of which I believe without ever seeking proof. My reasoning is simple. Anyone who can get through high school chemistry and physics and make sense of it all will have a better handle on scientific research than rubes like me. Besides, whenever a clever
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person with more letters after her name than in it states it is possible to live much longer, I buy in. I would like to live long enough to see Tom Brady’s records broken by someone who is both ugly and not a Trump supporter, or one of my grandkids become an Oscar winner and say my name on national TV (“And to Grandpa Bercuson, thanks for all those diaper changes.”).
couple of reasons. I consider anything deemed revolutionary to be worthy of my attention. When Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin suggested to the French government they ought to find a more humane way to execute people, he sold it as “a revolutionary approach to getting ahead of the peasants.” Boy, was he ever right. Secondly, the title implies rather strongly that by reading this tome, my knees will stop aching, my hair will revert to its original colour, and I can resume eating Ghirardelli chocolate cheesecake with no midriff effect. There are plenty of websites
to explain DNA, chromosomes, and telomeres. As a thorough and professional journalist, I really should
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