Telomeres and Cell Aging
Date posted: 30.12.2010
Preface
From
Cells, Aging, and Human Disease
From
Cells, Aging, and Human Disease
The major danger of technology is not that we may play God, but that we may refuse to work at being fully human. Compassion is the highest of human motivations, allowing us first to understand, then to prevent, the suffering, fear, and tragedy of others. Our enemy is not death, which will forever be with us, but avoidable suffering, which need not be. The ubiquity of disease is no more ordained than is the rarity of individual compassion, but it is in our power to lessen the former through our dedication to the latter.
The aim is to understand how diseases of aging occur, that we may prevent human suffering. Helping those around us is not “playing God”, but is, if it has a sacred meaning, God’s work. To denigrate this dedication, to avoid our responsibility, to ignore the suffering of those around us is neither human, nor forgivable. We cannot assume that if someone suffers, the creator of the universe must have wanted it that way. Our ignorance of divine intent is no justification for a lack of mercy.
Finally, the age of those who suffer does not mitigate nor alter our responsibility to them. Few are callous enough to ignore the suffering of children, some would ignore and trivialize suffering in the elderly. Having been children, perhaps, we remember our own helplessness and fear, yet remain unable to predict or understand the suffering of those who walk ahead of us in time. Compassion for the young is common; an equal compassion for the old should be no less equally common. Its lack indicts our basest egoism and rests upon a willful ignorance of life.
