The Future Of Longevity

"How We Age

By Coleen T. Murphy

Princeton, 464 pages, $35

Imagine my family's incredulity when, a decade ago, my perimenopausal 46-year-old sister announced an unexpected (though welcomed) pregnancy on Facebook. Already the parents of four children, she and her husband upended their routines and returned to diaper changes and 2 a.m. feedings. At the time I recalled that my paternal grandmother had given birth to her eighth child at 39 and died just shy of 100 -- did this pattern mean something beyond robust fertility?

In "How We Age," Coleen T. Murphy, a geneticist and professor of molecular biology at Princeton, posits a connection between advanced maternal age and potential life span, one of many provocative ideas in her meticulous if at points pedantic book on the hard science behind longevity. And while the details are pursued in the laboratory, her fundamental idea can be glimpsed in the lives of ordinary families.

 "If we view successful childbirth as a healthspan biomarker," she observes, "we can see that women who are able to have kids (naturally) later in life are more likely to live longer; being able to have kids late, therefore, might be correlated with other healthspan metrics, as well as long life. . . . The first sign of what might eventually end up as a really long life is the ability to have kids later than normal."

We follow the author deep into the knowns and unknowns of myriad metabolic pathways related to aging; readers may want a medical dictionary on hand, or at least Wikipedia. Her summaries of the field's history and current studies are impressive, although her tone occasionally lapses into textbook-tedious. Ms. Murphy reminds us of the intriguing Blue Zones, regions of the world where centenarians are most common, from Okinawa to Sardinia to California's communities of Seventh-Day Adventists. Her sweep is vast as she discourses on diet, exercise, insulin signaling and the genes that affect longevity. In her final, superb chapters, she takes on the associations between the human microbiome and cognitive deterioration, wrapping up with a look ahead to emerging drug therapies.

Ms. Murphy's research revolves around the roundworm C. elegans, which boasts a simple and well-understood cellular structure that allows the author and her colleagues to investigate the mechanisms of aging and how DNA is expressed in an array of cells. It can be challenging to imagine our relationship to such organisms, but Ms. Murphy champions this "powerful genetic model system" that gives scientists a means to seek fundamental interactions between genes and environment that can foster not only long life but extended health.

At the same time, an ideological argument runs through much of the book. Ms. Murphy finds connections between her data and the enduring inequities that women confront amid our raggedy quilt of a healthcare system, and she also inveighs against the institutional barriers that female researchers face when juggling careers and parental duties. More broadly, "How We Age" takes the position that science never truly rises above politics and laments the ceaseless challenges inflicted on poor and marginalized communities. At points the focus tilts and the aggressive social warrior trumps the exacting clinician, with too many "seems," "mays," "mights" and "appears to be" in the service of a bias.

The discussion of sex in "How We Age" is peppered with asides, a few of them deliberately amusing, playing to the feminist gallery. Ms. Murphy provides a tongue-in-cheek analysis of how her roundworm lab subjects shrink after mating with males, labeling the phenomenon "an act of pure evil on the part of the male." Elsewhere she references an article about her lab's findings from the website Jezebel, praising the attention-grabbing headline: "Sex Is 'Kiss of Death' for Female Worms because PATRIARCHY." Who knew that Mother Nature was such a misogynist?

Male dominance in the field of fertility medicine comes in for criticism: At a conference, Ms. Murphy asks a table full of male fertility doctors how far in advance a woman can know she's about to reach the end of her childbearing ability. "Months!" is the cheerful answer she gets -- and she expresses dismay that no one in the group seems able to acknowledge that family planning requires a longer time frame. Her skepticism is fair, but her generalizations about male doctors are not: Thousands of couples have welcomed beautiful, healthy children into their homes thanks to the skills and guidance of male reproductive clinicians, as my own spouse and I can attest.

Ms. Murphy acknowledges, in passing, the life-expectancy gap between men and women -- there was a small but statistically noticeable bump during the Covid pandemic, from 4.8 years to 5.8 -- but discusses it only in terms of women's life expectancy, without exploring the other side of the coin: the dwindling life spans of men. Suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the U.S., with men four times as likely to kill themselves as women; the highest rate is among middle-aged white men, a data point Ms. Murphy ignores. This is a noteworthy flaw in an otherwise fascinating account, a bizarre erasure at the very moment boys and men around the globe are falling behind in education and emotional well-being. As science "How We Age" hits many of its marks -- Ms. Murphy is an assiduous researcher and thinker -- but her achievement is marred by such a skewed perspective.

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Mr. Cain is the author of "This Boy's Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing." [1]

1. The Future Of Longevity. Cain, Hamilton.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 Jan 2024: A.13.