Do your part to make humanity be the best it can be. Don't waste a moment. Embrace your youth; hold on to it for as long as you can. Fight for it. Fi… - David A. Sinclair

Even if they don't recognize its violence, children come to understand the tragedy of death surprisingly early in their lives. By the age of four or five, they know that death occurs and is irreversible.2 It is a shocking thought for them, a nightmare that is real. A "GOOD, LONG LIFE." My grandmother "Vera" sheltered Jews in World War II, lived in primitive New Guinea, and was removed from Bondi Beach for wearing a bikini. The end of her life was hard to watch. "This is just the way it goes," she said. But the person she truly was had been dead many years at that point. At first, because it's calming, most children prefer to think that there are certain groups of people who are protected from death: parents, teachers, and themselves. Between 5 and 7, however, all children come to understand the universality of death. Every family member will die. Every pet. Every plant. Everything they love. Themselves, too.

And because aging isn't a disease by the commonly accepted definition, it doesn't fit nicely into the system we've built for funding medical research, drug development, and the reimbursement of medical costs by insurance companies. Words matter. Definitions matter.

Analog data are superior for this job because they can be changed back and forth with relative ease whenever the environment within or outside the cell demands it, and they can store an almost unlimited number of possible values, even in response to conditions that have never been encountered before.25 The unlimited number of possible values is why many audiophiles still prefer the rich sounds of analog storage systems. But even though analog devices have their advantages, they have a major disadvantage. In fact, it's the reason we've moved from analog to digital. Unlike digital, analog information degrades over time — falling victim to the conspiring forces of magnetic fields, gravity, cosmic rays, and oxygen. Worse still, information is lost as it's copied. No one was more acutely disturbed by the problem of information loss than Claude Shannon, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.