‘I decided I don’t mind being old. It’s relaxing.’
A brilliant quote from my most excellent friend VH.
I still can’t
work out why the spelling of this word is different on the east versus the west
of the Atlantic Ocean....anyway.... There are so many advantages to
becoming older, and our societies should be keen to exploit the benefits as
our populations skew to reach the bigger birthdays. Maybe the Queen will have
to raise the age at which a birthday message is received, as many more people
reach their 100th year.
Of course our work is principally
to do with how the body changes as we age, but is it correct to define
everything we see as different as potentially detrimental? When I compare an
old brain mitochondrial proteome to that from a young brain is it fair to say
that the proteins that are changed throughout life are necessarily associated
with declining health?
This week Damien Hirst spoke in theGuardian’s culture podcast about Mr. Barnes a man who lived next door and
collected things, providing inspiration and materials for the artist’s first
collages. At the end of the article Hirst writes about visiting Louise
Bourgeois towards the end of her life, how everything around her was old and
crumbling. He hints at her environment being filled with character and the
important imperfections requisite for something to be interesting. He thinks
these features may have brought her comfort and that this might be a feature of
getting older.
It made me think - what if the
molecular ‘imperfections’ we see in the brain and other tissues are the echo of
the same force at play? Is it the biochemistry we are revealing that makes
older people so very interesting?
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