The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

by Sheldon Solomon

Metabolism, de Grey and other scientists believe, is a two-sided coin: while a fast metabolism is great for burning calories and fat, it also contributes to aging because it makes us wear out faster, analogous to driving your car a hundred miles more a day. Aging, they argue, results from toxic by-products of cellular metabolism, the process that turns food into energy. So the fix, de Grey and other scientists think, is to slow down metabolism and clean up the age-promoting waste that it produces. The Taoists did this by eating nothing but berries and roots once a day, and it might have worked; the fewer calories you eat, the slower your metabolism runs. Research by these modern immortalists has showed that mice that ate 30 percent fewer calories lived 40 percent longer than mice that ate as they pleased.