Have Israeli Scientists Cured Aging?

Stop the presses.

Photo by Julia Koblitz on Unsplash.

In an enlightened age when “Trust the Science” is a popular catch-phrase, it’s amazing what humankind still doesn’t know.

Why we humans need sleep, why we age, and why placebos work are only a few of the unanswered questions with which scientists around the world still grapple.

From the Agricultural Revolution, to the Age of Enlightenment, to the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, to the Information Age; our most recent scientific rises have been the most meteoric but we didn’t get here overnight.

When the very first farmers started successfully growing crops, the seeds of the first towns and cities were planted. Food surpluses created by farming allowed, for the first time in history, members of a group to stay in one place, organize and grow. It also allowed, for the first time, some people in that collective to devote themselves to higher pursuits and specialties not directly related to meeting the ever-present need for sustenance and survival.

Engineering was probably born around that time; tax collection was certainly invented at that time. The oldest written records archeologists have ever uncovered, the very first known records left by our ancient ancestors are…tax records.

A food surplus meant someone had to store it, manage it; maintain it. That person would need to be paid and public service, as we understand it, was born. Let’s face it; politics probably already existed.

Humans collecting in larger and larger groups, fed by the largesse of the Agricultural Revolution, could exchange information faster, share ideas, cooperate on larger projects.

Even considering this, once upon a time, major breakthroughs in various fields of science, engineering and technology only occurred once every few generations, if that. Now, major breakthroughs happen all the time.

It hasn’t all been mapping the human genome, of course.

Along with the internal combustion engine, penicillin, anesthesia, and pentium processors, has flowed an equal and opposite force, a prevailing darkness to contrast the light of human ingenuity and creativity.