Time is either a tyrant, or a beautiful friend

　　Time is either a tyrant, or a beautiful friend
 

　　ORLANDO - Who knew there was a generous streak of poetry running through actuarial science?

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　　Wallace Stevens

　　No doubt Wallace Stevens did. My favorite American poet -- who was also an insurance executive -- would have been so pleased to hear himself quoted at last week's Living to 100 Symposium presented by the Society of Actuaries -- so fittingly held at a hotel in Disney World, land of perpetual childhood.

　　"Death is the mother of beauty," recited Arnold Dicke, president of New World Actuaries; "hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires."

　　An actuary is someone who consults historical tables and performs abstruse calculations to predict when we might die -- a question of pressing importance to companies that try to turn a profit from managing pensions, annuities and life insurance policies. The conference was designed to help answer an equally urgent question for actuaries: Is it realistic to expect a day when living to 100 is no longer such a big deal?

　　(Well, maybe in places like Sarasota, that day has already arrived.)

　　But the dreams and desires Dicke was talking about had nothing to do with profit, and everything to do with the question of whether mortality is what gives our lives their shape and meaning. That he was asking it at a session largely devoted to retirement planning made it all the more moving for me.

　　Maybe it was because I was still mulling over the compelling message of Leonard Hayflick, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He is famous in some circles for the Hayflick Limit, the idea that all living organisms carry within them a molecular clock that inevitably, eventually will stop ticking.

　　Hayflick was addressing claims by other scientists at the conference that there is no upper limit to how old we can be. He talked about human aging as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, using a car as his metaphor.

　　"There is no direct evidence," Hayflick said, "that proves that aging is dictated by a genetic process."

　　The Second Law, he said, dictates that "energy tends to disperse or spread out unless it is restrained. In our bodies, the restraint is the cellular structure. The function of all molecules depends on how long their precise, three-dimensional folded structures can be maintained. The tendency for molecules to lose energy can never be circumvented."

　　In other words, our genetic codes are no match for the tyranny of time.

　　"There are no instructions in the blueprints that designed your car, instructing it on how to age," Hayflick went on. "Your car is brilliant because it knows how to age all by itself. Analogously, your genome also does not contain instructions for aging, because instructions are unnecessary."

　　A good mechanic, he acknowledged, can keep an old car on the road, but "after how many parts are replaced does the original car no longer exist?"

　　A fascination with concepts like artificial life extension and "the end of aging," he said, ignores this essential question of what it means to be human.

　　"The present excitement of regenerative medicine has yet to come to grips with the concept of brain regeneration, which would result in loss of memory or identity," he said. Plus, "the repair and synthesis machineries are themselves composed of complex molecules. These also suffer the same fate as the molecules they repair and replace. In other words, repair shops also age."

　　I think Wallace Stevens would have agreed that there is a powerful beauty to be contemplated in the Hayflick Limit.

　　Barbara Peters Smith is the aging reporter for the Herald-Tribune, and the editor of Health+Fitness. She can be reached at 361-4936 or by email at barbara.peters-smith@heraldtribune.com. Read more blogs at health.heraldtribune.com.
 

　　高顿网校小编预祝你在2014年精算师考试中顺利通过考试！
 

　　考试励志名言：考试答题步骤：通览全卷，沉着应试；慎密审题，扣题作答；先易后难，从容解答。