Experts say aging not unsolved

PARIS, June 26 (UPI) -- Dysfunction on the molecular level causes the body to age, a U.S. medical scientist says.

Leonard Hayflick of the University of California, San Francisco, says new biological insights are making it possible to understand the reasons humans and animals age.

"Aging occurs because the complex biological molecules of which we are all composed become dysfunctional over time as the energy necessary to keep them structurally sound diminishes," Hayflick said in a statement.

"Thus, our molecules must be repaired or replaced frequently by our own extensive repair systems."

These repair systems, which are also composed of complex molecules, eventually suffer the same molecular dysfunction. The time when the balance shifts in favor of the accumulation of dysfunctional molecules is determined by natural selection -- and leads to the manifestation of age changes that we recognize are characteristic of an old person or animal, Hayflick says.

The author of "How and Why We Age" is among several speakers invited to make presentations at the World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics scheduled for July 5–9 in Paris.

Other presenters scheduled include Steven Austad of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio who wrote "Why We Age"; and Thomas Kirkwood of Newcastle University in England, author of "Time of Our Lives."