LET(-7) Me Down

A guest speaker delivered a sermon at my church this morning. I'm always interested in this guy... His name is Elliot Tepper, and he's an unusual man. He has a few big degrees (One from Harvard), and so forth. Today, he's the head of an international drug treatment center. He gave up a career as an economics professor (among other things) to help people who need help badly.

Anyway, he was disucssing his work among AIDS patients and drug addicts - and eventually got into the ethics of science and medicine (It's interesting. Let me know if you want to hear more about that). He made me think, when he mentioned science has found the LET-7 gene... and when they removed that gene from earthworms, they lived in perpetual adolescence. The actuality of such a find astonished me. My mind was spinning. Could science actually reverse the aging process? Would they want to? What would it mean if that technology landed us with a perpetual leader like Duvalier? Hussein? Bush (I just thought I'd throw that out to all my democrat friends out there, even though we'd only get 8 years of him at the helm)? HITLER? Elliot brouht me back down to a level we can all understand, "Does anyone want to be a teenager forever?"

In a room of four hundred people, no one indicated that they'd want to go back to that age.

Later, I told Dave about the LET-7 gene- and how earthworms can be perpetual adolescents.

Dave said, "Kinda like men?"

Who needs science? We've apparently found the Fountain of Youth... It's a chromosome.