Quote Originally Posted by GeoFisher View Post
They key to longevity is genes.......you can add a few years by being "good", but for the most part, the day you're born, you're coded to when you will die.

My aunt Minnie lived to a ripe old age of 105.......she smoked nearly half a pack a day till the day she died......and she drank at least 2-3 warm beers a day.....And if she had a cold, a couple shots of jack in her tea did the trick.
Your aunt Minnie was a lucky woman to live to 105. God bless her. But remember that for the first half century of her life we didn't have the modern automobiles, jets and other devices putting pollution into the air we all breath.

The world has changed a lot since she was born. The world changed a whole lot after the industrial revolution as well as after WWII. And there are chemicals that are being made today that we didn't even dream of when you aunt was a child.

We know so much more about modern medicine these days too. Many people in the past just died of sepsis but today with modern antibiotics and new ways of finding disease inside the human body without operating on them we can extend human life by another 20 years in some cases and even longer in other cases. But remember that we are just a few steps ahead of the bacteria when it comes to treating them with antibiotics. Those antibiotics that worked ten years ago don't work any more. Bacteria mutate and change and become resistant to our antibiotics as fast as we can develop new one. It's a never ending battle. The same battle goes on in the soil around us as bacteria and fungi fight a never ending CHEMICAL battle for survival. Remember that penicillin ( a fungus) was one of the first antibiotics that we discovered in a old petri dish that we noticed killing bacteria. But penicillin is not as effective today on a lot of bacteria as it was when first discovered.