Julia Czudak

10/12/18

English 21300

 

Making the Impossible a Reality: Michael R. Rose’s Contribution to Evolutionary Science

Although the idea of immortality seems like something straight out of a science-fiction novel, scientists such as Michael Roberson Rose dedicate their time to proving the impossible to be within our grasp. The human lifespan has already been drastically prolonged thanks to the advance in medicine, but Rose wants to go even further. He believes that we have the ability to reduce our chances of perishing due to illness. Aging itself can be prevented; the deterioration of cells and organs, which is essentially the ultimate cause of death, could become an issue of the past.

Michael R. Rose is a very proud Canadian “punk” who started his academic career in 1971 at Victoria University. He’s currently “an aging Canadian punk”, but he’s moved to California where he is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. Apart from making a living by teaching his students, Rose says he gets paid because he can “produce much longer lived organisms” and can analyze “how that happens genetically and physiologically”. This remarkable ability has earned Michael Rose a title of a leading scientist for experimental evolutionary research.

According to Rose, the foundation of his current career began in 1977, when he realized that reproducing at a later age would “automatically clean-up everyone”, meaning the genes that cause deadly illnesses are more likely to be controlled thanks to natural selection. This is because the ultimate, biological goal of every living being is to procreate and pass on genes. At later ages, after creating offspring, the body is “more than happy to let you die”. If mating were to be held off, the body would have no choice but to continue ridding itself of health-impairing genetic variants and slow the process of aging to keep the organism desirable as a mate.

Generation after generation of selecting for later reproduction, as well as carefully choosing the right mate will prolong the lifespan of future generations. Rose acknowledges that most people don’t choose who they have children with by examining their family’s medical history, but it would make sense from a Darwinian stand point. A person’s lifespan is very often dependant on genetics so, as Rose’s fruit fly experiments have shown, mating with someone who has the potential of carrying the right genes can allow for offspring with a long lifespan.

The fruit fly experiment is perhaps the most known experiments conducted by Michael R. Rose. It resulted in fruit flies with a quadrupled lifespan of their predecessors. Rose claims that eventually they could live forever as long as no outside factors contribute to their death (such as famine or getting squashed). Of course this took years of selective breeding and since the fruit flies mature much faster than humans, the process did not take as much time as completing such results with humans. According to Rose, humans will most likely not have the potential to be immortal in the next twenty years but with natural selection, this may be possible in the next hundred years.

Rose’s discoveries have gained worldwide attention because of how controversial, yet innovative they are. Evolutionary science in general seems to be a controversial topic and Rose points out that this tends to be especially true in the United States. The U.S. is one of the most fundamentalist, religious countries in the world. Many people do not believe in evolution because they prefer to think that everything was made by God. Others just don’t appreciate efforts to prolong the human lifespan because it rivals against the divine command theory they believe; they feel that the use of science to alter God’s will is unacceptable.

Michael Rose is very defensive about his work because it was his “shelter from life” for decades. After the deaths of his wife, brother, and brother-in-law, burying himself in evolutionary theories was a coping mechanism. Rose’s brother-in-law was murdered leaving his wife in dismay and so their marriage was falling apart. Not much later, Rose’s brother committed suicide. These tragedies left Rose’s marriage torn and soon after their legal separation, his wife committed suicide in her apartment. Finding the key to immortality became personal to Rose and obsessively experimenting with evolutionary theories became a way of coping with depression.

Rose responds to critics simply by saying that he isn’t dictating what people should do with their lives. Personally he finds “graveyard desires revolting”, but if people choose to die at seventy-two then they can do so. He does, however, recognize that many people would prefer to expand their life for as long as possible and so he will continue researching new ways to help achieve this goal. Rose also comments on the lack of evolutionary education within the school systems of America and suggests that people would adopt a completely different point of view if they would understand more of his scientific research.

The hard work has obviously paid off in terms of gaining the science community’s attention. He has won awards such as: the British Commonwealth Scholar (1976-79), the NATO Science Fellow (1979-1981), the NSERC of Canada University Research Fellow (1981-88), the  President’s Prize, American Society of Naturalists (1992), Excellence in Teaching Award, University of California, Irvine Biological Sciences (1996), Busse Prize, and the World Congress of Gerontology (1997). He’s published over two-hundred-seventy-four papers and a book titled “The Evolutionary Biology of Aging” in 1991. He continues to lead many seminars around the world apart from his lectures at the University of California.

Rose’s work will have a significant impact on the world on top of his current accomplishments. Thanks to Rose, there is a rising interest in lengitivity throughout the scientific community that seemed impossible before. Even those who aren’t considered part of the scientific community are eager to gain the key to immortality and youth. The amount that the average American citizen spends on healthcare and medication suggests that the majority of people would like to spend as much time on Earth as possible along with their family and friends.

Through his everlasting research and experimentation since 1981, Rose has found that living organisms have the ability to be immortal (so long as no external circumstances pose a threat) through diet-control, natural selection, and the delay of procreating. Longevity and preservation of youth is on high-demand so Rose’s research has already become the inspiration for many scientists who seek to find the cure for death. Perhaps one day the “life cycle” will only simply become a section of the history books rather than a science textbook.

Works Cited

1.“An Interview with Michael R. Rose, Ph.D. – [PDF Document].” Vdocuments.site, Mary Ann Libert, Inc. , 8 July 2004, vdocuments.site/documents/an-interview-with-michael-r-rose-phd.html.

2.Rose, Michael R., et al. “Does Aging Stop?” Oxford Scholarship, Oxford University Press, 7 Nov. 2014

3.Rose, Micael R. “Genome-Wide Analysis of a Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Drosophila.” Macmillan Publishers, 2010, pp. 1–3., www.researchgate.net/profile/Anthony_Long/publication/46281845_Genome-wide_analysis_of_a_long-term_evolution_experiment_with_Drosophila/links/00463515cfca10b5a0000000/Genome-wide-analysis-of-a-long-term-evolution-experiment-with-Drosophila.pdf.