Age A Byproduct of Cancer Defense?

A reader writes "The International Herald Tribune has an article which says, in brief: they have discovered that aging in mice seems to be a byproduct of the chemicals that prevent cancer" If true, that's quite a double edged sword - avoid death, to cause it later.

Comments

Wow

[TheGreenLantern]

This sort of puts a whole new spin on this whole "Cure for Cancer" thing. The study seems to suggest that cancer is inevitable, and any attempts by our body to avoid it result in our own death.

Seems to me that if this is the case, it would have some serious repurcussions on how we currently understand how our bodies work. What is it about our physiologies that makes cancer such an irresitible force?

Re:Evolutionary balance?

[zulux]

There's a 25 year lifespan discrepancy, in which evolution has no effect, because the population (at least of women) can't reproduce!

In most primate cultures, old females still help with rearing the young. There is a hypothesis that this is the reason that females live longer than males - an old male is useless as a 'hunter' while an old femail is moderatly usefull as a child raiser.