Michael Waterhouse
Will We Live Forever?
The Living End: The Future of Death, Aging and Immortality
By Guy Brown
Macmillan 280pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Put alongside mice or elephants, human beings live as much as four times longer than they should, given their size and pace of life. There is, it seems, a correlation in the wild between body size, metabolic rate and lifespan. A mouse scurries about the undergrowth and, if not eaten, can expect to survive for up to three years. Elephants are more sedate, consume energy more slowly and may live to sixty. Humans should die sometime between the two.
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