Where are the comparable superhumans?
It seems quite plausible that similar experiments could be done with humans -— however, unlike the 30+ years for Rose’s fly experiments, comparable experiments on humans would take at least tens of thousands of years. But if these experiments were done on humans, the result would be humans who live hundreds of healthy years — not due to any one magic mutation, or any small set of mutations, but due to a huge complex of coordinated, crosslinked changes in various genes influencing various body systems. Recently published results from another lab about flies living a mere 1.7 times as long as normal flies bolster these ideas. These researchers show that their long-lived flies, even when chronologically “old”, display the gene expression patterns characteristic of younger flies. In other words, they have adapted, evolution-wise, to stay young longer. But Rose has his doubts about the viability of puzzling out the relevant complex of genetic mutations underlying radically increased healths
