Growing old in the age of lead
Growing old in the age of lead: “Do we grow old because of natural cellular mechanisms or because of gradually accumulated environmental toxins, like lead?
AP’s science feed reported last week that ‘what has been called normal aging might in fact be due to ubiquitous environmental exposures like lead.’
Aging, in other words, would be one of lead’s ‘delayed effects’ – and ‘other pollutants like mercury and pesticides may do the same thing.’
So does architecture and the built environment, on a material level, actually contribute to human aging?
This obviously over-states the case; after all, cells age. It’s what biology does. It doesn’t take exposure to pesticides to grow old on this planet.
But there are at least three things worth considering here:
1) How interesting to think that certain ‘pollutants’ are responsible for what we consider signs of old age – poor memory, fading eyesight, loss of hearing, insomnia. Maybe if you’d lived in a different house as a teenager, or your dorm room hadn’t had lead paint on the walls, you’d still have perfect vision at 93. Maybe you’d live to be 116, with perfect hearing, your mind as sharp as a tack, if you hadn’t grown up beside a highway.
2) I’m reminded of a post on MetaFilter last year in which it was suggested that the decline in New York City’s crime rate wasn’t due to Rudi Giuliani but to ‘local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.’ The man whose research supports this claim has found ‘an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.’ Lead! It poisoned the Romans, and maybe even made their Empire fall. So what’ll it do next?
3) Let’s pretend that this doesn’t over-state the case. What if biology doesn’t age outside of exposure to things like lead, mercury, pesticides, etc.? What if there was no lead on the earth at all? No mercury? Nothing that could form dioxin? What if there were no anti-biological pollutants of any kind? Might ‘life’ then live forever?
(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Literary Atmospheres).“
(Via BLDGBLOG.)
