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Driving on the Tappan Zee Bridge, Santos saw Maria Cappozza, 24, jump off the 140-ft.-high span into the Hudson River. He stopped, handed his wallet to a bystander and leaped in after her. Although the impact knocked him out briefly, he reached Cappozza; a boat sent from shore pulled them from the water. Says Spring Valley fire chief Robert Schultz: "He saw a woman in distress and did what he is trained...
...little doubt that both elements are at play. "You have genetics overlaid by environmental factors," says Dr. James Smith, co-chairman of the Huffington Center on Aging at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine. "There's something going on inside the human body to determine a maximum possible life-span of 115 to 120 years. There's a limit--but we have no idea what defines...
...theory goes. Experiments involving restricted diets on primates have produced lower bone mass, a dangerous condition for older people. Moreover, because lab animals do not have the life-span of humans, all this remains highly speculative. Dr. Anna McCormick, chief of the biology section at the National Institute on Aging, cautions that cutting calories may never be an effective method of retarding age in humans. But, she says, "there may be a way to find a hormone or a drug that would have the same effect...
...wear and tear, I'd buy the theory that you could live 500 years," says Dr. Richard Sprott, associate director of the NIA's biology of aging program. "But there is some basic genetic programming, and the only way to significantly increase the life-span is to alter genetics...
...popular theory posits the existence of clock-type genes that in essence predetermine a human's life-span. Human cells appear to have some sort of counting mechanism and "remember" where they are in the sequence of divisions they must go through. Certain "longevity assurance" genes then make sure that the cell population keeps dividing until the clock winds down. A newer theory champions the role of stress-response genes, which regulate the body's maintenance and repair functions. As yet, researchers are unsure whether these genes merely affect susceptibility to disease or actually control the aging processes...