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Science Enables Parents to Choose a Child Without Alzheimer's

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Yesterday the public was made aware of a new breakthrough in the fight against Alzheimer's after doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston successfully replicated the disease in a petri dish.

Alzheimer's currently effects more than 5 million Americans, and by the year 2050, almost two thirds of people age 85 or older are expected to have some form of the disease. But today, scientists have taken another large step forward in their efforts to fight against the debilitating illness.

Using a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), doctors in Chicago can now allow parents to choose a child without Alzheimer's. Under the PGD procedure, doctors can prevent a woman with a family history of early onset Alzheimer's disease from passing on any chromosomes that could be Alzheimer's carriers onto her child.

Dr. Lana Rechitsky is a PGD and IVF lab director at Reproductive Genetic Innovations in Northbrook, Illinois which has been driving this research. 


Scientists Close In on Alzheimer's Cure

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Of the top 10 causes of death in the United States, Alzheimer's disease is the only one that cannot be prevented, cured, or slowed.

However, researchers at Duke University might be one step closer to finding a cure for this devastating disease that affects nearly 5.3 million Americans.

In a recent study, Duke researchers devised a way to prevent immune cells from attacking a vital nutrient in the brain, which causes the memory loss associated with Alzheimer's. So far they've only tested their treatment on mice, but human tests might not be far off.

Carol Colton, a professor of Neurology at Duke University and the senior author of this study, says the key to a cure is understanding how the immune system reacts to Alzheimer's disease. Increasingly, evidence supports the idea that the immune system, which protects our bodies from foreign invaders, plays a part in actually contributing to the disease.

“The [immune cell] response is basically a warrior response where they’re defensive—they fight off bacteria and viruses, and that’s a really good thing,” says Colton. “And then there’s another response to microglia immune cells in the brain, and that is the nurturer, which helps the brain survive, repair, and maintain. It’s easy to see that the warrior would be a component of Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s hard to understand that the nurturer could be a problem in Alzheimer's disease.”

Microglia are known as the first responders to infection, and the research done by Duke shows that they begin to divide and change early in Alzheimer’s disease.

“Our study shows that in fact the nurturer here is a problem,” says Colton. “The immune cell—our microglia—is actually saying ‘I’m unhappy, the brain is unhappy, and I’m going to try to fix it’...It’s just a consequence of overactivity of the system in a confined space.”

Colton and her team found that the microglia immune cells are chewing up an important amino acid, arginine, which is potentially causing Alzheimer's disease. But when it comes to therapies, Colton says that people can’t just eat more arginine or take arginine dietary supplements.

“In reality, you can consume a lot of different types of metabolites, arginine included, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to cross the blood brain barrier,” which determines how much arginine will enter the brain, Colton says. “We have to think about this as a much more complex system than we thought in the past.”

Before the mice began showing Alzheimer’s symptoms, Colton and her team blocked arginase, an enzyme that breaks down arginine, using the drug difluoromethylornithine, also known as DFMO. As a result, the scientists saw fewer microglia and plaques develop in the brains of the mice, and the mice performed better on memory tests.

“DFMO is a very interesting compound because it can be repurposed,” says Colton. “It’s a drug that was used years ago for cancer treatment, it has a very specific activity, and it would be lovely if that drug would actually work in humans for Alzheimer’s disease [AD]. It was never really a particularly good cancer treatment, but it certainly could be repurposed to be a treatment for AD. Are we at that stage that I can say that this is going to be possible, that it can happen, and that it can work? No. We have to be, I would say, cautiously optimistic.”

Love, Sex and Alzheimer's: The Question of Consent

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The question of consent has become a hot-button issue over the last few years as colleges and universities struggle with problems of sexual assault on campus. 

Now the issue has come up in a completely different context: The elder population. The debate has turned its focus to whether or not patients with Alzheimer's disease or dementia are capable of consenting to sexual activity.

This week, a former Iowa state lawmaker was found not guilty of sexual abusing his wife who had Alzheimer's disease. Henry Rayhons, a farmer and former Republican legislator, insisted that sexual contact with his wife was completely consensual. He argued that his wife was often the one to instigate the activity.

However, nursing home staff members said his wife, Donna Rayhons, was cognitively unable to give consent.

There are currently more than 5.3 million Americans suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and as the population continues to age, this complicated question of consent is one that is likely to come up more often. 

Dr. Tia Powell is director of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics in New York City. She tells Takeaway Host John Hockenberry that sexual activity is very common among the elderly—even those with Alzheimer's—and intervention should only occur if abuse is taking place. 

The Grayest Generation: Older Parents

"56 Up"

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Documentary filmmakerMichael Apted talks about the latest in his 7 Up series, "56 Up." Joining him is Tony Walker, one of the subjects who has been featured in the films since he was 7 years old.

 

[Unedited] Rex Jung and Krista Tippett

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[Unedited] Rex Jung and Krista TippettKrista Tippett interviewed neuropsychologist Rex Jung on February 12, 2012. This interview is included in the show "Creativity and the Everyday Brain." Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.

Rex Jung — Creativity and the Everyday Brain [remix]

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Rex Jung — Creativity and the Everyday Brain

Few features of humanity are more fascinating than creativity; and few fields are more dynamic now than neuroscience. Rex Jung is a neuropsychologist who puts the two together. He's working on a cutting edge of science, exploring the differences and interplay between intelligence and creativity. He and his colleagues unsettle long-held beliefs about who is creative and who is not. And they're seeing practical, often common-sense connections between creativity and family life, aging, and purpose.

Love & Let Die

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Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, and Diane Meier, chief executive officer of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) and professor of geriatrics, internal medicine and medical ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, discuss Saturday's symposium exploring the question of prolonging life in an era of limited resources.

 


Born Wet, Human Babies Are 75 Percent Water. Then Comes Drying

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Look at this baby.

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Robert Krulwich/NPR

Lovely, no? Now think of this baby abstractly — as a sack of hundreds of millions of atoms. Here's the atomic formula for a new human being, arranged by elements, according to scientist Neil Shubin.

Notice that the two most plentiful atoms are H (hydrogen) and O (oxygen) which shouldn't be a big surprise, since 2 H's and an O make water, and we humans are very moist, especially when we're born.

Human Chemistry

Robert Krulwich/NPR

It turns out, a brand new human baby is 75 percent water.

Baby with water

Robert Krulwich/NPR

We're born as wet as a fresh potato. Tomatoes are wetter (93.5 percent water). Apples, too, but only slightly (80 percent). Check out this fruit vs. baby comparison.

Water content

Robert Krulwich/NPR

OK, we aren't as wet as watermelons (who'd want to be?), but still, we begin our lives as noisy dewdrops that will one day learn to crawl, then walk. As science writer Loren Eiseley once put it, people "are a way that water has of going about, beyond the reach of rivers."

Aging = Drying

But then, with every step we take, we begin to dry. The longer we live, the drier we get. One year after birth, a human baby is only 65 percent water – a ten percent drop, says the U.S. Geological Survey.

Babies are wetter than children. By the time we're adults, the USGS says, adult men are about 60 percent water, adult women 55 percent. Elderly people are roughly half water.

Older people

Robert Krulwich/NPR

There are variations, of course. The more buff you are (muscle tissue stores more water) the wetter you are. Because women generally have more fat cells, they tend to be a bit drier. Fat cells aren't as moist. The water that lubricates your joints, flushes your waste (I'm talking about pee), assists seminal reproduction, and absorbs shocks to your bones — as you age, the moisturizer in you slowly dwindles.

Bodybuilder

Robert Krulwich/NPR

And the odd thing is, our wet parts aren't where you'd think. I figured if some giant fist were to plunge out of the sky and squeeze a human like a sponge, the wettest bit would be our blood. That's wrong.

High Tide

Our brains, lungs, heart, liver and kidney contain the wettest tissue — between 65 and 85 percent water. Bones, of course, are dryish, (but still 31 percent water.) There's also water between cells, but only a small fraction of our H2O is blood. Most of the water inside us is stored, not in our veins, but in our 100 trillion teeny cells. We are an assemblage of water packets, slightly salty, like the sea we came from. As Loren Eiseley put it, we're a "concentration" of water, "that indescribable and liquid brew which is compounded in varying proportions of salt and sun and time," and on the day we're born, we're at high tide. After that, very quietly, the sea within us ebbs and ebbs, and as it goes ... so do we.


Paleontologist Neil Shubin writes about water and the human body in his book The Universe Within: the Deep History of the Human Body. Loren Eiseley wrote about water in his classic, The Immense Journey.

P.J. O'Rourke's Generation

Aging and Long-Term Unemployment

Clock Your Sleep: Seniors

Middle-Aged and Menopausal

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Sandra Tsing Loh, writer, comedian and author of The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), talks about her new book in which she describes the joys and perils of being part of "Generation Triple M" (Middle-Aged Moms in Menopause).

 


Excerpt: The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones

Prologue: Gloomings

I’m hurtling west along the 101 Freeway to the Val-  ley to pick my daughters up from school. I am for-ty-nine years old, and I have just gotten off the phone with my friend and magazine editor, Ben. We have been talking about refinancing: It’s a wonderfully mundane topic of conversation—one of those truly harmless pleasures of midlife. It helps me to recall not all, but at least some, of the staid, rational person I was not too long ago: which is to say before I, a for-ty-­something suburban mother, became involved in a wild and ill-­considered extramarital affair.

“Listen,” Ben says excitedly. “I know two years ago John Warick got you that thirty years fixed at 4.75 percent, which as we know is historically unheard of. But I’m telling you, this new guy who’s doing my next refinance, at Wells Fargo? When I ran your numbers by him, he thought you could qualify for an even lower thirty years fixed like . . . 4.275.” Ben is as much of a math nerd about this stuff as I am.

Indeed, under normal circumstances, I am the sort of OCD person for whom the number 4.275 would create a spike of excitement. It’s the same adrenaline rush I get when successfully completing a newspaper sudoku or crossword puzzle with a sharp number 2 pencil. Ben and I can get truly wound up around our small personal-finance triumphs most of the time. But today even this conversation hasn’t supplied its usual lift. I find myself feeling surprisingly flat.

Until now, not being able to feel things has never been one of my copious personal flaws. I am, for bet-ter or for worse, a person obsessively driven by pas-sions large and small. I find my mind drifting to dinner. I remember in that moment that I promised my girls that morning that tonight’s dinner would be Make Your Own Pizza.

 

In theory Make Your Own Pizza is one of the wonderfully creative new things my girls and I do. Now that my kids go back and forth between my ex-husband and me, I have periods of rest. As a consequence, I’ve been able to bring on an astonish-ing amount of high-quality parenting. Ironically, here is the artisanal attention and care I was never able to provide as a full-time mother. In our new life together in our big short-saled Victorian house, my girls and I make lemonade from scratch, bake pies, and paint Easter eggs. I’ve taught them to ride bikes, to crochet, and to paint on actual easels with watercolors. We even go bowling, and we have Make Your Own Pizza for dinner.

I find myself thinking ahead to the burned pizza stone languishing crusty and unwashed in the oven. I think of how sticky the Trader Joe’s dough is, of how I will probably need to get two kinds, the garlic-herb and the whole wheat. I think of how needlessly jam-packed the parking lot at Trader Joe’s is in midafternoon, how surprisingly uninspired their samples—lukewarm cups of bland organic rotelli, cloudy vials of unfiltered apple juice. My feeling of flatness gives way decidedly, at the thought of Make Your Own Pizza, to sudden and dramatic gloom.

I hang up on Ben, pull off the freeway, and park under a tree in front of a dirty-yellow ranch-style house to collect myself and instead instantly begin sobbing, producing heaves of seawater like Jonah’s whale. It’s not just the pizza. Suddenly an image comes to me, seemingly at random, of my daughters’ hamster. Because they are always begging for more pets, their dad had given them a toffee-blond hamster named Hammy, who stayed with me one weekend when they all went out of town. He spent the day as my little companion, happily rolling around in his blue plastic ball while I wrote at the computer. After Hammy went home I heard from the girls that he had gotten sick—“Probably from eating his own wood chips,” Sally reported—and subsequently died.

Hunched over the steering wheel, I think—why now?—of that little face, those little paws, that jingling blue ball. I think of Hammy’s sunny disposition and friendly, inquisitive nose, and his essential innocence and trueness and goodness. I am a forty-nine-year-old woman sitting in her filthy Volvo parked under a tree on a Tuesday afternoon wailing about a hamster. Just how low are we setting the bar here? (And yet, why of all things did God have to take this hamster? What was the harm?)

I want to call my older sister, Kaitlin, but I shouldn’t. My sister and I are so close it’s as if we share a limb. When Kaitlin and I are getting along, we talk all the time, and she gives the greatest, most amazing sister advice (call that Pema Chödrön, after the crop-haired Tibetan-Buddhist nun whose inspira-tional writings we both adore). When we are fighting I can almost physically feel the phone not ring, and it feels intentionally strategic (call that . . . Margaret Thatcher). But I’ve put Kaitlin through a hell of a lot. My affair almost killed her. After all, I’m not just her middle-aged kid sister but the mother of her two fa-vorite nieces. No, I can’t call her, because if she sensed I was going off the deep end again, Kaitlin would have to stage an intervention to treat the entire family.

Instead I find myself dialing Ann. Ann is not nec-essarily my closest girlfriend, but she is the most sen-sible and the longest happily married. (I’ve had my share of crazy girlfriends, and since my divorce it seems like everyone else’s twenty-year-long mar-riages are now suddenly toppling over like dominoes. All these wild-eyed women want to meet for coffee, as though I’m a sort of underground-divorce-railroad Harriet Tubman, and the vibe is unsettling.) Ann is together. Ann always has a good plumber, contractor, or electrician. Ann knows which Beverly Hills specialist to call if you have a mysterious spot or rash. Ann has a beautifully organized shoe closet.

“Hello?” Ann says after two and a half rings. Bare-ly able to choke the words out, I tell her about my sorrow over the hamster, and about this sudden, vio-lent stab of midafternoon midlife malaise.

She says: “Oh sweetie. I’m so sorry to hear that. Can I ask—when did you last have your period?”

“I have no idea. I can barely keep food in the fridge and my daughters in underwear.”

“But might you have missed any?”

“Oh sure.” I frown. Good God—who keeps track of periods anymore?

“I think . . . ? Maybe . . . ? Because it sounds so ­familiar . . . ? You may not want to hear this, but you could be entering menopause.”

“Menopause?!” I cry out in relief. “Just meno-pause? That would be awesome! I thought I was go-ing mad or something!”

But now Ann goes on to describe a personal daily routine that is about the most complicated one I have ever heard of. It is a rigorously titrated cocktail of an-tidepressants, bioidenticals, walks, facials, massages, dark chocolate, and practically throwing salt over the left shoulder.

“And it’s most intense at that certain time of the month. That’s when I have these bouts of progester-one depression balanced with rage—tons and tons of rage. I’m shouting on the streets, in traffic, at my husband. I almost killed someone in the parking lot at B of A. I can feel like I’m really going crazy. I throw things. For no reason. Weird things set me off. So just for those days—it’s four to five days—I have to up my Estrovel. If I remember. The hardest thing is just to remember.” She recommends her dream gynecologist, Dr. Valerie. I take the number without admitting that I’m not sure I’m ready to see a doctor, because quite frankly I can’t face being weighed.

Later I’ll go home to my laptop for a crash course in the history of the change. Wow—there’s so much I didn’t know. Menopause was first mentioned in an-cient Greece by writers like Aristotle, who pegged both menstrual periods and fertility as ending at the same time for women, then around age forty. Cited in European scholarly texts in the Middle Ages, meno-pause took an unattractive turn in 1816 when the French physician Charles de Gardanne termed “ménopause” a nervous disorder. This no doubt con-tributed to medical thinking in the later 1800s that menopause was a time when a woman “ceased to exist for the species” and “resembled a dethroned queen” (these from a description of female diseases). The first complete book on menopause, with the warm and fuzzy title of The Change of Life in Health and Disease (1857), by John Edward Tilt, apparently cites 135 different menopause symptoms, including curious manifestations like pseudonarcotism, tempo-rary deafness, uncontrollable peevishness, and “hys-terical flatulence.” Yikes!

By contrast, it appears that non-European cultures have more organic, female-friendly approaches to menopause. Mayan women famously report not having any negative menopausal symptoms at all. American Indian women and their faraway Chinese sisters have long treated menopausal symptoms with such healing natural remedies as angelica (dong quai). In India a woman’s ascent into this next, nonmothering phase of life is seen as a sacred time of greater spiritual depth and exploration. Instead of “ceasing to exist for the species,” for Hindu women menopause opens the door to enlightenment, growth, and wisdom. As I’ll learn in the chapters to come, enlightenment, growth, and wisdom are only part of the package.

 

As Ann and I hang up, mostly I’m relieved at her diagnosis. As though a temporary fog has been blasted away with lemon-scented Febreze, I turn the key in the ignition, pick up my girls, go to Target, and follow that with Trader Joe’s. Invigorated by this new information, I’m again rocking my chores. In the checkout line I fumble with keys, sunglasses, debit card, and change, as is increasingly common for me these days. I have this thing where if I forget my can-vas bags, I feel so guilty about the harm that plastic wreaks on the planet that I stack all my groceries into my arms. Doubled over, I shuffle out to the car, leav-ing a trail of broken eggs, milk, cantaloupe.

“You need a hand, hon?” the female checker asks. “Oh no,” I say. With a big smile I turn to the entire line behind me and grandly announce: “Don’t mind me—I’m just forty-nine and entering menopause!”

From the book The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones. Copyright (c) 2014 by Sandra Tsing Loh. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.

Preview: What Death and Divorce Taught Jane Fonda

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Jane Fonda says she’d disappear into a monastery before she'd get married again. She’s had three marriages — to a French director, an anti-war activist, and the billionaire Ted Turner — and each ended in divorce. But she told me that when she found herself newly single at 62, she finally felt whole for the first time.

She was celibate for seven years before she started dating her current boyfriend, music producer Richard Perry. With him, she says she’s discovered a mature kind of intimacy and a new role as caretaker. He’s living with Parkinson's, and she’s learning how to help.

In next week’s episode, I speak with Jane Fonda about her mother's suicide when she was a girl, her father Henry Fonda's long decline, and the lessons she learned by choosing to be alone. Here’s a preview of our conversation — the full show comes out June 18.

Jane Fonda recently spoke at TEDxWomen about living in this age of unprecedented life expectancies:

In 1972, Fonda spoke out at a rally in protest of the Vietnam War:

And for a certain generation, Jane Fonda might be most well-known for her workout videos:

 

Jane Fonda Acts and Ages with Lily Tomlin

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Jane Fonda is reuniting with her 9-to-5 co-star Lily Tomlin in Grace and Frankie, a new Netflix series out next summer. She says it's a return to form for the pair, who along with Dolly Parton, brought women often overlooked by society to center stage in their classic 1980 comedy. 

I want to give a cultural face to aging. I want to show older women who are, their attitude is hey kiddo, it ain’t over til I say it’s over. And I love, it starts at a time when the rug has been pulled out from under these two women and they are unmoored. They’re not young anymore. They’re old. And Lily and I are best buds, so we’re just gonna have a good time. 

Hear the the full episode of Jane Fonda on Death, Sex & Money. 

Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton in the outtakes from 9-to-5:


Are You Ready for Retirement?

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Do you have a plan for retirement? Today's show may help. It's a two-hour "family meeting" about whether you crave or dread retirement, and some advice for how you can actually afford it. Plus, a cultural history of the idea of retirement, which has meant many different things in different times and cultures.

I Love You, But There's This Money Thing...

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We like to think of our romantic lives as pure and unbothered by the cold business of spreadsheets and tax documents. But here's the thing: serious relationships are both romantic and financial partnerships. That can come as a shock to a lot of people. I asked for your stories about love and money. Tiffany sent in this plea:

Anna,

Can we talk about prenups? My fiancé and I just broke things off because we couldn't agree to the terms that each of us wanted...I'm completely devastated and I'm getting mixed messages from people. Some are for and some are against but everyone seems to feel very strongly for one side or the other.

Tiffany’s 28, and she’s disappointed by what killed her otherwise great romance: an irreconcilable disagreement about money. 

Tiffany is dating in Washington, D.C. after breaking up with her fiancé over a prenup dispute.

Her problems aren't unique, though. Relationships demand regular financial negotiation: prenups, joint checking accounts, retirement plans. What if one partner wants to buy a luxury car and the other finds that totally embarrassing? Is it worth getting remarried later in life when pricey hospital bills are looming? These are big questions that might not seem romantic, but talking about them is essential for a healthy relationship.

Got a money or relationship question that's causing stress at home? Let us know in the comments below − or share a tip that might help us all.

Eric and Martha are teaching their 4-year-old daughter about money while figuring things out themselves.

Consider Eric Burton and Martha Mills. They opened a joint checking account, and had a perfect system in which each of them deposited a percentage of their income. Until the kid came along. Here’s what Eric wrote us:

After our daughter was born 4 years ago, we chose for Martha to stay at home (since I made more money).  We both do a little bit of side work, but I still earn most of the income. Now all of our money goes into joint and we each just tend to use spending money via our credit cards and figure it all out down the line. The stay-at-home mom/not-working-but-always working dynamic kind of [adds to] the difficulties of our new fiscal reality. 

When you have a system around money that’s been working for so long, how do you deal with change?

Lola, a personal assistant and actress, is paying all her own bills now. 

Ask Lola Davidson. Several years ago, she fell in love with a very wealthy man, and he paid for everything. That included the BMW, the handbags, the jewelry, and the condo on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles:

I remember the day we went to the open house of that condo and the realtor, a sharply dressed woman, asked what we both did for a living and I said some obnoxious thing like, "just living the dream," and she replied, "and that's how it should be, the man makes the money and we spend it." Today I'd be so offended if someone said that to me, but that day, at that time in my life, it sounded more like approval.

Then, Lola and her boyfriend broke up. She had no income and had to face her financial problems head-on. That’s what this episode is all about — the ways money complicates our relationships, what we learn, and what questions still linger.

You can read a full transcript of this episode.

And we got a lot of calls from listeners dealing with money in their relationships. Here are a few more.

Erin's inheritance makes her feel guilty that she can't fully support her family:

Rob and his husband have separate checking accounts and very different spending habits:

This listener dated a 32-year-old man who was totally happy to let his mother support him, and she couldn't stick it out:

Jeremy's in his 40s, and has no idea what his parents actually made to afford the life they gave him:

 

A Family Meeting on Retirement: Plans, History and Money

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The Brian Lehrer Show is not live today, so we won't be taking any calls. As always, you can join the conversation online through our comments section (links below), on Facebook, or on Twitter through @BrianLehrer. We'll be back live tomorrow!

Do you have a retirement plan? Today's show may help. It's a two-hour "family meeting" about whether you crave or dread retirement, and some advice for how you can actually afford it. Plus, a cultural history of the idea of retirement, which has meant many different things in different times and cultures.

The New Science Of Immortality

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If current trends persist, we can expect that Americans born in the year 2084 will live to be 100. That's up from an average life expectancy of 39.4 years in 1880. Living longer, healthier lives is an appealing prospect. But what will it mean for our economy, politics, and healthcare systems when America's 65-and-older population triples in size? Gregg Easterbrook, contributing editor at The Atlantic and The Washington Monthly, explores the latest research behind the new science of immortality and the implications for its success in his upcoming cover story for The Atlantic, "What Happens When We All Live to 100?"

The Dead, Dead, Dead at 75 Edition

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Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and John Dickerson discuss the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder, the bombing campaign against ISIS, and Ezekiel Emanuel's Atlantic piece, "Why I Hope to Die at 75." Show notes at www.slate.com/gabfest.
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