Ouch. There has to be a better way.
A report in the scientific journal Current Biology shows a very interesting find: eunuchs live longer than their ball-carrying brethren. Balls-deep into the archives from the Imperial Court of the Korean Chosun dynasty (1392–1910), Korean researcher Kyung-Jin Min found that castrated men of the era lived to be 70 years of age, significantly longer than the average age of 47. Even more astonishing was that three of the 80 men lived to be 100 years old. Given the population at the time, that’s 130 times more centenarians than even the most-developed countries of today.
The men were castrated as boys, which suggests that hormones may play a factor in why men don’t live as long as women. They never got to experience that wonderful, pimply and oily part of life – puberty. Dr. L. Stephen Coles, a co-founder of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group, has a theory on why this matters:
Females may have an advantage in longevity because they have a back-up X chromosome. A woman’s body is a mixture of cells, half containing an active X chromosome from her mother and the other half from her father. If there is a defect on one X chromosome, half of her cells will be unaffected.
Makes sense. If we have an ailment that originates in our DNA, women have another copy of the gene. In the IT world, we call that a backup plan.
Head over to the source links for more information. With all that said, I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got…
Wondergressive 