Whether it is the fountain of youth or the elixir of life, men have traveled the world in search of the key to extending their lifespan.
According to a leading researcher, they should look a little closer to home – although they might then get the years God intended for them.
When it comes to extending the lifespan of any male mammal, “there is one way you can intervene”: castration.
Cat Bohannon, the acclaimed author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, said that men went through life “smuggling two little nuggets of death,” with research showing that an orchiectomy saves a few more precious years can produce.
Speaking at the Hay Festival on Friday, Bohannon said castration is a “way to make male mammals live longer”. This effect was observed in the mid-20th century in American men who were institutionalized, usually for mental illness, and castrated, and in Korean eunuchs. The castrated men lived longer than their ‘regularly clenched peers’.
‘You can castrate it. Cut off his balls. Don’t try this at home,” added Bohannon, a researcher with a doctorate from Columbia University in the evolution of stories and cognition.
While it used to be thought that the difference in average lifespan was behavioral — “dumb boys doing dumb boy things” — it actually appears to have “something deeply to do with the immune system and cellular repair,” she said. Men develop “more infections” and “more cancer throughout their lives, and the prognosis in many cases tends to be somewhat worse.”
a Study from 2012 published in Current Biology found that the average lifespan of 81 eunuchs born between 1556 and 1861 was 70 years, which was 14.4–19.1 years longer than the lifespan of uncastrated males of similar socioeconomic status. Researchers concluded that the study “supports the idea that male sex hormones shorten the lifespan in men.”
“So why is this? Why are so many men smuggling two little death nuggets?” Bohannon said. ‘I’m afraid we don’t really know. There is a lot of good science being done in this area.”
Bohannon said that after discussing “killer balls” on The Daily Show with Sarah Silverman, she started getting “very intimate” questions from men about their “testicular situation.” “Looks like I’m a ball chick now,” she said.
Bohannon also told a Hay audience that “one day we will have an artificial womb,” even if that won’t be the case for hundreds of years, and that this would raise ethical questions.
“Let’s be really utopian about this nonsense, okay. Let’s say it’s available to everyone, it’s not just a rich woman’s thing, it’s not just a white woman’s thing – whatever that means hundreds of years from now – will it ever be ethical to ask someone with a uterus to get pregnant? to be if that is possible? be done outside a body?”
The technology would take a long time to develop, she said, because “it’s not just a bag in which you carry a baby, it’s a very feminine body. When a mammal is pregnant, that entire body is pregnant.
“There are knock-on effects throughout the system, many of which have long evolved to influence what happens in that uterus – immunological agents that cross the placental barrier and so on. So that means we need to know a lot more about female bodies to try to build a fake body.”