Blog Number 3

One thing we talked about in class about The Way We Age Now was that we were supposed to pick a passage that stuck out to us and write why we thought it was false and why we thought it was true. I ended up picking the passage “hair grows grey because we run out of the pigment cells that give hair its color.” In the text it says that the natural life cycle of the scalps pigment cells is just a few years so we rely on stems cells to migrate and replace them but gradually the stem call reservoir dries up so usually by the age of 50 the average persons hair has gone grey. I believe what the writer is telling us because I see people all the time with grey hair; my grandparents on my dad’s side had grey hair. But then I also think that’s false because my grandmother and her two sisters all have jet black hair, and they don’t dye it or any thing its been like that ever since I can remember for all of them. Another way to disprove what the author is saying is what about Italians and Spanish people, they don’t grey until way over their 50^th birthday. So that claim can go either way I think, it just depends on the person’s genes and where they come from.

One thing I really liked about The Way We Age Now was all the facts and statistics that were featured in the essay. I think they were very interesting because I am very interested and always have been interested in stuff medical related. The essay was written by Atul Gawande and featured in the New Yorker. The New Yorker is a weekly magazine that features essays, cartoons, satire, commentary, and criticisms. It has a wide base in not only New York but all around the world. My grandfather gets this magazine and I’ve looked at it a few times but never really read anything in it.