A Means To An End is my most recent book, and in a sense it is an extension of Sex and the Origins of Death. It examines the impact of molecular biology and molecular medicine on our understanding of the mechanisms underlying aging and death. Aging is obviously a very complex condition, affecting every cell and tissue in the body. While there has long been evidence that aging (and ultimately death) are under some sort of genetic control, many researchers have been reluctant to pursue this possibility, believing that the very complexity of these phenomena would make genetic analysis fruitless. But molecular biologists are finding that, like many other apparently complex phenomena (cancer, for example), the number of genes underlying aging and death may be fewer than previously suspected. Moreover, most of these genes are extremely old, in an evolutionary sense. The need to dispose of nonreproductive DNA (and the cells that house it) appears to be a very old problem, one that was addressed as far back as our single-cell eukaryotic ancestors.