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It used to be a sign of aging that cops seemed to get younger. Now, they are mice.
A landmark scientific study has shown that the experimental therapy can rejuvenate cells in mice, helping them live longer. This research could lead to the development of a technique that can be tested in humans within five years.
Fantastic! In five years, the white-coated brainiacs hope to inject us with magical genes so that people can dream of being like the world’s oldest lady, a French nun who died last week at 118, looking no older than 109.
Of course, along the way, scientists hope to eliminate many of the ills that plague us in old age, such as dementia and creaking joints.
Anti-aging drug tested on mice could be tested on humans in five years, new research suggests
If they succeed, good luck to them. Because no one who has seen someone they love descend into the dark land of madness would wish that fate on their worst enemy.
But do we really want to live longer than we already do?
My wife and I are living temporarily in a small Bedfordshire town that is packed with beauty salons and nail bars. No dry cleaners, no hardware store, and very few useful shops, but everything you need if you want false eyelashes and long shiny nails. They just opened another one, and her name is Blissfully Young.
The people who come out of everything look a bit like Alison Steadman’s fun-loving mom character on the TV series Gavin & Stacey. There’s nothing wrong with her, you could say, but they don’t seem young or happy. I think there’s something a little sad about them, as there was about Roger Moore, who, having been the most handsome James Bond, became a stiff and ageless thing, as if stuffed. I am reminded of writer Gore Vidal’s description of President Ronald Reagan as “a triumph of the embalmer’s art.”
Surely the quality of life is best judged not by how young we claim to be, let alone how long we live, but by how we live.
In Gulliver’s Travels, writer Jonathan Swift creates a land called Luggnagg inhabited by a race endowed with immortality.
AN WILSON: ‘In five years, white-coated brainiacs hope to inject us with magical genes so people can dream of being like the world’s oldest woman’ (file image)
At first Gulliver thinks this is wonderful. He imagines living forever and being forever young.
However, the people of Luggnagg have bodies that age. They become unpleasant in appearance and increasingly smelly, increasingly quarrelsome, complaining and grumpy.
Surely the result of the work of these anti-aging scientists would be equally grisly?
The most sinister thing about the researchers’ experiment is what many of us, at first glance, would think to be the most desirable. In other words, they will introduce an element of choice into what until now has been a relentless and unalterable process. That is, the element of choice about when we die. I would also argue against any benefit from that. At Oxford University there used to be a famously witty and mischievous don named Maurice Bowra. One day, he walked into his school and saw the flag fly at half mast, indicating that one of his classmates had died. He told the college janitor: ‘No, don’t tell me, let me guess who…’
I think the ‘let me guess’ element should be present in any well-adjusted human life, not about the death of others, but about our own death… and our own life. The fact is that we don’t know what awaits us, this year, or next, or ten years from now.
Lucile Randon (pictured) had died in her sleep at the age of 118, the oldest person in the world.
We learn on the job, we adapt, and that is an essential ingredient in life experience. It means that we have to come to terms with two things: the inexorable aging process and the uncertainty of the time of our death. Both factors are good things, good challenges.
I guess the closest thing on the planet to Gulliver’s land of Luggnagg is California, where the populace, with its soft smooth tans and facelifts, pursues its seemingly immortal and mindless existence. It’s all in one piece with California which really has no seasons.
But for most of the planet, the seasons mark the progress of the year, and the seasons of life mark the changes in our bodies and our character.
An anti-aging drug might allow us to hold on to our own hips and knees a little longer, and it might, just might, help us not go crazy. But if it made us young again, it would be hell.
Surely no one would want to go through the trauma of adolescence more than once!
And for most men, trust me, the 20s are a scary decade.
If he could really get a single injection that would make him eternally younger, of course, it wouldn’t bring him back to real youth. He would just freeze you into a middle-aged sort of thing.
If she thought that would mean not having to worry about muscle soreness or forgetfulness, she’d rush to give herself the shot.
But it would also be depriving you of the day-to-day, month-to-month recognition that the human race, like the rest of nature, is in a seasonal cycle.
It’s natural to get old, and it’s crazy to want to be, to borrow the name of the newest beauty salon in my current neck of the woods, happily young.
There is nothing wrong with being old, nothing wrong with being extremely old.
Close your eyes for a moment and think of the faces you have loved the most in your life. Yes, you will be thinking about your first kiss, the first heartbreaking crush from your school days. He might as well be thinking of his children.
AN WILSON: ‘If they succeed, good luck to them. Because no one who has seen someone they love descend into the dark land of insanity would wish that fate on their worst enemy’ (file image)
But you will also be remembering a grandmother or a father, their old wrinkled features are part of what you love.
Wrinkles are the signature of a lifetime’s experience.
It is a commonplace that we repeat to ourselves when we lose loved ones too young, but it is true: that the quality of a life is not measured in years, but in how we live or have lived.
Just realizing that we don’t need plastic knee replacements or that we can still run up the stairs at age 80 isn’t really what we long for.
What we want from life, whether we die at 20 or 90, is to have learned to love.
The wise scientists know this, of course. But in a laboratory atmosphere, it is easy to assume that what is true for mice is also true for humans, and that will never be true.
The mysterious element that makes us different from other creatures used to be called our soul. John Keats, a wise young poet who died at the age of 25, said that we live in a valley of soul-making.
That is not the same as running through the scientifically programmed existence of laboratory mice.