My 14-month-old son might live to see the end of human ageing
‘In the end”, wrote Goethe glumly, “we are all King Lear”. While medical science is getting better at replacing bits of us – hearts, kidneys, eardrums, hips – it has not been able to halt senility. Doctors have become very good at curing previously fatal conditions in younger people, but there seems to be an upper limit.
The age of the oldest person on the planet is, if anything, dropping slightly: the title recently passed from Jamaica’s Violet Brown (117) to Japan’s Nabi Tajima (also 117). Neither matched France’s Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122.
What, though, if that limit could be breached? Not just breached, but completely transcended? What if we could halt the degeneration of cells, and so halt ageing itself? A quiet revolution is underway in gerontology. Twenty years ago, physical decline was seen as inescapable, and the various conditions associated with old age – heart failure, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and so on – were viewed as discrete diseases. Senescence itself was thought to be beyond the reach of medical science.
We are now witnessing a vertiginous shift. Rather than treating the separate manifestations of old age, biotech companies are categorising old age itself as a disease, and searching for a cure. They aim to halt cellular decay – and so forestall the related conditions. Why, after all, should cells die? Our very earliest ancestors were functionally immortal, reproducing by parthenogenesis rather than by breeding. Even now, we can develop immortal cells, albeit in the tragic form of cancer.
Many of the researchers working in this field are coy about the vastness of their ambition, aware that it sounds fantastical. I would have dismissed it myself until I read Juvenescence, a new book by Jim Mellon and Al Chalabi. The authors are not interested in fairy tales: they are successful money men, and their book is an overview of what life science companies are currently doing. Mellon, sometimes called Britain’s Warren Buffett, has made the better part of a billion pounds by recognising investment opportunities. When hard-headed entrepreneurs are putting their money into immortality research, the fanciful is becoming feasible.
My 14-month-old son might easily live to see the conquest of ageing. That’s not to say that he’ll be immortal – he’ll still be subject to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. But old age, as we know it, is unlikely to be among them.
Will that advance make him happier? Not as much as you might think. As the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari points out, the fear of accidental death will be horribly magnified in a long-lived society, and the pain of bereavement unbearable. And that’s before we consider the anguish of those who can’t afford the new elixirs. Even so, what a world to be born into. What was it Louis Armstrong sang? “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow. They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know”.
Edward Heath is not the first man to face legal action after his death. In the year 897, Pope Stephen VI had his predecessor-butone, Pope Formosus, put on trial for having improperly usurped the See of Rome.
The papal cadaver was dragged into the Basilica of St John Lateran, seated in a chair and interrogated. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it failed to provide adequate answers to the prosecutor’s questions, and was found guilty.
We scoff at such medieval superstition. Yet look at how we behave in our turn. Sir Edward, after all, is not alone in being posthumously placed in the dock. George Bell, the former Bishop of Chichester, has been effectively disowned and condemned more than half a century after his death on the same charge – child abuse.
The mistreatment of children revolts us uniquely, and for good reason. That, though, does not undermine the basic legal principle that an accused person should be allowed to answer the charges. Even at the time, Pope Stephen’s macabre trial was seen as demented: his congregation rose up and deposed him.
Our own age shows no such sense of balance.
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at telegraph.co.uk/opinion