Could Harriet the tortoise, who lived to 175, help find a cure for ageing?
Ageless: The New Science Of Getting Older Without Getting Old Andrew Steele Bloomsbury £20 ★★★★★
In 2015, medical researchers at the Mayo Clinic in America discovered that a cocktail of two drugs administered to elderly subjects made them biologically younger. Subsequent work with ‘D+Q’ – dasatinib and quercetin – has shown that the cocktail improves heart function, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, lung disease and fatty liver disease. It also strengthens the grip of recipients, allowing them to hang from a wire for longer. Yes, D+Q is great news for mice, but what about humans?
Well, Andrew Steele has written Ageless to show us humans that ‘ageing is not some rigid, immutable biological inevitability’. It can be slowed or halted by a variety of medical techniques, some still hypothetical, others nearly ready for deployment. ‘The ideas for treating ageing processes aren’t pie-in-the-sky theoretical biology – they are being tested in labs and hospitals around the world today,’ he writes.
Steele is not a crank or a s nake- oi l s al esman. He’s not a ‘ wellness’ YouTuber. He doesn’t work for Goop. He’s a biologist and fellow of the Francis Crick Institute in London, Europe’s biggest biomedical research lab. We can take what he says seriously.
He believes the ‘ cure’ for ageing won’t be a single magicbullet solution but ‘a succession of t echnologies t hat gradually improve life expectancy to the point that people will notice that they’ve stopped ageing’. He acknowledges that even talking about ‘curing’ ageing sounds odd, and he’s not saying it will happen next week or next year, or perhaps even within the lifetime of anyone reading. But he does make a good case that it will eventually happen, and his compelling book gives a high-level snapshot of current, cutting-edge research in biogerontology, the relatively young science of ageing. It looks at how and why ageing happens and how it might be halted.
It’s a fascinating read with almost every page bursti ng with extrao r di nary facts. For example, when the tree in California thought to be Earth’s oldest multicellular life f o r m ger minated, the builders hadn’t yet broken ground on Stonehenge. Galapagos tortoises exhibit ‘negligible senescence’, meaning that when Harriet (right), a tortoise collected by Charles Darwin, died in 2006 at the age of 175, she was as fit as she had been in Victorian times. Historical records about castrated prisoners suggest that they were less prone to male-pattern baldness so, you know, swings and roundabouts. There are several passages the squeamish might want to hurry past. When discussing teratomas, a particularly horrific type of tumour, Steele writes ‘I highly recommend seeking one out’, the better to understand their monstrousness. I highly recommend you don’t. Also, some might think death preferable to one potential lifespan-extending technique: a ‘microbiome transplant’ involving the ingestion or insertion of somebody else’s ‘faecal matter’.
There is only one section that is slightly less than gripping, towards the end when Steele passes on his best tips to ensure you live long enough to benefit from the medical breakthroughs coming down the line. Given what’s gone before, you might expect some exciting new discoveries but it’s nothing that you didn’t already know. Knock the fags on the head, cut down on the booze, eat plenty of fruit and veg, look after your teeth and so on. Oh, and get vaccinated too. Ironically, Ageless is itself ageing quickly. The rate at which the science is advancing is so dizzying that, several times, Steele points out that what he has just written will already be out of date when his book is published. So read it now before it – or you – gets any older.