We’re all living longer. Instead of struggling to stay young, why not learn to age well?
In the words of Taylor Swift, I might be “feeling 22” but the reality is that my 39th birthday approaches and with that the slow creep to 40: official midlife territory. The desire to stay young feels like a universal pursuit, whether you are Swift, Madonna or Jeff Bezos. Indeed, it is an obsession that transcends the centuries: in 1513, explorer Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida while searching for the fountain of youth and eternal life.
Fast forward just more than 500 years and American tech centimillionaire Bryan Johnson is on his own voyage of discovery. Johnson reportedly spends $2m (£1.6m) a year on an intensive regime designed to reduce his biological age from 45 to 18. He recently made headlines for injecting himself with his 17-year-old son’s plasma, after studies in mice showed young blood can rejuvenate old tissue.
In these experiments, two mice (one old and one young) were stitched together to share a circulatory system. Within five weeks, the blood from the younger mouse had restored muscle and liver cells – and enhanced growth of brain cells – in the older one. On the other hand, the young mice who were exposed to older blood had reduced growth. The experiments were not without risk. In a 1956 study that joined 69 pairs of rats, scientists noted that if two rats were not adjusted to each other, one would chew the head of the other until it was destroyed. In addition, 11 pairs died within one to two weeks of conjoining, probably due to tissue rejection.
So why would a multimillionaire want to be infused with his son’s blood based on such a rudimentary experiment? Johnson’s quest is indicative of our singular obsession as a society with looking younger and living longer in the face of an ever-elusive anti-ageing “cure”. Demand for anti-ageing elixirs is huge, from widely available skin and hair products, to surgical procedures andless common medical experiments, such as Johnson’s plasma transfusions. The anti-ageing market is expected to surpass $119.6bn globally by 2030.
As people live longer across the world and our societies age, there is