Donald Morrison does everything but “Help the Ageing” in this horribly brilliant series of reviews.
Eos, the goddess of dawn, persuaded Zeus to bestow immortality on her human lover Tithonus. But she forgot to ask for enduring youth as well. Big mistake. Eventually, Tithonus became a withered old wreck, and Eos shut him away for eternity.
We all know the feeling, or soon will. Death may be our common fate but our common fear is the nightmare that comes first: growing old. Aristotle saw ageing as a nasty process that turns us into cynical, emotionally shrivelled Scrooges. In As You Like It, Shakespeare panned life’s last act as “second childishness and mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Martin Amis, in his recent novel The Pregnant Widow, likens ageing to “auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then, after interminable rehearsals, you’re finally starring in a horror film – a talentless, irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way with horror films) they’re saving the worst for last”.
Must the last be so horrible? Though average lifespans increased very little between Aristotle’s time and Shakespeare’s – to less than 40 – they have leapt forward in the past two centuries with the rise of public health systems, vaccinations, antibiotics and the like. A baby born in the developed world today can expect to live 80 years. The number of centenarians on the planet has doubled every decade since 1960.
But life’s length and its quality are hardly the same thing, as Tithonus can attest. So for as long as humans have been ageing – roughly from that Garden of Eden incident – the search has been on for a cure: Herodotus’s Ethiopian springs, Ponce de Leon’s Florida fountain, Dorian Gray’s portrait. Goat testicle transplants and radium potions were the rage a century ago. Sigmund Freud subjected himself, without apparent benefit, to an early 20th-century fad for “rejuvenating” vasectomies. Similarly neutered was William Butler Yeats, who thereupon began chasing younger women and churning out poems, including many of his best. Indeed, anxiety over ageing has inspired much forgettable science and memorable poetry. “I grow old. I grow old,” laments T?S Eliot in “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. “I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled. / Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”
A grape would be better. After decades of going nowhere – and being held in slightly ill repute – the science of ageing has begun turning out masterstrokes as prolifically as the later Yeats. Resveratrol, a substance found in grape skins and a few other places, has been shown to block the effects of ageing. Just weeks ago, researchers in the US announced that proteins activated by resveratrol appear to suppress Alzheimer’s disease in mice. The researchers hope for similar results against Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and other degenerative ailments that plague the old. At this rate, science could add years to our lives and, perhaps, decades to those of future generations.