A longer life ignores the cost of growing old

Genetic science promises to delay death, but cannot prevent the decay that comes with ageing
    • The Observer,
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Europeans once joked that Californians believed so strongly in the power of positive thinking they thought 'death was optional'. Perhaps we laughed too soon. Since the mapping of the human genome and the arrival of stem cell research, a utopian wave has swept up researchers into the ageing process.

Many no longer find it fanciful to imagine average life spans in the hundreds, while researchers at the Immortality Institute in California, inevitably, go further. Our mission, they declare, is 'to conquer the blight of involuntary death'.

The techniques of extreme dieting they discuss - eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea a day - seem cranky, while putting your corpse into cold storage until some unspecified date when as yet uninvented nanobots repair your body seems crankier still.

And at first glance, British researcher Aubrey de Grey seems equally eccentric. But although he is criticised by his peers for saying 'the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already', he remains part of the academic argument, not a derided outsider. Further into the mainstream, BBC4 has given Michio Kaku, a wonderfully optimistic physicist, the opportunity to host Visions of the Future.

Last week, he said it was reasonable to believe that biotechnology and advances in genetic science may mean that 'ultimately, the ageing process itself could be slowed down or even halted'. Sober scientists, untouched by the Californian sun, now dream anything is possible.

The day after Kaku broadcast, Dr Guy Brown, head of Cambridge University's research group into cell death in the brain, took to the stage of the Royal Society of Arts and began his lecture with an apology: 'I'm afraid I have rather a depressing theme.'

His publishers describe his latest book, The Living End, as a groundbreaking exposé of a crisis as great as global warming or radical Islam, but which is hardly ever confronted. As he spoke to the RSA, I understood why.

Brown may not think immortality is within our grasp, but he doesn't disagree with the predictions that life expectancy will go on rising. He points out that each generation of actuaries assumed that ageing must stop; that somewhere there was a boundary beyond which the overwhelming majority of people could not pass. Every time they said humanity had reached its natural limit, they were wrong. By 2050, Britain will have 250,000 people who are more than 100, with millions bunched behind them in their eighties and nineties.

They will not be bright, rejuvenated Californians, but the victims of lives that are 'beyond what is sensible, beneficial and humane'. Although improvements in health in the rich world and beyond mean that '40 is the new 30' and '60 is the new 50' aren't simply the slogans of ad men, scientific advance has not, and perhaps cannot, make 90 the new 80 and 100 the new 90. More people are living longer than their ancestors imagined possible, but their death is preceded by years of chronic disease. Dementia, blindness, deafness and arthritis bring an end to independent life. Memory loss destroys socialising and conversation. Unsurprisingly, given the above, deep depression characterises extreme old age.

Most people in most of history have moved from life to death instantaneously or after a short catastrophic illness. Now, a woman aged 65 in the UK is likely to live to at least 85 and has a one in four chance of dying with dementia (rising to one in three by 2050). To use Brown's metaphor, death is changing from a digital event (like a light being switched off) to an analogue process (like a dimmer switch slowly bringing darkness).

For Brown and researchers who agree with him, scientists and governments have failed to react by shifting medical research away from conditions that kill and towards conditions that make life not worth living. He thinks that if they do, advances are possible. 'I have to be an optimist,' he told me.

Others aren't as sure. Professor Steve Jones of University College London told me how he listened in despair to heartbreaking stories as children told him they didn't worry about their cystic fibrosis, 'because I'm going to be cured by gene therapy'. For all the exultant hopes of our time, he is struck by how few treatments have followed the 'gross overselling' of genetic science.

If he's right and there are no cures in sight for the degradations of old age, then a second recommendation of Brown's has greater salience. He wants societies to accept death as a process rather than an event and let people choose how far they are prepared to go before reaching for the switch. States should free their citizens from decay by legislating for living wills, assisted suicide and a mass building of hospices.

The RSA audience was composed of intelligent men and women, several of them from charities for the aged. I may be being unfair to them, but they didn't seem to understand what Brown had said. They, too, were utopians and wanted tougher legislation against ageism, greater equality to raise the life-expectancy and 'more positive images' of the elderly. Worthy objectives, I'm sure, but if the future is to be composed of millions living longer but suffering more, I can't see how they would help.

If his warnings are ignored, Brown cites the Greek myth of Tithonus as a cautionary tale. His lover, Eos, asked Zeus to make him immortal, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus lived forever 'but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.'

If Tithonus is not to become a 21st-century deity, we may have to accept that an end to suffering is better than suffering without end.

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