just won’t do.It was an upsetting sight, like being a pathologist, peeping through the one-way glass to see all the people who have just tested positive for something woeful but don’t know it yet, and I wondered how it all came about. I could see how they might start being lawyers – a desire to please Daddy, an urge to be safe and in the right – but not why they would go on being them, long after it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. How could this be? And, by the same token, how could I go on yearning for boats and watches and crocodile shoes and an Olycom, when I know that none of it makes any difference at all?Then I got the answer.It was evolution. Lamarckism – the inheritance of acquired characteristics – doesn’t work, but evolution doesn’t work either. In particular, we haven’t evolved the most useful thing of all, which would be a yearn-o-meter. We laugh at dogs because if you put a dog in a room with enough food to kill it if eaten all at once, it will eat all the food at once and die But we are the same. We have no little gauge which will say: “Enough.”Think what the world would be like if we had evolved one “Enough power,” it would say “Enough telling lies for political expediency Enough trying to please Daddy Enough houses Enough corporate subsidies Enough money Enough control Enough novels Enough prizes Enough sex.

Enough gadgets.”Who knows: if we had been really lucky, we might even have evolved one that said “Enough yearning.”But we didn’t. We have to learn it for ourselves; and that’s another reason Lamarckism won’t work. By the time we’ve acquired really useful characteristics like how to stop yearning, we’re too old to move, let alone breed children. Tough world, but what can you do? So I carried on to Berry’s to drool over the Olycom, but I know that one day I won’t want one any more It’s as good a reason as any to keep on going !. For most of human history, man’s only hope of living forever has been to die first. Eternal life, with death reduced to a transient state en route to the hereafter, has been the most popular means of avoiding eternal oblivion.

But now death itself is under siege as never before, as chemical and genetic manipulation of the ageing process and its terminal consequences, become real possibilities. Evidence against the “wear and tear” theory of ageing is growing, suggesting that it is a process that can be tinkered with – mankind may one day have no need of a hereafter because life on earth will just go on and on.
Fruit flies and worms are the major beneficiaries of the Methuselah-mania that is currently sweeping through laboratories worldwide, but it is more scientific fact than fiction which has respected scientists and learned scientific journals discussing the prospects of human life measured in centuries rather than decades.Dr Michael Rose, a British-born geneticist now based at the University of California at Irvine, and the man credited with almost single-handedly bringing “the evolutionary theory of ageing from an abstract notion to one of the more exciting topics in science,” has, by selective breeding techniques, managed to double the life span of his laboratory fruit flies.This, he says, corresponds to a human life span of around 200 years. Dr Rose is now planning to extend his work to mice, a more useful genetic model for man than the 500 generations of drosophilae he has bred over the last 20 years.Meanwhile, scientists at McGill University in Montreal recently published research in the journal Science, showing how they had genetically altered worms to live almost seven times longer than normal. And Cynthia Kenyon, professor of biology at the University of California in San Francisco, has succeeded in breeding nematodes, microscopic worms found in the soil, which buck their expected life-span trend. At eight weeks old – positively senile in nematode terms – they are as vigorous as they were at two weeks old.By studying these longer-living flies and worms, and extending the work to other species, scientists hope to determine how the Meth-uselahs differ from their “normal”, shorter-living brothers and sisters; what hormones, enzymes, or other biologically active proteins they make more or less of, and at what stage in their life cycle. It may then be possible to devise therapies which will make humans live longer, according to Dr Rose.In a recent interview published in The New Yorker magazine, he fast-forwards to a future in which popping anti-ageing pills – clinically proven to be effective in total contrast to the extremely dubious panaceas like DHEA and melatonin which are the current fashion – is the accepted norm “You’ll have a big, elaborate industry … which will involve companies that turn out many products for a considerable amount of money, so that people are going to have to spend a very significant fraction of their income every year on products that will keep them young and robust,” Dr Rose confidently predicts.Certainly that is what the Geron Corporation in San Francisco is hoping for.

It is the world’s first biotechnology company devoted to developing drugs to treat ageing, and is at the forefront of what is known as telomere theory. It is an area of research which has sprung up only in the last five years, and focuses on the caps of DNA – telomeres – that sit on the end of human chromosomes. The exact function of a telomere is not known but it has been observed that each time a cell divides, it gets a little bit shorter. The older a person is, the shorter these DNA caps on the chromosomes.Telomere experts such as Carol Greider at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, and Calvin Harley, chief scientific adviser at Geron Corporation propose that telomeres regulate the ageing of cells.

They argue that telomeres have a critical length below which a cell cannot divide further, and this is when the ageing process kicks in. If the shortening of telomeres could be halted, or a means found of lengthening them, in theory at least, the ageing of the cell could be stopped in its tracks. This theory also offers a route to another of medical science’s holy grails, a cure for cancer, predominantly a disease of ageing.In the mid-Eighties, scientists discovered a protein known as telomerase, an enzyme which can replace all the bits of telomere lost during cell division, and stop it shortening. Cancer cells, rogue cells which divide repeatedly short-circuiting the normal growth controls imposed on a cell, are rich in telomerase. Healthy cells are not; they possess the ability to make the enzyme but the genetic switch regulating its production has not been flipped on.