KEY POINTS:
Attention all you livewires who find there aren't enough hours in the day, for hope is at hand. A Cambridge University scientist believes there are people alive today who will live for 1000 years.
I once dissected a frog and after that rapidly lost interest in biology, so
I can't give you the exact technical details apart from the fact that it's all to do with molecules.
But in a nutshell, Dr Aubrey de Grey's theory is that the ageing process isn't irreversible because it's an accumulation of damage which we'll soon be able to repair.
He likens the human body to a car - a Volkswagen Beetle perhaps - that given careful handling and regular servicing will just keep trundling along.
Dr de Grey concedes that most gerontologists think he's pushing the biological equivalent of time travel. But he's put his money where his mouth is, joining forces with an American magazine to offer $30,000 to anyone who can convince a panel of experts that his ideas are bunkum and not worth further research.
The implications are enormous. The first thing that springs to mind is that the various stages of growth, maturity, and decline will be drawn out to such an extent that inhabitants of this brave new world will spend the best part of a century in nappies and enduring the ravages of acne.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare identified the seven ages of man as follows:
* The infant "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms".
* The whining schoolboy "creeping like snail unwillingly to school".
* The lover "sighing like furnace".
* The soldier "seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth".
* The justice "in fair round belly ... full of wise saws and modern instances".
So far so good but it's all downhill from there:
* The "lean and slippered pantaloon ... his youthful hose well saved a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big, manly voice turning again towards childish treble".
* "Second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything".
However, what Dr de Grey seems to be saying is that in future we won't have to go through those final stages when our bodies pack up and our minds turn to mush.
Instead we'll progress normally to an optimum physical, intellectual and psychological age, say 35 to 40, when life's lessons have been absorbed and our physical attributes enhanced by an overlay of George Clooney-style charm, and remain forever youngish.
In fact, 1000 won't necessarily be the new 100. Dr de Grey says it's an average life expectancy based on the assumption that even when there's no such thing as death by natural causes people will find ways to die - such as car accidents, substance abuse, and getting murdered.
My money would be on suicide being the big mover. I suspect that, being the perverse and ungrateful creatures we are, if and when science does make eternal life an option, many people will spurn it. Faced with the prospect of spending another 900 years working at the checkout counter, or collecting rubbish, or writing a column, who wouldn't feel a twinge of nostalgia for the bad old days when there were such things as retirement - and death?
What effect would it have on our psyche? We're the only species - as far as we know - possessing foreknowledge of our death, and that awareness pervades most aspects of our existence.
For instance, it's been said that, when you get right down to it, most art is about sex or death or both. If so, and if Dr de Grey is right, future societies are going to be even more sex-saturated, something we may not have thought possible.
Would it mean the end of religion? To the atheist, religion is simply our way of softening the blow of mortality. But who needs heaven when you can plan a Tuscan holiday in the next millennium?
What would be the impact on family relationships when grown-up children will in effect be the same age as their parents?
I can see the headline now: Heir to the throne dumps wife of 700 years for great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grand-daughter.
On the plus side it might dispel the mystery that has preoccupied humankind since the cave: What's it all about?
Life would be like a long-haul flight, so the object of the exercise would be to make yourself as comfortable as you could afford. And as you're going to spend about 333 years in bed it would be wise to buy a really good one.
Assuming Dr de Grey isn't just another publicity-seeking nutty professor, we're left with the impression of science being at odds with itself, endangering humanity in various ways even as it closes in on the secret of eternal life.
Maybe he should share his theory with the Apocalypse Now faction in the scientific community, who keep ramping up the threat level of global warming: while Dr de Grey is claiming that a baby born today could live for 1000 years, they're telling us that our children's children won't need molecule transplants to be around when the world ends.
