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The Quest for Immortality by S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes, W. W. Norton
£19.95, ISBN 0393048365

KEEP up the exercise, eat properly—and you may live a few days longer
than an actuary would have predicted. That’s the sensible and utterly unexciting
prescription offered by Jay Olshanksy and Bruce Carnes.

The Quest for Immortality is, as you’ll have guessed, a
down-to-earth survey of the science of ageing. After years of publishing journal
articles, these two University of Chicago researchers decided to explain ageing
to the general public. And they are horribly thorough.

They review the history of beliefs about ageing, and puncture them all. For
example, the “hyperborean myth” has it that somewhere, maybe in the Andes or
Caucasus, people live to be 130. They don’t of course—none of these places
has proper birth records.

A lucid recounting follows of the vast achievements of medical science in the
“first longevity revolution”. This redistributed death from the young to the
old, making cancer and heart disease, insignificant in the 18th century, the
major health problems in today’s industrial world But we do live longer these
days.

Much of what you read about ageing, however, Olshansky and Carnes assure us,
is pure snake oil. The original exponents of near-starvation diets, antioxidant
therapy, and human growth hormone, they point out, are all dead. But research
into anything and everything that could stop ageing, or even make our later
years more satisfying, is a growth industry. For the first time in human
history, billions of people now alive will grow old.