WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER?

From ancient myth to modern medicine, the search for eternal life has moved into the lab

- By AA Patawaran

I have always been fascinated by our obsession with time.

We want to stop it, stretch it, outwit it. The oldest known surviving epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia is a tale of a man chasing immortality. Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, whether or not he searched for the Fountain of Youth, has gone down in history as if he did. The Greeks had Clotho, the spinner of life's thread, and the gods themselves were defined by eternity, what mortals could never have. Or could they now? From the beginning, we have looked at ageing not as a natural course but as a problem to solve.

Now, the myth has moved into the laboratory. The alchemists of today are not trying to turn lead into gold but to turn back the clock. We know now why we wrinkle, why our joints creak, why memory fades. Our DNA frays at the edges, like the tips of shoelaces. Some of our cells turn zombie, refusing to die but refusing to live, releasing toxins that drag everything else down with them. Even mitochondria, the supposed powerhouse of the cell, lose their charge. What was once fate has been itemised into a checklist of processes, each with its own potential fix. This is where a new class of drugs called senolytics comes in, designed to specifically clear these rogue cells from the body.