Wednesday 30 August, 2000
The Ageing Game
Today 85% of people who reach the milestone of 100 years, happen to be women. By 2025, a woman well past middle age will be able to turn the clock back to her prime. She'll be able to bear a child and to shrug off the horrors of old age. Christopher Upton reports.
Most of us are obsessed with the ageing process, always have been and always will. When we're young we want to be old before our time and when we're getting on, we spend our twilight years desperately seeking some sort of magic potion that will reverse the ageing process. Time, life and ego are inextricably tied and the advances of science have served to do little more than feed our appetite for personal preservation.
'At the moment, women don't really "live" longer than men. They just take longer to die.' | |
Womankind In The 21st Century
After the giant leap for mankind in the 20th century, the 21st century promises to be the golden age for womankind. Scientific and economic changes have given women the power to control their work lives, family lives and fertility. Women in the west today can expect to live to 79 years, on average, and their longevity continues to rise. Despite this the effects of menopause and ageing often overshadow their final years: arthritic joints, brittle bones, senile dementia and general debilitation. For although women outlive men, as Dr Freda Lewis-Hall, the director of the Lilly Centre for Women's Health in Indianapolis, points out:
'At the moment, women don't really "live" longer than men. They just take longer to die.'
It has been worse: 100 years ago, western women often died in childbirth, after backstreet abortion and from the lack of basic nutrition, and tended not to live much longer than 50 - about the same age that the menopause struck.
'It is as though women were created to live while they were fertile; as soon as their fertility ended, so did their lives,'
says Dr Peter Selby, a consultant physician at Manchester Royal Infirmary. They simply didn't live long enough to experience many of the degenerative illnesses that now occur after the menopause, for the increased life span has brought its own problems.
Future Developments
Today women live a third of their lives after the menopause, during which time many can expect to suffer from broken bones, heart disease, incontinence and the other indignities of ageing. But all this is set to change. And what is coming tomorrow will make the social, political and cultural effects of the contraceptive pill look like a minor footnote in the pages of women's history.
'They will not be able to fly - but they will be able to do pretty much everything else,'
says Dr Michio Kaku. The professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, Kaku interviewed more than 150 of the world's leading scientists for his authoritative look at the future:
Visions: How Science Will Revolutionise The 21st Century And Beyond.
Mothers At 70
According to Dr Kaku,
'The changes for women will be dramatic. There will be no biological clock ticking if they know they can be mothers at 70. They will also have the ability to correct genetic defects of their embryos. But people can be carried away, so a major concern for a mother in the future will be how far to push the issue of "designer babies". It will be both a biological and a moral problem.'
The medical and scientific breakthroughs will affect every part of a woman's day-to-day life. But this is not something that awaits only our daughters and granddaughters. A woman who is 40 today will be able to reap the benefits of the research and development being carried out in laboratories now.
The potential for change in the next 25 years is very much greater than the changes that have occurred since 1975. One has only to look back 25 years, when most people hadn't heard of Aids or the Internet.
This article originally appeared in BBC On Air magazine
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| Longevity |
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Two of the biggest weapons in the war against ageing are likely to be Telomerase and Stem cells.
Telomerase is an enzyme that stops the degradation of cells and has been shown in mice to regenerate livers damaged by cirrhosis. It may in future be injected or taken orally, but since it affects cell division, it will be essential that it is used only to treat specific kinds of cells (skin, brain, heart etc) so that it does not stimulate cancer.
Stem cells are all-purpose cells that can, with the help of specific growth factors, be made to turn into virtually any cell in the body. They may be used to replace damaged tissue in heart disease, strokes, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, osteoarthritis and much more besides. People might be able to set up a bank of their own stem cells for use later to repair tissues or replace organs as needed. There would then be no need for donor organs, with the risk of rejection they carry. |
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| Age Prevention |
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| The history of ageing in humans is littered with wild ideas for warding off old age such as injecting mashed monkey testicles, eating algae salads or (for men) sleeping between two virgins. |
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