Pat Kane: If science allowed us to live for centuries - would you want to?

Er, I think. The National Records of Scotland told us this week that we have the highest number ever of centenarians in the country – 960 (770 are women, 190 are men).

Representing a 13% rise on the previous year, there is a startling jolt of history behind these stats. They reflect, we are told, “the increase of births which occurred in Scotland at the end of World War One”. Eros and Thanatos twisting darkly and wonderfully together there, across the centuries.

Yet let me confess. When I look upon any centenarians, and imagine myself in their position, the achievement of extreme old age seems like a heavily cursed blessing. Old enough for considerable wisdom, too tired, slow and frail to act upon it all that much. Most of them seem like the human essence stretched out to a thin, papery roll.

I took to my Twitter followers to ask if any of them were living with centenarians. There were two clear and divergent responses. For example, @SBeattieSmith wrote that her 103-year-old grannie was not happy, a bit bored, her memory fading, missing her house in a care home, lonely and pining for her late husband. “She often says: ‘don’t get this old.’”

My grandad was 100 in July. His quality of life, full mental capacity and looks about 20yrs younger than he is. I hope I have his genes!

— Paul Durkin (@durky16) September 24, 2021

Yet another was from @amberjane199. Her “nana” was 100 years, living with a 98-year-old sister, “healthy in body and mind”. She works three days a week in an old folks home as an activity co-ordinator and her holiday is booked for next year. “And she is amazing.”

We’d want to ensure our life condition was something closer to nana than grannie, if we ever got past three figures. Indeed, for angry (and inflammation-gripped) blokes, to even get there would be a bonus.

A recommendation from my research for this column was to use the MyLongevity app from the University of East Anglia (UEA). This takes a number of biological and physical readings, then spits out an estimate of your age of death.

It didn’t come with a Grim Reaper emoji, but it might as well have. “83.3 years … 25.3 years left.” Whit!?

That’s a sore yin. One of the punishing elements of being a legacy act in the music business is that, every other weekend, you croon and cavort with songs you wrote when in your mid-20s. So you can measure the passage of three decades and more with ease (or varying degrees of discomfort).

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The continuities are much stronger than the discontinuities. Where did the time go? I’ve only gotten started!

Such a projection forward – giving you less time to play with, when you still feel in play (and a player) – has given me a proper shake. Indeed I’m sure I need to sail past the UEA’s calculation, but in a personal condition that allows new ideas to build on long experiences – and then be actually executed.

So one 100-plus: I’m interested. Science that halts or even reverses the processes of ageing as I get there: I’m really interested. Becoming obsessional about it, to the detriment of doing what I want to do: no thanks.

I know a good chunk of my own longevity is entirely in my own hands. I was diagnosed Type 2 diabetic a few years ago, which (the doctors cheerfully inform you) takes a decade off your life expectancy.

That is, if you don’t decide to slam on the dietary brakes, fasting, detoxifiying and exercising to a degree that the condition is reversed or considerably suppressed (the former Labour politician Tom Watson (above) is a great exemplar of this approach). I have left these starting blocks a few times, but not optimally. Once more onto the track…

Yet oddly, and inadvertently, I am already in the pill-popping world of longevity science and medicine. One of my diabetes-prescribed pills is metformin. This has been quietly doing its job, decreasing glucose, and increasing insulin sensitivity, since the mid-50s.

But in the last few years, scientists have observed how metformin prevents “senescent cells” – cells that slow their processes as we get older – from causing inflammation around them, which disorders our tissues and organs.

Indeed, this is the big flip that contemporary longevity scientists are trying to make. Haltong or reversing ageing is a way to attack chronic illnesses caused by the ageing process – like heart disease, arthritis, even cancer – at source. For example, rather than try to attack hundreds of different cancers separately, you should find ways for cells to maintain their healthy functioning and not trigger metastasis and tumours in the first place.

So halting or reversing ageing is, for these scientists, a matter of public health – particularly the hundreds of billions it costs to treat these maladies of ageing.

There is a chorus of familiar, indeed perennial charges against such research. It’s a foolish search for an elixir of youth (a fantasy indulged across many civilisations). Or it’s a pursuit driven by plutocrats. All the major tech moguls – old and young, Microsoft to Facebook to Google to Amazon – have invested billions in the core science.

The benign justification is that these are “moonshot” developments. You may or may not land on the planet of Youthtopia, but on the way to this audacious destination you produce a cascade of benefits.

The malign version is that this medicine extends the lives of those who do not act, shall we say, for the benefit of the commonality. Imagine an endlessly rejuvenating Murdoch, Putin, Orban (above)…

The current practices of the hard-right libertarian tech mogul (and Trump supporter) Peter Thiel are bad enough. The PayPal founder buys “young blood” from Gen Z’ers and pumps it into his own body. Literally, he’s a vampire.

HERE comes my own narcissism: I am pretty sure that I’d fill another functional 50 or a 100 years with a multitude of worthwhile projects, goals and relationships. Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic sci-fi novel 2312 imagines a newly settled general human lifespan of more than 150 years. Earthlings use their extra years to work their passage through an occupied solar system, using long journeys to deeply immerse themselves—mastering new languages, skills, artworks, spiritual beliefs…

Yes, it’s an idealistic take. The contrary view is posed by the Netflix series Altered Carbon. There, consciousnesses are downloaded on a chip, insertable at will into new human-body “sleeves”. The series shows this tech enabling repulsive and authoritarian dynasties, spreading their dominion across centuries.

So I am also very struck by the ethical view expressed by Paul Root Wolpe, the director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University. “Lingering multitudes of superseniors”, he said recently, “would stifle new generations and impede social progress. There is a wisdom to the evolutionary process of letting the older generation disappear. If the World War I generation and World War II generation and perhaps, you know, the Civil War generation were still alive, do you really think that we would have civil rights in this country? Gay marriage?”

However, ultimately I fall on the other side (also occupied by the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan). Which is that our human condition faces challenges of such complexity, such heightened existential risks, that we are evolving longer and healthier lifespans – so that we can increase our wisdom capacity to deal with them.

Against, is this ridiculously optimistic given the generational gulfs we see around attitudes to climate change, Brexit, Black Lives Matter – even Scottish independence?

Maybe. But speaking for this soul: I would love to be one of those Scottish centenarians, cresting my wave in 2064. Ideally a few decades into independence, enjoying a paragon of a nation, wrangling skilfully with the Anthropocene. Pills and cells permitting, I’ll see you there.