Dr Graham Easton splits his week between working as a GP in west London and producing and presenting science and medical programmes for BBC Radio.

So will we live forever?
An important part of my daily routine as a GP is the ritual prodding and shouting at newspapers. Headlines like 'Could this be a cure for Cancer?' may be great for sales but they're nothing but a cruel tease for Mrs Smith waiting to have her mastectomy. But I wouldn't be so cynical about "One Day We'll All Live to be a Hundred"; I'm not talking about a magical elixir of eternal youth, but I do think the human life span will gradually get longer and longer. Though as a doctor, what worries me is how we'll all cope.

Since the 1950's our average life span has been stretching by about 2 years every decade; and that's nothing to do with a magical elixir. My six-month-old son can expect to live about 8 years longer than I will. That's because we're eating better, there's better sanitation, we've got antibiotics and vaccinations and we're fighting the big killers like heart disease on several fronts - diet, exercise, and keeping our cholesterol and blood pressure nice and low. I think we'll use the same shotgun tactics to keep chipping away at the human life span in the future.

Just like heart disease, or cancer, ageing itself is driven by a mixture of our genes, and by the way we live our lives. Our genes account for only a quarter of what determines how old we live. No one knows exactly what these genes are yet, or what they do, but there have been tantalising glimpses in the form of wrinkled and arthritic mice and "Peter Pan" worms and fruit flies. With the Human Genome Project now up and running, it won't be long before scientists find the human genes that are beavering away repairing our cells and DNA, trying desperately to keep us young. But even if we found them all, worked out what they did, and then harnessed them to our advantage, we still wouldn't have the "magic bullet" against ageing.

Some scientists are making headway in stopping the biological clocks within every cell - the so-called 'telomeres' that sit like short fuses burning away at the end of our chromosomes. Others are already trying to use fresh, young, stem cells to replace worn-out body parts like the brain or the heart. Alongside all this genetic work, we're learning more about how calorie intake, antioxidants like Vitamin C, exercise, sunlight and smoking all affect the ageing process. No magic elixir then, but it's easy to see how some or all of these strands of research will, in time, carry us through the century barrier.

But as any frontline GP will tell you, the real challenges of old age are human, not scientific. In today's society older people are often marginalized: immobile, needing care, unproductive and therefore seen as a nuisance to society. How will we cope when 80 year-olds outnumber 30 year-olds? Unless there are great leaps in quality of life, as well as quantity, I doubt many of us would even want to live to be a hundred. So while the scientists focus on our ageing cells and genes, the rest of us need to think about what we'll do with the whole ancient organism.

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Content last updated: 17/07/2006

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