researchers studying how to repair the onslaughts and eradicate diseases of old age, buoyed by advances in genetics and stem-cell research. For example, reseachers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Maryland, reported in June that liver tumours in mice virtually vanished when treated with genetic snippets called microRNAs. “Since we were able to demonstrate such dramatic therapeutic benefit in this extremely aggressive model of human liver cancer, we are hopeful that similar strategies will be effective for patients with this disease,” said Dr Joshua Mendell, one of the astounded authors of the paper in the journal Cell.

Drug companies are on the case, because ageing afflicts everyone and makes every person in the developed world a potential customer. The current silver-haired generation is richer and vainer than any that has preceded it; the anti-ageing industry in the US alone is estimated to be worth $20 billion (£12 billion) and will grow by 9 per cent this year thanks to therapies to deal with menopause, hair loss, joint problems and ailing memories. Factor in the substantial number of billionaires who wake up one morning and decide that they don’t want to die (such as John Sperling, the $3 billion education-for-profit magnate who tried to buy the company that cloned Dolly the sheep) and you have a very competitive, fast-moving, well-funded research field with ready custom. Not all the research is being done in academic and company labs; numerous organisations, such as the Maximum Life Foundation (mission statement: where biotech, infotech and nanotech meet to reverse ageing by 2029), are marshalling biologists, futurists and doctors in their quest to extend lifespan radically.

Some researchers believe that if senescence (the ageing of an organism) can be reduced or even reversed, its end point — death — is no longer inevitable. The controversial British researcher Aubrey de Grey sees no reason why the human body cannot last for 1,000 years (barring accidents). He believes that such a modern-day Methuselah already walks among us. De Grey’s vision is close to that of “transhumanists”, people who believe in using science to transcend the limitations of being human, the most obvious limitation being death.

As de Grey puts it: “I claim that we are close to that point (someone living to 1,000) because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing. It is not just an idea: it is a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular damage that happen to us over time — and each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined.” His argument is that anti-ageing therapies will improve faster than we age, so that a young person today will be able to stave off ageing almost indefinitely.

Imagine an individual who makes full use of all therapies currently available to him or her, or being researched, whatever the cost. At Dorian’s birth, his genome is sequenced. This means that the whole book of his DNA, with its 23 chapters (each chapter representing a pair of chromosomes) laid out in separate paragraphs (genes), is written down. Reading a person’s genome is very crudely equivalent to mapping out the major plot twists of his medical

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