Spring Chiken

And another study found that ibuprofen also seems to be associated with a 44 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s.

metformin appeared to have about a 30 percent lower risk of cancer, too. And it is one of the few compounds that actually has been shown to extend lifespan in mice, who are notoriously hard to longevitize. (Is that a word?)

Another paradox: not so very long ago, coffee was thought to be bad for you. This was undoubtedly because of the fact that it makes you feel good. Also, something about cancer. Yet without it, nothing would get done by anyone, anywhere. I’m on my third cup today, and it’s nine o’clock at night. What to do?

Ernest Becker: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity largely designed to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

at dinner one night in the vaulted Queen’s College dining hall, the Silicon Valley finance guy next to me showed me photos of his cloned dog. I was envious.

scientists took a group of aged rats and advanced their light-dark cycle by six hours for a week, then by another six hours. Within four weeks, half of the rats were dead

Yet another recent long-term study found that people who had been fitter at age twenty-five had stayed more cognitively “intact” at age fifty.

It isn’t pretty, what age does to our brains.

“We are programmed to function at a high level because it gives you a lot of advantages at the beginning of your life,” Blagosklonny said in an interview via Skype (he dislikes travel, and avoids face-to-face interactions for the most part). “But after development is finished, it’s like a car that is leaving the highway and going to the parking lot. If you run your car in a parking lot at seventy miles per hour, it will be damaged.”

Not only that, but rapamycin had worked even though the mice were already middle-aged when they took it. The study had started late, because the team’s pharmacologist had spent months trying to get the drug into mouse feed in a chemically stable way. By the time he figured it out, the animals were already nearly twenty months old, the mouse equivalent of about sixty human years—too old, according to conventional wisdom, for an anti-ageing drug to have any effect. Yet still the stuff had increased both the average and maximum overall lifespan of the animals by 9 percent for males, and 14 percent for females.