Live Long and Prosper

“Pass the salt, willya?”

“I swear if you keep using that much salt, you won’t live to see 130,” my wife told me.

“I hope you’re wrong. I want to see the great-great grandkids graduate.” I cleared my throat. 

“Oh no, you’re not going to sing again are you?” 

I strummed my air guitar. “Imagine all the people living for today… and the next 100 years or more…”

“That sound you just heard was John Lennon fans all over the world groaning.”

I do apologize to John for adding lyrics to his incredible ballad, but I just heard some exciting news at a seminar presented by the head of USCB’s Center for Aging and Longevity Studies. He told us that humans are poised at the threshold of remarkable changes in their relationship with time. Research in the aging and longevity field holds the promise of forestalling the onset of age-related disease and thereby allowing us to live much, much longer and healthier.

I strummed my air guitar again. “Time, time, time is on my side, side, side… Say, is there any more wine?”

Pat passed the bottle. “Moderation, remember?”

“But wine helps my singing voice… Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine, when you gonna let me get sober? Leave me alone, let me go home, let me go home and start over… See?
Crooner, right?”

Pat opened another bottle. “Try the cab, Sinatra. See if that helps.”

This relatively new field of research is taking a different approach to longevity. Instead of looking at all the age-related diseases that are shortening lifespans, they are looking at ways to slow or even reverse the aging process itself.

“Can you imagine if, like, I became that young man you first met with long hair and those cool sideburns? And my day-glow poster collection? Sitting by my lava lamp hammering out those first humor pieces on my rental Smith-Coroner? Wonder what ever happened to that lava lamp?”

“Oh great,” muttered Pat. “Thirty-seven years of molding, redirecting, refining down the tubes.” 

Another interesting facet of the anti-aging research is that we could change the way we plan our lives. “Imagine going to college, having a career and then, at retirement, starting a family when you could better afford one and have the time to devote to raising them,” the professor told us at the seminar.

A number of women in the audience groaned. “Birth at 65, fuhgeddaboudit!”

“Or,” the professor added, “you could begin a brand new career. Try something you always wanted but couldn’t because you were building your first career.”

“Wow! You know, dear, how I’ve always been interested in taxidermy? Just think of all the possibilities.” Pat looked around the condo, the walls full of art she has collected for years. Then she took out a tape measure, measured me and a section of the hallway. “Okay, okay definitely not taxidermy. Maybe sculpting?”

Part of the problem today – as I understand it – is that as we age some of our cells die and like dead cells are wont to do, they just hang out and get in the way. So new “avenger” cells are being developed that will hunt down these cells and “take them out” kinda like paid assassins in a Netflix movie. Other advanced cells will be looking for abnormal cells that often lead to disease and eliminate them.

“Wow! It’ll be a big shootout inside of me. Wonder if I could swallow my iPhone and capture some video? I’d probably get like a million likes on Instagram or something.”

There will be new longevity drugs to take and vaccines to aid in this new science. I mean, Pfizer has to have something to sell when we no longer need the disease cures they make now, with their five million side effects. There will also be gene therapies, and of course artificial intelligence will have a role. I wonder if we’ll still be able to check that little box that pops up for software updates: “Are you a robot?”

I smiled at Pat. “You know, I’m glad I’m going to get to spend another fifty or sixty more years with you, dear.”

She hugged me. “That may be the nicest thing you say to me for the next 150 years.”