![]() ![]() "Our aim," he says, "is to make sure that the extra years are added to the youthful years, not to old age." Their argument is that a longer lifespan will only elongate the period of declining health and geriatric loneliness in a world that questions the productivity of the old. To a vast number, the very thought of extending the human lifespan - often through methods termed theologically corrupt - is disgusting. ![]() Scientists like Anthony Linnane of Australia's Monash University predict that it will soon be possible to increase the average human lifespan to 120 years.īut Methuselah doesn't have much to grin about. The past 10 years have been a virtual gerontological goldmine. The focus suddenly shifted from treating illnesses associated with ageing to treating ageing itself. Only when the sanitaria filled up to bursting point, and subsidies to geriatric welfare projects and institutions gobbled up more money than the governments were willing to pay, were substantial grants channelised into gerontology, the scientific study of ageing. In a world where collective compassion went down the tube right after World War II, the old had no place to go but sanitaria during the youthquaking '60s. As it is, ageism - prejudice against the aged - is growing: the longer they live, the more they consume increasingly scarce resources. Thus, while the elderly might live longer - in purely physical terms - there will also be more cases of senile dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et al. Better healthcare services and falling birth rates will ensure that the rate of growth of the world's elderly will far surpass the rate of growth of the total population - 60.5 per cent vs 37.6 per cent (over the 1980 figures). There will be 590 million oldsters(total estimated population?)- 60 years and above - by the fin de siecle, up from 200 million in 1950. Given a choice, it is a rare person who would not prefer Parkinson's disease or coronary heart diseases over the virtual brain death of Alzheimer's. They say that Alzheimer's is the worst of all tortures - watching memory and recognition fail, the synapses sputter into silence. What an irony it is that the man who once steered the world's most powerful nation now has no one in his driver's seat. He had survived terrible visitations upon his body: colon and skin cancer, prostate problems, even an assassin's bullet in the chest. "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life," wrote Ronald Reagan in a recent open letter to his fellow Americans, revealing that his brain had begun to rot, irreversibly. But even then, his brain had already kicked off into the bottomless abyss of Alzheimer's disease. HE HAD jet black hair when he quit the Oval Office 12 years ago, at unnerving variance with the network of age-lines on his face, wattles, dewlaps and all. ![]()
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