“By now, everyone’s heard of telomeres. Like the plastic ends of shoelaces, telomeres protect our DNA from unravelling. The length of our telomeres is an excellent measure of our health and well-being.”
The professor took a sip of water. She couldn’t tell if the unwavering gaze of the Federal Health Minister and his entourage was due to rapt attention at what she was saying or well-concealed boredom. She suspected the latter.
“Our group has been measuring telomere length for the past twenty years. Our data show that the average length of telomeres has stayed the same, below par. You have a question?”
The young man with owlish glasses and a pink tie had raised his hand.
“How do you account for human lifespan increasing over the past two decades if the length of telomeres has not improved?”
“Good question. The answer is technology. Medical advances can diagnose life-threatening conditions earlier and keep people alive longer.”
“So if technology is the answer, why are you still bothering with measuring telomeres?” asked the man with owlish glasses.
“Fair question. We believe that technology by itself is an eternal ‘wack a mole’ game. As soon as you clobber something like cancer on the head, another disease like Alzheimer’s pops up. People will never be free of disease, not until we cure ageing itself.”
“What do you mean, cure ageing?” asked the woman sitting next to the Minister, “Ageing is a natural process, it can’t be cured.” She was dressed in a pinstripe suit and had been introduced as the Minister’s principal adviser.
“I’m afraid that’s where we disagree. Ageing is primarily the loss of information at the cellular level. Experiments with animal models has shown that ageing can be put on hold by preventing this loss of information from happening. Whilst we haven’t been able to have a mouse live forever, we have well and truly opened the door to that possibility.”
“Hard to believe,” said the woman in the pinstripe suit, crossing her legs and folding her arms across her chest.
“I understand your skepticism,” replied the Professor, “but let me summarise what we know today.”
“We have known for a long time that good diet, regular exercise, good sleep and social connection extend human lifespan.”
“What is new, is that now we know the biological mechanisms involved. All of these good habits are what we call NAD boosters. NAD stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and is a natural enzyme that promotes error correction in cells, thus preventing the loss of information that we call ageing. Associated with these NAD boosters, is the release of sirtuins for beneficial cell metabolism, also the boosting of levels of the energy protein AMPK and the suppression of mTOR thereby leaving more energy for cell rejuvenation.”
“Ongoing chronic stress shortens lifespan by depleting the body of NAD. There is a dramatic shortening of those protective telomeres we were talking about earlier, as well as an increased prevalence of malformed cells. This is true of both animal models and people whenever there is ongoing chronic stress or bad diet or poor sleep patterns. The reason is that a body under continual stress diverts cellular energy away from healing and information correction and towards fight-or-flight chemical pathways instead.”
“Paradoxically, however, we do seem to benefit from temporary injections of stress in our lives. Exercise is a form of physical stress and is beneficial, so long as it feels good and isn’t just a boring routine. As is bathing in freezing water or rolling naked in the snow and then jumping into a sauna. Temporary calorie restriction is another form of beneficial physical stress.”
“Temporarily engaging what might be seen as risky behaviour also lengthens lifespan. I don’t mean driving on the wrong side of the road or playing with a loaded gun or kicking over a bikie’s Harley. I mean the temporary adrenalin shot from adventurous activities like skydiving, rock climbing, surfing, mountain biking or diving with sharks. As long as you don’t kill yourself or cause yourself permanent physical damage, engaging in these kinds of risky activities has been shown to promote NAD boosters.”
“My life is far too busy for all this,” growled the Minister, “why don’t you scientists find a pill I could take every morning instead?”
“There are some pills that boost NAD levels and have been proven to extend the healthy lifespan of animals,” said the Professor.
“These include Resveratrol where we have seen 10-15% longer lives in animal models, Metformin which activates AMPK thereby boosting NAD levels and extending lifespans by 6%, Rapamycin which turns down levels of mTOR and results in a 5% boost in lifespan and finally, the two NAD boosters NR (or nicotinamide riboside) and NMN (or nicotinamide mononucleotide) which further increase healthy lifespan,” she explained.
“So if I took all these pills, I could boost my lifespan by at least 25%?” asked the Minister, smiling broadly as though to say digesting numbers on the fly was something he did effortlessly every day, which was in fact true.
“The results are very promising but it’s too early to say,” answered the Professor, “more research is needed.”
“And that’s why you’ve invited us in,” said the Minister, “you want more funding for your department.”
“What is more beneficial? Spending money on ‘whacking the mole’ or curing ageing, the root cause of all human disease?” asked the Professor mildly.
“I have a question,” said the young man with the owlish glasses and pink tie, standing up with fists bunched to his side.
“Go ahead.”
“What if everything you say is true? What if we eventually manage to extend our lives to such as extent that we could live forever? Would that not mean an infinite number of people living on an earth that is already struggling under climactic and ecological stress? And at a personal level, if people lived forever, would they not get bored? Doesn’t death give us a reason to enjoy life? Would living forever not remove the incentive to do anything worthwhile with our lives?”
His face flushed, the young man sat down as suddenly as he had stood up.
“Those questions are more for the Philosophy Department than mine,” said the Professor equably, “It has been clear from the past few decades, however, that the more educated and knowledgeable people are, the fewer children they have. The birthrate in developed countries has dropped to way below replacement rate. Their populations are shrinking – and would be in dramatic collapse was it not for immigration from poorer countries. Furthermore, it is conceivable that once people can live forever, they would lose complete interest in procreation.”
Flurries of wind carve whorls of fragile delicacy across the crusty sand. An eagle wheels under a sky being honed on the whetstone of a white-hot sun. Razor blades of light cleave the overhanging cliff faces. Waves shatter into crystalline shards along the shoreline. The foamy remnants hiss back over beds of rolling pebbles. The old man’s soul slides along a timeless knife-edge of ecstatic being.
He escorts his surfboard through the shallows with a casual hand. Tangy slivers of salt slice the seaweed-laden air. Waist-deep, he climbs aboard and paddles to the lineup. The water surges back and forth over a snakeskin pattern of encrusted coral that looks close enough to touch. He shifts into a seated position, his eyes half-shuttered against the glare. Streaks of darker blue crease the denim of an ocean resonating with the lines of swell from a storm thousands of kilometres away. He and the other surfers slip down onto their boards and paddle towards deeper water, trying to gauge where the set of waves will break.
The first wave teases them, jinking first one way, then the other until its hidden underbelly collides with the coral and it rears up like a dragon woken from slumber.
The old man pivots his board and drops low. His arms dig in deep. He glances over his shoulder as the wall approaches while keeping in sight the two surfers to his right. The top of the wave starts feathering. The surfer closest to the peak stops paddling and duck-dives under the curling head. The second surfer pulls back and yells to the man.
The old man’s arms pull frantically and his legs kick for extra momentum. His board tilts. He is past the point of no return.
He is now attached to a tower of translucent beauty, poised to smash against the reef where it will release all its stored energy in a paroxysm of finality and death.
Any hesitation on his part means that the curling lip of the wave will snag him and throw his hapless body over into the waiting pit below. With tons of falling water about him, he will be driven beneath the surface, hitting the reef and incurring deep lacerations to his unprotected body as well as possible head trauma. Thrown about like a rag doll, he will be desperate by the time the ferocious tumult allows him to reach the surface for a quick breath. The swirling dragon will claw down on his body and he will be dragged under again and again until its energy is finally spent.
The old man feels himself falling and pushes up on his arms, creating the space for his legs to fold into position underneath him. He is dropping into the steepest section of the breaking wave. He stays crouched, head bent, holding onto the outside rail with his right hand. The board transitions out of its directionless fall, he feels the weight coming back onto his feet.
The fins grip and the inner rail bites. His legs straighten and he is launched out of the pocket, the lip curling above his head.
His arms thrown out wide for balance, he feels the power of the wave, how it responds taut and muscular to the surfboard drawing a smooth-flowing line along the glossy face.
If he was an expert rider, he would tuck into a barrel. Or ricochet off the lip. But no, he glides below the curving overhang, pure and harmonious, positioned just ahead of the exploding chaos, poised at the very razor edge of being.
The last section closes out. He dives back through the wave as it expires in a final maelstrom of thwarted foam.
The roulette wheel of life has turned under the circling white ball of the old man’s existence for the past 118 years, and it continues to spin.