Time of our Lives

  • Tom Kirkwood
Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1998. 287 pp. £20

It's a grand life if you don't weaken, as they used to say. Or if you don't get anything wrong with you. In the old days you almost invariably did. TB, cancer, hypertension, pneumonia above all — they could carry you off without much fuss or bother between the fifth and seventh decades of life. But now, says Tom Kirkwood, we ought to become more conscious of the fact that those once almost inevitable shorteners of our lives don't come round for us any more. We should draw a deep breath and make the most of what used to be the evening of our lives. Make it a new morning.

Kirkwood's hearty tone and vigorous mode of exposition are agreeable to nonscientists, even if they do not necessarily grasp all the implications of a scientific argument. Take the little matter of cell ageing, on which much of the general optimism of Kirkwood's thesis depends. He tells the story of the conceited though charismatic French surgeon Alexis Carrel, a Nobel prizewinner who demonstrated that cells outside the body could be kept alive indefinitely in a properly maintained culture, and continue to grow. This seemed good news until Paul Moorhead and Leonard Hayflick demonstrated in their turn that actual body cells appear to be subject to what became known as the Hayflick limit, the point beyond which cell reduplication did not continue. Could this be because cell ageing and final extinction are programmed as part of the ageing process? In other words, even if we escape the more obvious maladies of mortality, will we die just because our cells give up?

To help lay readers grasp the point, Kirkwood takes the analogy of an airliner hurtling down the runway towards take-off. Should something be still at fault after the elaborate pre-flight checks, a red light will come on in the cockpit, the crew will be alerted and the flight aborted. But a wholly clueless outsider might draw the conclusion that the red light was itself the cause of the problem. Cell ageing, that is to say, may not be programmed, but may be the result of random damage or accident over a cumulative period, which will finally have the result of the whole immensely complex system packing up.

I am not convinced that this argument is particularly good news for septuagenarians who may be hoping to enjoy the time of their lives. What may be good news scientifically is perhaps best forgotten by those who are toiling on from day to day, and getting by as best they can. Causation, or its opposite, is itself an unsettling matter for the unscientific mind. Which would you rather feel: that your cancer has been genetically programmed, induced by stress or caused by viruses? Brought about by your own folly in smoking cigarettes, or — as Kirkwood himself appears to take for granted — brought about casually and spontaneously through the operation of chance? If it is put before them in this way, most people would rather not think about the matter at all.

Kirkwood — who is professor of gerontology at Manchester University — takes a different view, maintaining that the more we know about the ageing process the more we can “exercise a greater degree of personal control”. Common sense certainly tells us oldies to take it easy, to cut down a bit on food and alcohol and strenuous exercise, but we know this from the feel of our bodies rather than from what we read about the progress of science.

To declare an interest of my own, my wife, Iris Murdoch, died recently. For four years she had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease, a brain disorder. Research was trying to find out why people died apparently not of, but with, this disease: what were the factors involved that produced a life-threatening situation? Apart from her mental troubles my wife had seemed to be in good health, eating and functioning normally. In a sense she seemed young rather than old, and I fed her, washed and cared for her as one would a three-year-old child. She seemed herself to attempt to adapt to this situation, to become good at it, just as she herself had been a good person, as well as a great novelist and writer.

But quite suddenly, and as if more brain cells had switched off their circuitry, she stopped eating and drinking. My impression was that she wanted to be good at this too, as if swiftly to produce its best result. She died peacefully and quietly in my arms, and the medical certificate gave the cause as broncho-pneumonia. The doctor told me, between ourselves, that there was no sign of this, but one could hardly write down “starvation and dehydration”.

The function of consciousness in this ending remained mysterious, at least to me. One could hardly feel that Iris had retained any capacity “to exercise a degree of personal control”. But her body seemed to know what it wanted, and how to set about getting it. No doubt an illusion of the outsider, like the red light in the cockpit being the cause of the trouble, but it was strangely comforting to feel that in this most helpless and hopeless of disorders the body was not just dependent for its decisions on cellular malfunction or termination.

One of the charms of Kirkwood's book is the vitality and insight conferred by its humour (humour that also survived in a 79-year-old woman transformed back into a three-year-old child). The best thing about growing old might be to have a good chuckle at it. As W. C. Fields, a lifelong hater of temperance-obsessed Philadelphia, did when he decided to make them write on his gravestone: “On the whole I'd rather be in Philadelphia”. That is one of the jokes Kirkwood tells in the course of an immensely shrewd but also light-hearted survey of our current prospects and situation, agewise: and, as he more controversially maintains, what we ourselves ought to know and to do about it.

I feel sure he would agree with what might be termed the law of conservation of trouble. If we do live longer, remain more healthy and more alert, the young, for one thing, are not going to like it at all. They would much rather look after us than have to compete with us. Kirkwood, who evidently knows Africa well, has some pertinent concluding remarks on the current grave difficulties in tribal societies where the authority of the old, once questioned, is today not so much challenged as ignored. To the young there who want to live and work in go-ahead towns, the old have become irrelevant. It would be an irony if we could all start to expect to live to 100, and yet have to be sensibly programmed in some future social and scientific Utopia to die at 60.

One of Kirkwood's engaging habits in this book is to preface his chapters with some suitable quotation from wise old poetry. (However young poets may die, poetry always knows how to grow old gracefully.) He omits, however, the ending of the Swinburne lyric, which thanks “whatever gods may be”,

That no man lives for ever  That dead men rise up never  That even the weariest river  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Sans hair, sans teeth⃛

A Means to an End: The Biological Basis of Aging and Death by William R. Clark  Oxford University Press, £18.99, $27.50  For those who want more of the same medicine, this immunologist and experienced popular-science writer's latest book is on ageing. And he covers mostly the same scientific ground as Kirkwood in a similar way.

Molecular Biology of Aging edited by Vilhelm A. Bohr, Brian F. C. Clark & Tinna Stevnsner Munksgaard, DKr400  For the specialist, the edited papers presented at the 44th Alfred Benzon symposium held in Copenhagen in June 1998.

How and Why We Age by Leonard Hayflick Ballantine, $14, £8.99  “Many a scientist has found immortality but none by Woody Allen's preferred method — not dying. Avogadro lives on through his number, Planck his constant, Ohm his law. Leonard Hayflick, happily very much alive today, will be known to future generations for discovering the Hayflick limit, a phenomenon that seems partly responsible for the certainty that Woody Allen's wish is one day going to be thwarted. . .Written in clear, nontechnical language, [Hayflick's book] is an excellent introduction to the scientific and demographic literature on this multifaceted subject.” Tom Kirkwood, Nature 373, 484– 485 (1995 ).