Will We Ever Conquer Old Age?
We’ve Gotten Good at Postponing, If Not Avoiding, the Grave. But Improving Our Record May Not Require Science.
Sooner or later, everyone ponders their mortality. It is the privilege of youth to be oblivious to death but the fate of old age to contemplate oblivion. Where such thoughts will take you depends very much on who you are. For the religious, there is the 17th-century poet John Donne’s rebuke “Death be not proud”: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!”
But there have always been skeptics, like the Roman poet Seneca, who years ago wrote:
After death nothing is, …
