Who’d call dat livin’?

Ian Glynn

  • The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Ageing by S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes
    Norton, 254 pp, £19.95, August 2001, ISBN 0 393 04836 5

As a role model, Methuselah is not ideal. Apart from his 969-year lifespan, almost all we know about him is that his first child, a son, was born when he was 187, and that he subsequently ‘begat sons and daughters’. We don’t know whether those first 187 years included a protracted adolescence, or how he fared towards the end of his life. Ira Gershwin’s splendidly execrable rhyme: ‘Who’d call dat livin’/When no gall’l give in/To no man what’s nine hundred years?’, suggests only one of many unenviable scenarios. Longevity is desirable only if the prolonged life is a happy one.

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Anne Enright wrote about Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells in the LRB of 13 April 2000.