This is the Guardian. Humans are obsessed with getting old or more precisely staying young.

And while there have always been those willing to halt anti-aging elixes and

sell us dreams of long healthy lives, so far the quest

for eternal youth has been a dead end.

But now science is beginning to catch up. This is an exceptionally hopeful time. This is the

first time in human history where we have a pretty good idea what some of the mechanisms driving aging and the diseases that accompany it.

As you can imagine, this has turbocharged our fascination with longevity.

Aging is 80% to 90% the cause of heart disease, Alzheimer's.

If we didn't get old and our bodies stayed youthful, we would not get those diseases.

We have discovered several genes in our centenarians.

We can imitate them.

If we can understand what happens to them,

we can create it as a drug. I've looked at my blood

by chemistry and I'm actually now younger and healthier than I've ever been.

And even though they say one thing money can't buy is time, that's not going to stop Silicon Valley billionaires.

The only objective we have is don't die.

Don't die. It's that simple.

Most of us aren't going to get infusions of young blood or take hundreds of supplements a day.

But beneath the hype there is something troubling happening.

The global population is aging. By 2030, one in six people in the world will be age 60 years or over. Today a child born in the UK

has more than 50% chance of living into their 90s. That doesn't mean they'll be healthy

when they get there of course.

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