In the 16th century, Spanish explorer Ponce de León went on an expedition to discover the mythical fountain of youth, stumbled upon the southeast coast of what is today known as United States. The magical water source supposedly capable of reversing the aging process and curing sickness may have been fictional, but it seems that many latter-day Leon’s are still searching for it in today’s America.

Since America worships youth, men and women advancing in age, hungering to stay relevant, want to live long but look young and healthy. Serving them are the twin drivers of biotechnology and ‘miracle’ face creams. Freezing time by ridding lines and sculpting the fat off the body is a pursuit universally chased by most oldies. Moneyed geysers often cohabit with women half their age lusting to regenerate their sag-bellied frames, get the old ticker pumping fresh blood by a fling with youth; quenching their thirst with the elixir of youth.

Recent experiments with blood transfusions from young mice to their older mates and vice versa show promise in age reversal. Young blood boosts old brains and bodies making the old mice look younger, while old blood prematurely ages the young mice. Humans are set to be the next guinea pigs and multi-billion dollar beauty and pharma corporations are already salivating at the prospect. Their wait period is over: Come October, human trials giving young blood plasma to older people begins; not for beauty but for medical reasons. A team at Stanford School of Medicine will administer the blood transfusion plasma donated by people under 30 to older volunteers with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s.

“I certainly think that this therapy might be beneficial in a number of different conditions,” says Tony Wyss-Coray, whose team pioneered blood transfusions in mice. “Blood might contain the fountain of youth after all. And it is within us all — that’s the crazy thing. It [blood] just loses its power as we age.”

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. — Woody Allen

Aggressively fighting age is another California-based not-for-profit institute called SENS Research Foundation: A world free of age-related disease is possible, they wager. Their research emphasises the application of ‘regenerative medicine to age-related disease, with the intent of repairing underlying damage to the body’s tissues, cells, and molecules.’ Their avowed goal is to “help build the industry that will end the diseases of aging.”

The anti-aging industry is a veritable juggernaut

Sexism: the stepchild of Septuagenarians

Until scientists can successfully engineer blood transfusions to fight the decaying process of age, the resounding ‘Aye’ for a robust splice of youth and spunk fixates our real life drama. The current queen of drama is the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. While she hems and haws on her candidacy for 2016 presidential elections, her male detractors hasten to remind the American public that age is against the lady with extra baggage, read folds, rumples, puckers and all. Howard Kurtz, the affable host of Fox News Channel’s Media Buzz remarked recently “Hillary — she of the ever-changing hairstyles — has to worry about wrinkles in a way that male candidates do not.” He warned male chauvinists that using her age against Hillary could backfire. Still, Kurtz, like his fellow Fox commenters, is Hillary-appearance-centric.

Charlie Cook’s column Is Hillary Clinton Too Old to Run? zeroes in on her age, not her wisdom that she brings to the table. Skeptics, largely men, support Cook’s diatribe appearing in the latest edition of the widely read ‘National Journal.’ Mrs Clinton, the reader is informed, will be passé by the time she ends her two-term presidency (if elected and re-elected). She will be 77! While it was okay for Reagan to be that old when he left the White House; it’s not okay for Hillary Clinton. Why? Superannuation prevents women from performing the “physically demanding” job of a president; but not men, says Cook.

Endorsing the overarching view ‘America worships youth,’ Charlie Cook — no spring chicken at 60, says Clinton at 69 will fail to appeal to the “younger” electorate swiftly overtaking the baby boomers (Americans born between 1946 -64). The ‘Millennials’ aka ‘Generation Y’ disdain politicians of Mrs Clinton’s vintage, having entered adulthood only this century. She’ll fail to make herself more “relevant to the future, rather than to the past.” Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, 72, quips “Don’t tell me that Democrats are the party of the future when their presidential ticket for 2016 is shaping up to look like a re-run of The Golden Girls [a popular sitcom of the 50s featuring four old women].”

“Men politicos blow dry their hair, use Botox to pull their sagging cheeks and jowls in a bid to look pretty boys” comments a woman who thinks geriatrics like McConnell are sexists. Blame it on politics, celebrity culture and mainstream media whose creed is: to stay young is to be relevant. For the rest, it’s downhill all the way until you hit the ground six feet under.

Dr Death

Not surprisingly then, here’s one man who wants to die at age 75. Why would the director of the clinical bioethics department at the US National Institutes of Health exalt death? Because, old age, according to Dr Ezekiel Emanuel’s prognosis, renders “many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived.” Provoking nationwide commentary with his column headlined Why I Hope to Die at 75 in The Atlantic, the twinkle-eyed doc writes that old age “robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

This is the man who designed the controversial Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act (ACA), dubbed by critics as ‘death panels,’ with TV advertisements showing President Obama (played by an actor), pushing granny off the cliff. Like the metaphor ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ Obamacare will piggyback on Medicare, the government agency funded by US Treasury for free medical treatment of working Americans on their 65th birthday. Naturally medical benefits for the seniors will suffer due to cuts in Medicare.

Small wonder then that ‘Dr Death’ advocates dying at age 75. Americans, according to him, will do whatever it takes to cheat death — they’ll exercise like crazy, solve mental puzzles, drink energy-boosting protein concoctions and watch what they put in their mouths. Dr Emanuel calls this obsession-soaked culture “The American immortal.” It is a direct attack on the West Coast institutes, mentioned above, who believe in the “compression of morbidity,” the theory that folks in their 80s and 90s will live healthier lives.

He rubbishes the theory that one can live happily and healthily a decade shy of a century. To him this is but a “dream” and a “fantasy” misleading Americans to believe that they will “live longer lives and then abruptly die with hardly any aches, pains, or physical deterioration—the morbidity traditionally associated with growing old.”

Fleeting interactions with people at the end of life and how their families deal with them makes for a sad snapshot. An apartment is up for sale. Missing from the scene are the owners; their clothes stand lined waiting to be worn. Where are they? “Upstairs!” points the realtor heavenwards. The daughter of the deceased couple has no time to dispose of her parents’ personal effects. She wants the house sold pronto. The smell of death hangs; the colour purple shades the walls; scattered are shapeless stone sculptures the dead woman once molded.

Another apartment tells the same sad tale. At the entrance, aged suitcases greet the visitor. Someone is ready to leave, it seems. Inside, medicines, rubber gloves, cotton wool, wheel chairs, oxygen tanks, hospital bed with rumbled sheets and blankets make a deathly statement. Where is the patient? “Gone to the hospital,” answers the aide indifferently. The family wants the house sold pronto.

With the falling leaves of autumn showcasing the end of summer, an ambulance followed by two police cars comes blaring to a halt in front of a home. Elderly neighbours wonder whose turn is it this time. Next door at the stately Park Savoy, wedding guests greet the bride in white and her strapping groom. Across the road, a viewing is in progress at an upscale funeral home. Mourners in black throng the parking lot. A crumbling nursing home is bang opposite. Old people unable to handle aging check in to die. Leaning against the railing of life are a group of startlingly worn-down inmates vacantly staring in space with the specter of death hanging over them. Nearby, the local strip mall bustles with life.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 26th, 2014