They say that we can very well live a hundred and thirty years. It is said by people who know: for example, Corina Amor, a Spanish immunologist who directs her own research group in a prestigious New York laboratory. By modifying white blood cells, Corina Amor and her team have already managed to defeat certain types of lymphoma and leukemia, and the mice she has experimented with in her laboratory have lived up to 36% more years than the rest of the mice. That suggests that you, the reader, and myself could easily be over a hundred years old and even a hundred and thirty. What would be strange if there are clams in Iceland that have lived more than five hundred years?
I would love to live many, many years, even be the first person to achieve immortality, but given the choice, I'd rather live eighty years as a human than five hundred as a clam. But that's not the point. The point is that, if Corina Amor is right, the fourteen million Spanish baby boomers, who for a long time have seen less road ahead than behind, in reality, would not yet have reached the halfway point of our existence. I, who felt close to the fateful moment of changing a bathtub for a shower tray, would still have seven long decades of life ahead of me! The plan of life does not displease me at all: quiet reading, walks in the evening, two or three weekly outings to go to the cinema or to exhibitions, a little writing if the inspiration has not been completely exhausted..., and so on for the next seventy years.
The only thing I don't want to know is how much time I have left. They say that the gods of antiquity, angry with the human being, punished him by depriving him of immortality, but then decided to soften the sentence by hiding the date of death. I prefer it that way, honestly. I don't even want to think about what life would be like if from the beginning it were presented as a long countdown: I have seven years, two months and three days left, I have left... As long as the doctor doesn't say otherwise, we insist on considering death a remote hypothesis and to continue living as if in reality we were never going to die. Through another prestigious Spanish scientist, María Blasco, we know that our life expectancy depends on telomeres, which are something like the little ends of chromosomes. If you have long telomeres, you will live for many years. If you have them short, one of these days you will have a serious upset. Can we know if our telomeres are short or long? I do not care. I don't want to know. I've already said that the last thing I want to know is how long I have left to live.
Now comes the bad news. The treatments being developed by teams of scientists like Corina Amor's are individualized. You have to isolate the patient's cells, modify them, re-inject them... The process is so complex that it is beyond the reach of most pockets. The conclusion is simple: while millionaires may live to be one hundred and thirty years old, the rest of us will continue to die at the age of always. What would happen if a cheap, effective, universally applicable treatment was suddenly discovered that would allow us all to reach one hundred and thirty years of life? That this would be a sindio, the system would collapse and we would end up killing each other in the streets, as in Diario de la Guerra del Pig, Adolfo Bioy Casares' passionate dystopia of customs, in which gangs of murderers of the elderly act with impunity in Buenos Aires, while the city is filled with old people with dyed gray hair and made-up wrinkles who do not want to be taken for such… But to get there, there is still a long time to go. I suppose that before we will know a world in which the right to longevity will be reserved for a few, the richest, who will refuse to share that privilege with others. The very idea of such a world seems so appalling to us that our brain refuses to accept it. However, that world already exists, and it is none other than this, our world: while the life expectancy of a man in Hong Kong is close to eighty-three years, that of one in Chad barely reaches fifty-three .
