Tag Archives: ageing

The entirety of our human state

Posted on by

Owning the ageing process at the Wellcome Collection, London, for the Spectator, 11 March 2026

More than thirty contemporary artists — Anna Maria Maiolino, Tam Joseph and the like — contribute to Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as often so happens at Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first.

“These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power — energy — the will to succeed. The other is listeless — tired all the time — it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.”

The point being, ageing is a process, not an event. It is as much a matter of style, and manners, and even morality, as it is a matter of medicine. Ageing is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other.

In 1972 Simone de Beauvoir nailed this point beautifully in her still rather neglected book La Vieillesse (the American edition translated that as “Coming of Age”; a revealing cop-out). As she sets out to break the conspiracy of silence around old age — this ‘forbidden subject’, she calls it — she demands her readers use their imaginations and recognise themselves in the aged other.

“If we do not know what we are going to be,” she writes, “we cannot know what we are: let us recognise ourselves in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state.”

Like those good fellows at Kellogg’s, curator Shamita Sharmacharja wants visitors to own their ageing process, and value the prospect — if not indeed the present reality — of old age.

It’s a Quixotic enterprise because, as Philip Roth once quipped, “In every calm and reasonable person there is hidden a second person scared witless about death,” and there are few reminders of death more terrifying than the one that confronts us in the mirror each morning. “About a year ago,” wrote the American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, “I suddenly realised that I could not face walking toward myself again in the morning because here is this strange, uncouth, ugly, kind of toad-like woman… long thin legs, long thin arms, and a shapeless little toad-like torso and this head at the top with great staring eyes. And I thought, Jesus, why do I have to do this?”

Shock and outrage find their visible expression at the Wellcome in Paula Rego’s bruised and twisted self-portraits, made in 2017 after she fell. (Awakened to our society’s ubiquitous ageism, I am absolutely *not* going to write “after she had a fall”).

William Utermohlen’s visual record of dementia is only marginally more muted: an achingly articulate series recording his steadily disintegrating impression of his own face.

How do you weave a worthwhile life-stage from such gloomy material? The older I get, the more I am struck by the profound wisdom of Eric Idle’s song at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Looking on the bright side of life are Kimiko Nishimoto and Shiro Oguni. Oguni’s Restaurant of Mistaken Orders — represented here by a few knick-nacks, aprons, menus — is a pop-up dining experience employing servers with dementia. By accepting from the outset that orders might be incorrect, the restaurant fosters patience, empathy, and joyful human connection over cold, technical perfection.

Nishimoto, meanwhile, began taking self-portraits in her seventies, using Photoshop to stage herself left out with the bins, or hanging from a washing line, or drifting serenely from a tree. The moral being, I suppose, that if life discards us at the end, we may as well have some fun with the idea.

Maija Tammi’s photographic print Immortal’s Birthday Party conjures up a space that’s part 18th-century Wunderkammer, half child’s bedroom, like the lair of a particularly naive Nosferatu. The trouble being, of course, that age is real, and there really is a moment when we have to put away childish things, and even middle-aged things, in time.

Why?

Well, look to The Way of Things — the world’s first (and, to everyone’s secret relief, last) verse-form book of popular science. In it the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius argued that it’s not just life that’s finite; life’s possibilities are finite, too. Yes, you can fall in love any number of times — but you can only fall in love for the first time once. By the time all gratifications have been experienced, living endlessly is futile. “Do you expect me to invent some new contrivance for your pleasure?” Nature sneers. Growing up and ageing always incurs a loss, but refusing to grow up — remaining perfectly innocent and untouched by the world — is an even greater loss. As J.M. Barrie understood, Peter Pan ultimately represents Death.

Am I arguing that, for all Sharmacharja’s efforts, I came away thinking that ageing is a uniformly bad idea?

Not at all. For women it’s much worse. (Or as that All-Bran leaflet has it: “These 2 women are the same age. One has the bloom of youth. The other is wrinkled, gray, careworn, far older than her years.”)

The depressing fact is, it takes more effort for women to camouflage their temporal nature. They’re the ones who bleed, who give birth, who feed infants, and who, at no great age, cease to be able to give birth.

Wellcome‘s approach to exhibition-making can get a bit modish. The desire to connect science to medicine, and medicine to society, and society to politics, and politics to technology, and back to science again, can induce — in this visitor, at any rate — the sort of dazed passivity I associate with getting dangerously drunk with anthropology graduates.

In this show, however, I think medium and message come together superbly. Ageing, in general, leads to old age, and old age leads to death, and death leads to terror, and terror leads to meanness, especially towards women, whose capacity for childbearing is so painfully and obviously truncated half way through life. No wonder women, just as much as men, judge other women harshly if (by dropping a tampon out of their handbag, say) they reveal their animal nature. (That’s a genuine psychological experiment, by the way — and a genuine result.)

Is this intimate connection between death-terror and misogyny in any way fair? Of course not. But as a fact of life it’s the very devil to get around. Serena Korda’s striking and powerful ceramic installation Wild Apples tries to reframe the menopause as a powerful moment of transformation, but how does it do this? By reclaiming, for hard-done by women, the archetype of the hag and the crone. So much for the escapist power of art.

The Coming of Age wants us to make that Beauvoir-esque imaginative leap and think our way into aged skin. We probably ought to give this a try. The world is getting older by the day; soon it will be getting emptier, as working-age adults find the costs of elder care so burdensome that they can’t afford to have children. I suppose we’d better make our peace with a rapidly ageing world, and make the best of it.

But let’s be frank here: empathy is a bore. And other responses to ageing are available.

The ancient Greeks (at least according to Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 book The Human Condition) developed a surprisingly hard-nosed view of ageing and death. They believed that being remembered was the nearest they could realistically come to immortality. So they revered fame, and the moral and physical excellence that would inculcate fame. Needless to say, they were vain to a fault.

Remember this, once it dawns on you that The Coming of Age is as much about sex, and fashion, and death, and our roles in society, as it is about its proper subject. People are like that around ageing, and have been for the longest time. Get them on the subject of ageing, and they will end up covering everything else under sun, in a frantic bid to evade thoughts of where ageing is leading them (and dress it up how you like, it’s nowhere pretty).

Evasion is the point. And meanwhile, and as it says on the T shirt (also part of the exhibition, and I desperately want one): “DON’T DIE.”

The seeds of indisposition

Posted on by

Reading Ageless by Andrew Steele for the Telegraph, 20 December 2020

The first successful blood transfusions were performed in 1650, by the English physician Richard Lower, on dogs. The idea, for some while, was not that transfusions would save lives, but that they might extend them.

Turns out they did. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society mentions an experiment in which “an old mongrel curr, all over-run with the mainge” was transfused with about fifteen ounces of of blood from a young spaniel and was “perfectly cured.”

Aleksandr Bogdanov, who once vied with Vladimir Lenin for control of the Bolsheviks (before retiring to write science fiction novels) brought blood transfusion to Russia, and hoped to rejuvenate various exhausted colleagues (including Stalin) by the method. On 24 March 1928 he mutually transfused blood with a 21-year-old student, suffered a massive transfusion reaction, and died, two weeks later, at the age of fifty-four.

Bogdanov’s theory was stronger than his practice. His essay on ageing speaks a lot of sense. “Partial methods against it are only palliative,” he wrote, “they merely address individual symptoms, but do not help fight the underlying illness itself.” For Bogdanov, ageing is an illness — unavoidable, universal, but no more “normal” or “natural” than any other illness. By that logic, ageing should be no less invulnerable to human ingenuity and science. It should, in theory, be curable.

Andrew Steele agrees. Steele is an Oxford physicist who switched to computational biology, drawn by the field of biogerontology — or the search for a cure for ageing. “Treating ageing itself rather than individual diseases would be transformative,” he writes, and the data he brings to this argument is quite shocking. It turns out that curing cancer would add less than three years to a person’s typical life expectancy, and curing heart disease, barely two, as there are plenty of other diseases waiting in the wings.

Is ageing, then, simply a statistical inevitability — a case of there always being something out there that’s going to get us?

Well, no. In 1825 Benjamin Gompertz, a British mathematician, explained that there are two distinct drivers of human mortality. There are extrinsic events, such as injuries or diseases. But there’s also an internal deterioration — what he called “the seeds of indisposition”.

It’s Steele’s job here to explain why we should treat those “seeds” as a disease, rather than a divinely determined limit. In the course of that explanation Steele gives us, in effect, a tour of the whole of human biology. It’s an exhilarating journey, but by no means always a pretty one: a tale of senescent cells, misfolded proteins, intracellular waste and reactive metals. Readers of advanced years, wondering why their skin is turning yellow, will learn much more here than they bargained for.

Ageing isn’t evolutionarily useful; but because it comes after our breeding period, evolution just hasn’t got the power to do anything about it. Mutations whose negative effects occur late in our lives accumulate in the gene pool. Worse, if they had a positive effect on our lives early on, then they will be actively selected for. Ageing, in other words, is something we inherit.

It’s all very well conceptualising old age as one disease. But if your disease amounts to “what happens to a human body when 525 million years of evolution stop working”, then you’re reduced to curing everything that can possibly go wrong, with every system, at once. Ageing, it turns out, is just thousands upon thousands of “individual symptoms”, arriving all at once.

Steele believes the more we know about human biology, the more likely it is we’ll find systemic ways to treat these multiple symptoms. The challenge is huge, but the advances, as Steele describes them, are real and rapid. If, for example, we can persuade senescent cells to die, then we can shed the toxic biochemical garbage they accumulate, and enjoy once more all the benefits of (among other things) young blood. This no fond hope: human trials of senolytics started in 2018.

Steele is a superb guide to the wilder fringes of real medicine. He pretends to nothing else, and nothing more. So whether you find Ageless an incredibly focused account, or just an incredibly narrow one, will come down, in the end, to personal taste.

Steele shows us what happens to us biologically as we get older — which of course leaves a lot of blank canvas for the thoughtful reader to fill. Steele’s forebears in this (frankly, not too edifying) genre have all to often claimed that there are no other issues to tackle. In the 1930s the surgeon Alexis Carrel declared that “Scientific civilization has destroyed the world of the soul… Only the strength of youth gives the power to satisfy physiological appetites and to conquer the outer world”.

Charming.

And he wasn’t the only one. Books like Successful Aging (Rowe & Kahn, 1998) and How and Why We Age (Hayflick, 1996) aspire to a sort of overweaning authority, not by answering hard questions about mortality, long life and ageing, but merely by denying a gerontological role for anyone outside their narrow specialism: philosophers, historians, theologians, ethicists, poets — all are shown the door.

Steele is much more sensible. He simply sticks to his subject. To the extent that he expresses a view, I am confident that he understands that ageing is an experience to be lived meaningfully and fully, as well as a fascinating medical problem to be solved.

Steele’s vision is very tightly controlled: he wants us to achieve “negligible senescence”, in which, as we grow older, we suffer no obvious impairments. What he’s after is a risk of death that stays constant no matter how old we get. This sounds fanciful, but it does happen in nature. Giant tortoises succumb to statistical inevitability, not decrepitude.

I have a fairly entrenched problem with books that treat ageing as a merely medical phenomenon. But I heartily recommend this one. It’s modest in scope, and generous in detail. It’s an honest and optimistic contribution to a field that tips very easily indeed into Tony Stark-style boosterism.

Life expectancy in the developed world has doubled from 40 in the 1800s to over 80 today. But it is in our nature to be always craving for more. One colourful outfit called Ambrosia is offering anyone over 35 the opportunity to receive a litre of youthful blood plasma for $8000. Steele has some fun with this: “At the time of writing,” he tells us, “a promotional offer also allows you to get two for $12000 — buy one, get one half-price.”