Do we have to age?

The biologist Andrew Steele thinks ageing is a disease that can be treated. But if we had a cure for getting old, what would that mean for us?

When the biologist Andrew Steele tells people his thoughts on ageing - that we might one day cure it as if it were any other disease - they are often incredulous and sometimes hostile. Once, at a friend's wedding, he left a group of guests mildly incensed for suggesting that near-future humans might live well into their 100s. A similar thing happens at dinner parties, where the responses are more polite but no less sceptical. He understands the reaction. We think of ageing as an inescapable fact of life - we're born, we grow old, so it goes. That's been the narrative for thousands of years," he says, on a video call. But what if it didn't have to be?

Steele began professional life as a physicist. As a child, he was fascinated by space, the way many scientists are. But he has spent the past three years researching a book about biogerontology, the scientific study of ageing, in which he argues the case for a future in which our lives go on and on. Steele considers ageing the greatest humanitarian issue of our time". When he describes growing old as the biggest cause of suffering in the world," he is being earnest. Ageing is this inevitable, creeping thing that happens," he says. He is wearing a button-down shirt and, at 35, a look of still-youthful optimism. We're all quite blind to its magnitude. But what do people die of? Cancer. Heart disease. Stroke. These things all occur in old people, and they primarily occur because of the ageing process."