Of course, on this question of old age, science is still a baby. There are plenty of biologists who believe that aging and death are as inevitable as taxes. No one really knows if human longevity will come up against a fixed barrier somewhere or if, like the sound barrier, it is there only to be broken. Some gerontologists say the limit of the average life-span is 85 years; others, 95, 100, 150 and beyond. No one understands the economic barriers either. Ronald Lee, a demographer at the University of California, Berkeley, calculates that for each year we add to the average life-span, the economy will have to grow 1% to pay for our care.

After more than 50 years in the laboratory, Benzer has too much respect for life's complexities to believe in quick cures or fountains of youth. He often works through the night on his mutant Methuselah. He feels that aging should now be studied as a disease, and he would love to spend his next career, he says, "unraveling the facts." But he hates to see the study of longevity being overblown by the press. "I hope the hype will not result in the same letdown as Nixon's all-out war on cancer." Even if there is a central clock, it may be harder to control than cancer.

Chances are that my generation will consume all manner of antiaging drugs and nostrums--antioxidants, growth hormone, vitamin D, garlic, red wine, melatonin, blueberries--and in the end we'll still live only a little longer than our parents. Today in Japan a clothing company is cashing in with "antistink" underwear for middle-aged men, who (according to the company) begin to emit odors. But by the time we die, or shortly thereafter, the expansion of youth and the postponement of old age may become one of the greatest enterprises of the 21st century. "I see it as inevitable," says evolutionary biologist Michael Rose, who breeds strains of long-lived flies in his laboratory at the University of California at Irvine. "I'm confident that Benzer's work--and the worm people's and maybe my work--will someday be used by a bunch of avaricious corporations who'll make billions of dollars a la Microsoft by giving people what they've always wanted."

I wouldn't want to live as long as Methuselah, myself. But I would like to reach old age alive and kicking. My hope is that the science of life will mature fast enough so that 30 years from now, when my sons begin to ask those eternal questions about growing old, I can look at them and say, "I recommend it."

Jonathan Weiner is the Pulitzer-prizewinning author of The Beak of the Finch. His most recent book is Time, Love, Memory

PAGE 1 | 2 |