Carol’s Column

There are absolutely no flies on the Elixir of Life

SOMETIMES I do not believe what I read.

I was sitting plucking out my grey hairs, which left me with only 237 sparsely-spread across the top of my head, when I happened to come across an article called "The Elixir of Life from Fruit Flies".

It described how a team of Swiss and British scientists can prolong a healthy life by at least half. Which in human terms meant 30 to 40 years.

This was earth-shattering news. The team, led by Dr John Sheppard and Dr Walter Gehring of Basel University, had remarkably discovered how to double the life of the fruit fly.

This they had done by injecting an extra gene into fertilised fruit fly eggs, then allowing the egg to develop naturally.

The extra gene is a protein called EF-1 Alpha which, the story said, is the gene for making a natural body substance and elongating life. Present in large quantities at birth, one's stocks of EF-1 Alpha declined with age and eventually one died.

Now, a fruit fly is not a human being, though, believe me, there are some fruit flies whose company I prefer to humans. I mean, I'd rather have dinner with a fruit fly than with Eugene TerreBlanche or Idi Amin.

According to the scientists, techniques for making humans immortal have been developed, but as yet, the results are not altogether successful.

I hadn't really given ageing much of a thought until the other day my teenage daughter of the dark eyes and ethnic sandals asked me if there was electricity when I was young.

She wasn't joking. Naturally I was distressed because I realised that in her just-17-year-old view I was almost dead, which was not a little disconcerting.

"Of course there wasn't electricity when I was young." I said tartly as in lemon-flavoured. "I studied by candlelight, rode a donkey bareback to school and only wore shoes for special occasions."

She believed me. Which was even more disconcerting.

And then I heard one of Barry's friends refer to me as the "old lady".

"Tell David Dembo that never again will I make him a beef on rye with four pickled cucumbers, half a tomato and real Dijon mustard. He can make his own sandwiches," I muttered to my oldest son as I grabbed my walking stick and hobbled off to my rocking chair.

"So what do you think of this fruit fly business?" I asked my good friend Betty as we sat at the beautician having our necks de-creped and the bags under our eyes reduced with a new skin treatment made of cucumber pips and lamb's testicles. "Would you like to live longer?"

"It depends on the day," said Betty. "Some days yes, some days no.

"Besides I wouldn't do that to my children," she added. Then, on reflection: "Mind you, it would serve them right."

Naturally, there are one or two problems that still have to be clarified. For instance. How is life prolonged? Do you remain 40 for the next 80 years or do you age so that by the time you're 120, you've lost your teeth and have more wrinkles than a herd of prunes?

A zoologist friend remarked in passing that fruit flies are a particularly jolly species of insect. "They're prolific breeders," he said, "and they make the best of their shortish little lives. They actually deserve to live longer."

Nevertheless, my pharmacist informs me that EF-1 Alpha is not yet available to the public and probably won't be for at least 20 years which might be too late as by that stage I'll probably have decomposed into fertiliser.

Meanwhile, yesterday someone bashed into the back of my car saying he hadn't seen it due to the fact that he was colour-blind. The electricity in our house died, causing the meat in the deep freeze to become vrot, the drains blocked, I cracked a front tooth on a piece of biltong, the security gate ran off its rail and disappeared down the road never to be seen again and the police came to arrest me for parking in front of a fire hydrant and not paying the fine.

One has to be realistic. Is this the kind of life that warrants an elixir?

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