Would you really like to live to be 200? – Telegraph.co.uk

Wearing a dark polo-shirt, his jovial, unlined features are a good advertisement for the medicine he is peddling. His dark hair has only the odd streak of grey. He looks relaxed but then perhaps a holiday in Tuscany, from where he is calling, will do that for anyone.

As he waves his arms, another possible reason for his youthful demeanour becomes clear: he is plastered in wearable devices smart watches and rings which track his heart rate and sleep patterns. I just took out my continuous glucose monitor. His latest health check-up was just a couple of months ago. I didnt even have the colonoscopy, he says, deadly serious. The combination of full-body MRI and colo guard [an at-home colon cancer screening kit] was enough

I nod sagely as though I too have just pooed into a sample bucket and sent it off to a lab.

But hes not wrong that such tests do form part of an ongoing medical revolution. Early diagnostics prevention not cure are increasingly hardwired into healthcare provision, if only because stopping people becoming sick is vastly cheaper for governments than treating them once they do.

Many of us will already be surfing this wave of consumer health tech gadgets, from trackers in smartwatches to fingertip oxygen monitors deployed during Covid. In Youngs book they are producing a wealth of data which, when allied with growing computing power to crunch through it, form the first great pillar of how life will be extended in the near time. How can he be wrong? Personalised, predictive medicine is already with us.

Gene editing, organ regeneration and what he calls longevity in a pill are his other great hopes. The first of these, too, is here today. A renegade Chinese scientist has already created the first gene-edited humans twins born in 2018 whose DNA was tweaked to confer resistance to HIV. And I remain marked by an interview in 2019 with Sophie Wheldon, then a 21-year-old student from Birmingham whose life was saved by Car-T, a novel therapy which genetically modified her own white blood cells to attack her otherwise untreatable leukaemia.

Organ regeneration is more far-fetched, more far-off, even if Young has put his money where his mouth is, investing in Lygenesis, a company trying to grow functioning new organs (to replace failing old ones) using a patients own lymph nodes. So far the company is working on growing livers, but Young says they have many more organs in the pipeline. Human trials start in November.

As for longevity in a pill, such hopes are pinned on drugs like metformin, usually administered for diabetes, which in some patients can have a beneficial effect on other body systems too. But despite thousands of ongoing trials, its still far from being released as a regulated anti-ageing drug. That doesnt deter Young. When we perfect such processes, he believes, living to 150 or 200 years old will become as simple as getting vaccinated today. For the moment, however, and as Young himself admits, regular exercise is, for most of us, safer and more effective.

Indeed, there is no getting around the boring, unchanging truths of staying well longer. Young is most proud of the books final chapter, which offers 10 top tips to take advantage of the longevity revolution. Quit smoking is second on the list. Dont drink too much is there, too. Sleep and eat well. This is hardly revolutionary, though he is also a keen advocate of fasting (Every week Im fasting 36 hours from Monday evening to Wednesday morning), and plant-based diets. (I eat meat probably once every two or three weeks).

He thinks that such steps will help him overcome the cancer barrier, and the heart disease barrier, which is somewhere around 60 and 65 years. But he knows that hurdling those only means crashing into the neurodegenerative diseases barrier, which is around 80 or 90 years.

But there is a tech solution to dementia too, he thinks. And this is where things get more outlandish. If we want to help people to fight Alzheimers or neurodegenerative diseases, he says, integration between human brain and computer is the only way to solve it. He talks of Elon Musk, whose company Neuralink is working on just such a brain-machine interface with the goal of enabling people with paralysis to directly use their neural activity to operate digital devices. He mentions digital representations of the elderly avatars which could continue, compos mentis, as the physical persons dementia deteriorates, or even live on after they die. It sounds loopy, until he talks movingly of his grandfather, who died in 1995 and to whom he was close. He was instrumental for me. I would love to have the opportunity to have 30 minutes with a [digital copy] of him in the virtual world. Theres so many questions I would still like to ask.

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Would you really like to live to be 200? - Telegraph.co.uk