If what we do with our time is a reflection of our personal anxieties, science journalists have a deep and persistent fear of their own deaths. Become a bioluddite.
You can maybe see this in the never-ending coverage of Bryan Johnson, the life extension millionaire obsessive who tracks the strength-over-time of his erections, takes dozens of pills per day (you can of course buy these pills from him), and never seems more than a few weeks between 10,000 word features written about him. Johnson, and a handful of other tech-adjacent people are part of a growing cadre of life extensionists, people who are actively searching for ways to extend the natural lifespan of humans, using whatever unproven and/or technically improbable platform they can get their hands on.
This interest/obsession, has existed for centuries, and while it has changed exactly tactics slightly the tactics remain the same. There is some fountain-of-youth-type substance or personal practice. If someone takes that substance or adds a little wellness habit to their daily routine, they’ll live longer. It can be something that modern wellness bloggers swear by, like sunning your perineum. A cadre of 19th century European physicians had their own fixations. One, Arnold Lorand, was obsessed with the thyroid and thought that eating animal glands could stave off senility. One, Serge Voronoff thought that the sex organs were the key to “rejuvenation” and elongating life. He perfected a technique where he grafted ape testicular tissue (and sometimes ovaries) into a human’s scrotum. He reported doing this 475 times in the 1930 calendar year (that’s hilarious but Voronoff was still, somehow, a serious scientist who was instrumental in the invention of hormone replacement therapy). Lorand also thought that a potential route to long life was simply being a poor peasant:
If we were asked for the best means of living to be 100 years old we would say: become a peasant or a pauper and be received into an English work-house… They have no anxieties about getting their daily bread, and oftentimes are fed better than they would have been in their homes, although only the minimum amount of hygienic food is given… Workhouse inmates lead a very regular and frugal life, rising in the small hours of the morning and retiring to bed early in the evening. Thus, in winter time, they can never contract pneumonia by coming home late from the overheated theatre, concert, or clubhouse. They also need not worry about their fortunes, for they have none.
The commonality that Johnson has with Lorand and Voronoff and a million others is that they were all wrong. It’s always something. For Johnson it’s supplements with coenzyme Q and vitamin B, for Lorand it was eating thyroid glands, for Voronoff it was stapling monkey testicles to your own sack. They all had something to provide to people, something to sell even, but not one person’s life was extended by a day through that work.