No subject has inspired more hype and wishful thinking through the ages than life extension. Not surprisingly, our inner sceptics tend to counsel extreme caution when the talk turns to anti-aging elixirs. For many of us after a certain age, the scepticism is reinforced each morning with that first grimacing glance in the bathroom mirror, showing once again that no matter how many vitamins we've popped, cups of ginkgo tea we've downed, or miles we've jogged, aging and the wrinkles that come with it are inevitable.

But our mirrors are no longer sound counsellors. Scientists have firmly established that the rate of aging is malleable and now a well-founded quest for drugs that brake aging is rapidly unfolding. While this drugs won't confer immortality they do promise to usher in a new era of preventive medicine, one in which novel medicines arrive that can delay or avert just about everything that goes wrong with us as we age: dementia, cancer, osteoporosis, and, yes, jowls too, in the same way that medicines that lower blood pressure and cholesterol fend off heart disease today. THE YOUTH PILL explores these developments and the scientists behind them in an engaging account of the science that is changing the face of medicine and of our lives.