Live forever: Wonder drugs kill zombie cells and prevent diseases making 100 the new 60

Clinical geriatrician Dr James Kirkland, Director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Ageing at Mayo Clinic, told the Telegraph: “Most people don’t want to live to 130 and feel like they’re 130 but they wouldn’t mind living to 90 or 100 and feel like they’re 60. And now that can actually be achieved in animals.

“Ageing itself is the highest risk factor for most of the chronic diseases. And if you get one age-related disease, you’ve got a huge chance of having several.

“You tend to find older individuals who are completely healthy and are playing 18 rounds of golf a day, or they’ve got three, five or 10 different conditions. There aren’t too many people in between.

“Around 10 years ago we began to explore the notion that ageing may be an upstream cause of all of these conditions and not only be a risk factor but could actually be causal.