Every week a new candidate for extending life appears, whether a drug, a supplement or a protocol, and every week the public conversation treats it as if longevity were something bought at a pharmacy, an individual promise that depends on finding the right molecule before everyone else.

The evidence points in another direction. Healthy years of life are won, or lost, at three levels that rarely speak to one another, that is, in each person’s decisions, in how health organisations design prevention for their patients and members, and in which questions each region’s science chooses to investigate. A promising molecule that reaches a system that does not detect in time, does not follow up its patients and does not measure outcomes, delivers very little.

That is why this section exists. To read every new development asking, above all, what changes at those three levels… and what does not.

Perhaps the question is not how long we can live, but who is designing those years.