Nadia is forty-three. A teacher. Comfortable but not wealthy. Last spring she went to a free longevity clinic consultation. Her epigenetic age came back three years older than her chronological age. The protocol the clinic's AI designed to address it cost £4,800 a year. She earns £38,000 before tax. She left with a leaflet and a feeling she found difficult to name.

This essay is about that feeling — and about the industry that produced it. About the genuinely extraordinary science (David Sinclair's epigenetic reprogramming work has just cleared its first FDA human trial), the market that trades on the credibility of that science while selling something rather different, and a life expectancy gap that stands at 24 years between the richest and poorest before a single AI-designed therapy reaches scale. The biology of ageing does not discriminate by income. The science trying to address it, for now, very largely does.