Detail from The Fountain of Youth, 1546, by German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (Wikimedia Commons; click for full image).

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Everybody’s getting older. Almost nobody wants to age.

Now there’s a huge industry in “anti-aging.” Eighty billion dollars a year in this country — spent on pills and guidance, anti-aging diets and exercise, hormones and more.

“Age management,” it’s being called. And it’s booming as boomers … well, age. Testosterone sales are through the roof, with growth outstripping Viagra. For five thousand a year, we read, you can be kept tuned up like a race horse.

This hour, On Point: Age management. We’ll look at the real science and new horizons of aging.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

S. Jay Olshansky, professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois – Chicago and author of “The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging.”

Luigi Fontana, associate professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and director of the division of nutrition and aging at the Italian National Institute of Health.

Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

More links:

“Testosterone Is Sure Looking Virile” — BusinessWeek looks at surging sales of testosterone and reports that “despite legal setbacks and FDA delays, youth-crazed boomers are making it a billion-dollar industry.”

“The Caloric Restriction Experiment” — The New York Times Magazine reports on the NIH-funded clinical trial called Calerie (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy).

Novelist, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron knows a thing or two about life.  And she shares.  The story of her break-up as a young mother with Watergate star reporter Carl Bernstein in the thinly-veiled “Heartburn”.  Sex and the friendship of men and women in “When Harry Met Sally.”

There was “Silkwood” and “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” and kids and three marriages.  And then suddenly, the issue of age and aging.

Nora Ephron turned 65, and had issues with that.

This hour, in an archive edition of On Point:  Nora Ephron turns her comic eye on life and age.

- Tom Ashbrook

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Guest:

Nora Ephron, director, screenwriter, and author of “I Feel Bad About My Neck.”