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"It wasn't until I was past forty that it bacame clear that I was going to be quote, successful, unquote."
- Isaac Asimov

Anti-agathic drugs  
  Drugs that indefinitely postpone death from old age.  

"...What we want now is something much more direct: an antitoxin against the ageing toxin of humans. We know that the ageing toxin exists in all complex animals. We know that it's a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the poisons that cause the degenerative diseases. And we know that it can be neutralized. When your lab animals were given ascomycin, they didn't develop a single degenerative disease - but they died anyhow, at about the usual time, as if they'd been set, like a clock, at birth...

"So what we're looking for now is not an antibiotic - an anti-life drug - but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug..."

From Cities in Flight, by James Blish.
Published by Avon in 1957
Additional resources -

The anti-agathics were part of what made interstellar space flight possible in the novel; the administrators and essential personnel of the cities received the necessary treatments.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Cities in Flight
  More Ideas and Technology by James Blish
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