Bicentenarian

It took a long time — sometimes 10 or 15 years — for the fungus to kill a tree, especially if it were one of the patriarchs we have described. Even today, right in the vicinity of New York City, a very few of these bicentenarians or tricentenarians are desperately holding on to a thread of life.

How long those lives can be expected to last is hard to say, because even the oldest persons around aren’t yet much more than bicentenarians (that’s the time since the procedures first became available), and they show no signs of old age yet.

My instincts told me he was exaggerating, but I had little personal experience with bicentenarians. We colonials shy away from age-defying treatments—a normal 125 always seemed a sufficiently lengthy life to most of us.

Altogether they located nearly two thousand living centenarians, some of whom were already well past 150 and on their way to becoming “bicentenarians.”