I am responding with very deep concern to a column in the Daily Mail on November 27.

I address my grave anxieties with the utmost respect to Dr Maxim Skulachev of Moscow State University who, with his team of scientists, is inventing a pill to enable our human race to live to 120 years.

I beseech this brilliant scientific team to prioritise the quality of life appertaining to our current later years of life on Earth, to raise the standard of health mentally, physically and emotionally so that life is richly enhanced during the most precious and vulnerable years of life’s ever challenging journey, so that people in their fifties will no longer give up and retire into care homes.

Your expertise, Dr Skulachev, could/would remove the stigma and the dread that overshadows the later years and render enriched quality of life, reassurance, happiness and personal fulfilment.

As I embrace the final decade of my journey, this year has been the most remarkable in my entire life. I anticipate a dignified, happy and peaceful eventide, not merely existing as a skeletal zombie for 120 years.

Mary Ratcliffe Old Town, Swindon