the title is a pun on methusala, a biblical character extremely advanced in age. here he's a metaphor for medically engineered longevity, the human desire to play god (see those televangelist samples) by extending human life indefinitely. (the second line is wrong: it should read "ninety years old.") we hadn't sequenced the genome when this song was written, but replace "farmer-chemists" with "gene therapists" and you're good to go.
the title is a pun on methusala, a biblical character extremely advanced in age. here he's a metaphor for medically engineered longevity, the human desire to play god (see those televangelist samples) by extending human life indefinitely. (the second line is wrong: it should read "ninety years old.") we hadn't sequenced the genome when this song was written, but replace "farmer-chemists" with "gene therapists" and you're good to go.