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Izeinwinter comments on Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Honestly, I think almost all media treatments of this entire topic will be extremely problematic in hindsight once an actual cure for senescence is found.
In this particular case, I'd expect her to become... very interested in biochemistry. That would be a much better plot, wouldn't it? One woman's fight to cure ageing because she knows for a fact it can be done, but at the same time trying to not end up strapped to a lab table. Heck, for the first period, the fact that women were massively overlooked in science would be outright helpful. - Getting hired at a place which does whatever she was currently investigating would be fairly simple, and then just have some random dude steal credit for whatever results she manages. Paper trail? What paper trail?
If this happened to someone in an undeveloped non-Western country that didn't have much contact with the rest of the world, or in a premodern society several centuries back, the character wouldn't have the ideas to think about his or her situation as a scientific problem. But a reasonably intelligent woman who grew up in the U.S. in the early 20th Century would at least know of the existence of a culture of science that could shed light on her condition.
This raises the question of whether a nonaging person encountering science after several centuries would have the abiltiy to absorb the implications of this relatively new and unintuitive way of thinking.
First option doesn't exist. The third world is well and truely aware that science is a thing. As for the second.. Writing someone who is old, but not impaired by decay is very, very difficult, due to lack of examples, but I think this might be less of a leap than it seems. Necessity will force mobility upon our protag, and contact with various cultures will immunize against believing received wisdom without proof. Going from there to "reality is the final arbiter" isn't much of a leap.
.. Now I am trying to think what applicable skills someone really old might have to bring to the project of science, assuming she didn't win the cosmic lottery trice over and is both a genius and highly creative on top of unageing..
"Social-Fu, ninth dan"? Hypercompetency at organizing a group of people into working smoothly together is something which she could with very high plausibility have picked up simply from endless practice. Setting up a carpentry shop in Milan one decade, a china production in venice the next and so on conferring skills that do tranfer quite well to running a lab within budget and with abnormally low social frictions.
George Bernard Shaw wrote some in his play "Back To Methuselah". It is long; search for "Lutestring" (the name of one of the characters) and read forwards from there. Context: Mrs Lutestring and The Archbishop are, covertly, over 250 years old, and their secret (previously not even known to each other) has just come out. The others in the scene are of ordinary ages and, as far as they know, short-lived. Then search onward for the subtitle of act 5, "As Far as Thought can Reach", set in the year 31,920 A.D. (Shaw's speculative mechanism for life extension can be ignored.)
And of course there is Lazarus Long.
That last part is interesting. But just to note, you're using "several" to mean 'probably more than three, and definitely more than two.'