Posted on 03/16/2006 7:51:36 AM PST by djf
OXFORD (Reuters) - Modern medicine is redefining old age and may soon allow people to live regularly beyond the current upper limit of 120 years, experts said on Wednesday.
It used to be thought there was some inbuilt limit on lifespan, but a group of scientists meeting at Oxford University for a conference on life extension and enhancement dismissed that idea.
Paul Hodge, director of the Harvard Generations Policy Program, said governments around the world - struggling with pension crises, graying workforces and rising healthcare costs - had to face up to the challenge now.
"Life expectancy is going to grow significantly, and current policies are going to be proven totally inadequate," he predicted.
Just how far and fast life expectancy will increase is open to debate, but the direction and the accelerating trend is clear.
Richard Miller of the Michigan University Medical School said tests on mice and rats - genetically very similar to humans - showed lifespan could be extended by 40 percent, simply by limiting calorie consumption.
Translated into humans, that would mean average life expectancy in rich countries rising from near 80 to 112 years, with many individuals living a lot longer.
Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from Cambridge University, goes much further. He believes the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born and told the meeting that periodic repairs to the body using stem cells, gene therapy and other techniques could eventually stop the aging process entirely.
De Grey argues that if each repair lasts 30 or 40 years, science will advance enough by the next "service" date that death can be put off indefinitely - a process he calls strategies for engineered negligible senescence.
His maverick ideas are dismissed by others in the field, such as Tom Kirkwood, director of Newcastle University's Center of Aging and Nutrition, as little more than a thought experiment.
Kirkwood said the human aging process was intrinsically malleable - meaning life expectancy was not set in stone - but researchers had only scratched the surface in understanding how it worked.
CALL FOR FUNDING
The real goal is not simply longer life but longer healthy life, something that is starting to happen as today's over-70s lead far more active lives than previous generations.
Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois in Chicago is confident that longevity and health will go hand in hand and that delaying aging will translate into later onset for diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease.
But to get to the bottom of understanding the biology of aging will require a major step-up in investment.
Olshansky and his colleagues have called on the U.S. government to inject $3 billion a year into the field, arguing the benefits of achieving an average seven-year delay in the process of biological aging would far exceed the gains from eliminating cancer.
Ethically, the extension of life is controversial, with some philosophers arguing it goes against fundamental human nature.
But John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said any society that applauded the saving of life had a duty to embrace regenerative medicine.
"Life saving is just death postponing with a positive spin," he said. "If it is right and good to postpone death for a short time, it is hard to see now it would be less right and less good to postpone it for a long while."
Now we will be retired longer than our careers? How will anyone save enough to live 'til they're 150yo?
I hear that 90 is the new 40.
Social Security is in BIG trouble........
They'll need to raise the age to qualify that's for sure.
Don't know if I'd want to live that long.
Course I might say different if I was 149 yrs, 364 days old when you asked!
I know that there are darn few people in the world I'd wanna put up with for 150 years, and I ain't one of them!
Ask Japan how well this is working out. They now have invented a robot to take care of the unwanted elderly. No, thanks. I'd be happy to leave for heaven after my hree-score-years-and-ten. Surely beats a robot's care in a nursing home.
This is not a "new era" for advanced age. Most from Adam to Noah lived well into their 900s.
Nobody ever lived to see 1,000. (Unless you could Enoch and Elijah, who never died.)
I agree.
how many people in the OT in the bible are reported to have lived well into their hundreds, and people use that to discredit the bible?
now they're saying that living to those older ages is quite possible by limiting your diet.
Does this mean 60 years of p------ in their pants?
I hear that 90 is the new 40.
A bit of an exaggeration, but a few years more, certainly possible.
With the advances in biochemistry, genetics, and the actual mechanics of aging being decoded, I'm inclined to agree with the fellow who talks about 1,000 year lifespans.
There are probably less than a dozen major critical systems in the body, respiration, digestion, waste elimination, cell repair, circulation, etc. As the problems with these systems from an aging perspective are figured out, the limits on aging will be drastically pushed... I mean very, very drastically.
It's entirely possible you could wake up one morning and see a new ad on the tube for a pill that would add 200 years to your lifespan.
It'll cost $46,000,000 dollars, but hey...
...problem is, ageism is silent but rampant.
Could it be possible that the ages listed in the Bible were not calculated using the same yearly measurements?
I agree. I'm hoping I can stay working until I just can't get up in the morning. I can't imagine retiring. I've never made enough money, to be able to save what I would need to live even until I'm 100yo.
That would be a logical explanation.
Ageism is a problem. I used to listen to my wifes dad when he felt like talking. And he could tell the most amazing stories you could imagine.
It often seems sad and somewhat cruel to me that people who have had such experience and wisdom pounded into them are shuffled to the sidelines.
As a long time computer pro, I put alot of faith in people who have made (AND LEARNED FROM) major mistakes.
This is true, but not in the way that you think... WE ARE NOT LIVING ANY LONGER THAN WE DID IN 1900!! Look at the data; the average life expectancy has increased from around fifty to around seventy-six, for a new born. For someone who is sixty, the average life expectancy is about the same. This is due to two main factors: (1) Most important... Infant mortality has gone down (2) Mothers dying in childbirth has gone down... there is also a small increase in folks surviving through pandemics because of anti-biotics. Looking at different scientific analysis of the data, if a sixty year old today lives any longer than one did at the turn of the LAST century is by NO MORE than a few years. Google myths, longevity infant mortality for more info...
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