Niall McDiarmid/Millennium Images, UK
ON 17 October 1995, a French woman called Jeanne Calment set a new official record for human longevity: 120 years and 238 days. When she died, she was 122 years, 164 days. Her record still stands.
You might conclude from this that research aimed at extending the human lifespan has gone nowhere, and that 120 or so remains a non-negotiable upper limit. If the radical claims of life extension science are true, where are all the supercentenarians?
The answer is: they are still in middle age. Today’s oldest person, a Japanese woman called Nabi Tajima, turned 97 the day Calment died – already too old to benefit from treatments aimed at slowing or reversing ageing. We won’t start to see any population-level effects of targeted life extension for another 30 to 40 years, when today’s septuagenarians may be entering their 12th decade in increasing numbers.
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Whether this will happen is still an open question. Nothing has yet been shown to work in humans, although there are promising avenues, including research on the rejuvenating effects of young blood (see “Exclusive: Inside the clinic offering young blood to cure ageing“). Most may prove to be dead ends, but the quantity of research effort and money that has been poured into anti-ageing suggests that if it is possible, it is going to happen.
That is good news for individuals, but a challenge for society. Consider that Tajima was born in the 19th century and reached retirement age more than 57 years ago. Now extrapolate that life trajectory to large numbers of people. Bioethicists have long flagged concerns about the social consequences of life extension, including overpopulation and the prospect of a “care home world” full of decrepit people. These problems are half a lifetime away, and are unlikely to be a deal-breaker. But it is not too soon to start thinking seriously about how we should deal with them.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Live long, and prosper?”
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