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Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect

The Economist | September 28, 2023

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Want to live longer? For centuries the attempt to stop ageing was the preserve of charlatans touting the benefits of mercury and arsenic, or assortments of herbs and pills, often to disastrous effect. Yet after years of false starts, the idea of a genuine elixir of longevity is taking wing. Behind it is a coterie of fascinated and ambitious scientists and enthusiastic and self-interested billionaires. Increasingly, they are being joined by ordinary folk who have come to think that the right behaviour and drugs could add years, maybe decades, to their lives.

Living to 100 today is not unheard of, but is still rare. In America and Britain centenarians make up around 0.03% of the population. Should the latest efforts to prolong life reach their potential, living to see your 100th birthday could become the norm; making it to 120 could become a perfectly reasonable aspiration.

More exciting still, those extra years would be healthy. What progress has been made in expanding lifespans has so far come by countering the causes of death, especially infectious disease. The process of ageing itself, with its attendant ills such as dementia, has not yet been slowed. This time, that is the intention.

The idea is to manipulate biological processes associated with ageing that, when dampened in laboratory animals, seem to extend their lives. Some of these are familiar, such as severely restricting the number of calories an animal consumes as part of an otherwise balanced diet. Living such a calorie-restricted life is too much to ask of most people; but drugs that affect the relevant biological pathways appear to bring similar results.  Another path is to develop drugs that kill “senescent” cells for which the body has no further use. The natural means for disposing of these cells, like a number of other repair mechanisms, themselves weaken with age.

One cause for concern is people’s brains. Slowing bodily ageing will not change the fact that the brain has a finite capacity, and is presumably adapted by natural selection to conventional lifespans.  An even greater concern is that none of these ideas has yet been tested formally on people.   Such studies will necessarily take time. But more of them are needed, and governments should be helping bring them about.

The fact of many people living much longer would have wide ramifications. Most obviously, working lives will be extended. Over time there could be deeper shifts. People who live longer may care more about threats that are further away, such as the state of the world in 2100. Longevity permits the patient accumulation of capital, a factor in the emergence of a middle class. And times when political power is exercised mainly by young men, such as the Middle Ages in Europe, tend to be more violent than when older, cooler heads prevail. Families will span even more generations and, presumably, larger networks of exes, half-siblings and quarter-cousins.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. For centuries the attempt to stop ageing was the preserve of charlatans touting the benefits of mercury and arsenic, or assortments of herbs and pills, often to disastrous effect. Yet after years of false starts, the idea of a genuine elixir of longevity is taking wing. Behind it is a coterie of fascinated and ambitious scientists and enthusiastic and self-interested billionaires. Increasingly, they are being joined by ordinary folk who have come to think that the right behaviour and drugs could add years, maybe decades, to their lives.
2. Mimicking calorie restriction and clearing out senescent cells would delay ageing. Boosters claim that epigenetic rejuvenation could halt or reverse it.
3. The fact of many people living much longer would have wide ramifications.

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Topics: Technology, Medical, Aging