Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3868

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Publication type: news

Hirschler B.
Happy 150th birthday: a new era looms for old age
Reuters 2006 Mar 15
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-03-15T162034Z_01_FOR558718_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-SCIENCE-AGE-DC.XML

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

No-one has lived to be 150 years old and most likely never will.
What evidence does the author of this article have to support his claims?
Modern medicine has not ‘redefined old age’ as he claims.

“ 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 consigned that idea to the dustbin. “

You can’t consign a self-evident fact to the dustbin purely on the basis of wishful thinking.

“ Just how far and fast life expectancy will increase is open to debate, but the direction and the accelerating trend is clear.”

The fact is that human lifespan is likely to get shorter in the future. In the developed world, the epidemic of obesity in children, unhealthy lifestyles, climate change, pollution, and the Energy Crisis are likely to result in declining life expectancy for the next few generations. Life expectancy is already dropping in many countries including Russia.

“ 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. “

This pure fantasy and absolute nonsense like this entire article.

The introduction by irresponsible journalists of sci-fi fantasy ideas into the public consciousness as if they were imminent realities tends to trivialize the serious nature of the problems facing humanity and acts as a kind of verbal techno-Valium.

Full text:

Happy 150th birthday: a new era looms for old age
Wed Mar 15, 2006 4:20 PM GMT167

By Ben Hirschler

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 consigned that idea to the dustbin.

Paul Hodge, director of the Harvard Generations Policy Program, said governments around the world — struggling with pension crises, greying 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

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.