Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
From legends of the Fountain of Youth to classic comedy skits about people who have lived for more than two millennia, age has long captured the imagination of people all over the world who wonder just how far science may one day be able to stretch the limits of longevity.
Following last week’s death of 116-year-old Arkansas native Gertrude Weaver (who briefly was the world’s oldest living person), Discovery News posed the question, “given new kinds of drugs and technology, can we push the limits of human lifespan beyond 130, to even 200 years?”
Technology might keep us alive for even 1,000 years
According to the website, Aubrey de Grey, editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research and Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, claims that by finding a cure for a handful of diseases and developing new treatments for aging, we could one day wind up with humans who live for upwards of 1,000 years.
De Grey, who received his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge and who is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and his SENS colleagues explain on their website that they not only fund studies on aging, but also conduct experiments of their own at their California-based research center, fund researchers through educational grants, and host conferences to discuss medical issues.
SENS explains that its goal is to address the cellular and molecular damage to a person’s body that is responsible for aging without altering the metabolism. Instead, the group said that it is seeking “new therapies” that “target and repair this damage” – treatments that “apply techniques from regenerative medicine to the damage of aging” called rejuvenation biotechnologies.
Age-related research projects: are they worth it?
However, as Discovery News pointed out, SENS is not the only organization looking to find the scientific equivalent to the Fountain of Youth. Dr. Joon Yun, a board-certified radiologist and the managing partner and president of investment management firm Palo Alto Investors, LLC, has recently offered a $1 million dollar prize to scientists who can reverse the aging process.
Similarly, Google launched a research division known as Calico Labs last year to study ways to slow the aging process and to combat age-related diseases. In March, that company reached a four-year deal with the University of California’s QB3 biotech institute to conduct research into longevity and age-related diseases. The goal, Calico said in a statement, was to better understand the biology of aging and to develop new therapies for treating age-related diseases.
However, some experts, including Boston University medicine and geriatrics professor Thomas Perls, believe that no amount of research and funding will help us push the human body beyond its natural limits. Instead of trying to artificially get a few people to the age of 130, 150 or even 200, he told Discovery News that the focus should be on helping people achieve better health in the time that they do have on Earth.
“Should the goal be to get a few people to 130, or is there a more achievable goal of getting a hugely larger number of people living much greater portions of their lives in good health?” Perls pondered. He added that some long-lived people who are primarily healthy throughout most of their lives experience something known as compression of morbidity that leaves them vulnerable to opportunistic diseases such as pneumonia or stroke as they grow older.
Personally, we don’t think old age could get much better than this:
So, getting back to the original question…
So will we ever see a person live to be 200 years of age? The fact is that nobody can definitively say for certain one way or the other, but the advances in medical technology would appear to indicate that the best and brightest scientists in the world are going to do their best to eventually make it happen. Only the future can determine if they will succeed or fail.
However, Caleb Finch, professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, noted to Discovery News that half of people over the age of 100 have some form of Alzheimer’s, and that those individual have a higher risk of dementia. Finch said that he believes that people have a maximum lifespan of 120 years, and that as you get closer to that age, there is a “high risk” that you will develop a neurodegenerative condition such as Alzheimer’s.
“We are doing our best to find a way to slow the disease – careers have been devoted to it and we’ve had glimmers of success. But nothing does very much,” he continued, adding that recent research has shown that the impact of climate change will likely hurt older people more. So even if we can make it to 200 one day, it might not be the most pleasant of experiences.
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