Humans Will Live To Be 150 (or more)
by Stanley Bronstein on July 7, 2011It’s a milestone that few, if any, of us expect to reach.
But the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born, according to a leading scientist.
Even more incredibly, Aubrey De Grey believes that the first person to live for 1,000 years will be born in the next two decades.
Mid-life crisis? The first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born, according to a leading scientist
The biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research claims that within his own lifetime doctors will have all the tools they need to ‘cure’ ageing.
This will be done, he believes, by banishing all diseases and extending life indefinitely.
Dr De Grey said: ‘I’d say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing ageing under what I’d call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so.
‘And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today.’
The British scientist sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular ‘maintenance’, which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.
He is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.
Dr De Grey describes aging as the life-long accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.
‘The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic,’ he said.
Dr Aubrey De Grey describes aging as the life-long accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body
Dr Aubrey De Grey describes aging as the life-long accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body
Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear.
An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.
To date, the world’s longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.
Some researchers say, however, that the trend towards a longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.
Dr De Grey’s ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey’s SENS theory was ‘so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate’ was never won.
The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of Dr De Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as ‘pseudo science’.
They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS ‘exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt’.
For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.
But Dr De Grey says that’s not what he’s working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.
He said: ‘This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health. This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age.
‘This is not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health. This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age’
‘The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health.’
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Until next time, take care.Stanley Bronstein
The Warrior Walker
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