If health-span research is successful, pharmaceuticals as remarkable as those earlier generations of drugs may result. What if, instead, aging is the root cause of many chronic diseases, and aging can be slowed? Not just life span but “health span” might increase.ĭrugs that lengthen health span are becoming to medical researchers what vaccines and antibiotics were to previous generations in the lab: their grail. Traditional research assumes the chronic later-life diseases that are among the nation’s leading killers-cardiovascular blockage, stroke, Alzheimer’s-arise individually and should be treated individually. Postwar medical research has focused on specific conditions: there are heart-disease laboratories, cancer institutes, and so on. Indeed, the most-exciting work being done in longevity science concerns making the later years vibrant, as opposed to simply adding time at the end.
If medical interventions to slow aging result in added years of reasonable fitness, life might extend in a sanguine manner, with most men and women living longer in good vigor, and also working longer, keeping pension and health-care subsidies under control. With each passing year, the newly born live about three months longer than those born the prior year.īut the story might have a happy ending.
If longer life expectancy simply leads to more years in which pensioners are disabled and demand expensive services, health-care costs may balloon as never before, while other social needs go unmet. Social Security and private pensions could be burdened well beyond what current actuarial tables suggest. Politics may come to be dominated by the old, who might vote themselves ever more generous benefits for which the young must pay. Longer life has obvious appeal, but it entails societal risks. population that is elderly-fated to rise anyway, considering declining fertility rates, the retirement of the Baby Boomers, and the continuing uplift of the escalator-may climb even more. Should research find a life-span breakthrough, the proportion of the U.S. Six months after Calico’s charter was announced, Craig Venter, the biotech entrepreneur who in the 1990s conducted a dramatic race against government laboratories to sequence the human genome, also founded a start-up that seeks ways to slow aging. Late in 2013, Google brought its trove of cash into the game, founding a spin-off called the California Life Company (known as Calico) to specialize in longevity research. The University of Michigan, the University of Texas, and the University of California at San Francisco are studying ways to slow aging, as is the Mayo Clinic. Most Americans have never heard of the Buck Institute, but someday this place may be very well known.īuck is not alone in its pursuit. Already, the institute’s researchers have quintupled the life span of laboratory worms. Since 1999, scientists and postdocs there have studied ways to make organisms live much longer, and with better health, than they naturally would. Pie in the sky? On a verdant hillside in Marin County, California-home to hipsters and towering redwoods, the place to which the Golden Gate Bridge leads-sits the Buck Institute, the first private, independent research facility dedicated to extending the human life span. Centenarians may become the norm, rather than rarities who generate a headline in the local newspaper. If anti-aging drugs or genetic therapies are found, the climb could accelerate. Projections of ever-longer life spans assume no incredible medical discoveries-rather, that the escalator ride simply continues. The trend holds, in most years, in individual nations rich and poor the whole world is riding the escalator. A graph of global life expectancy over time looks like an escalator rising smoothly. Nor did it retreat much during wars or disease outbreaks.
It didn’t accelerate much as antibiotics and vaccines became common. Viewed globally, the lengthening of life spans seems independent of any single, specific event. By the end of the century, it will be 100 years. If about three months continue to be added with each passing year, by the middle of this century, American life expectancy at birth will be 88 years. When the 20th century began, life expectancy at birth in America was 47 years now newborns are expected to live 79 years. The United States displays roughly the same trend. In 1840, life expectancy at birth in Sweden, a much-studied nation owing to its record-keeping, was 45 years for women today it’s 83 years. Since 1840, life expectancy at birth has risen about three months with each passing year. The typical person was fortunate to reach 40.īeginning in the 19th century, that slowly changed. The few people who grew old were assumed, because of their years, to have won the favor of the gods. F or millennia, if not for eons-anthropology continuously pushes backward the time of human origin-life expectancy was short.
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