Radical Life Extension in Humans Is Improbable This Century—but Not Impossible, Study Finds
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A new study suggests that the human lifespan might be reaching its biological limit, and any increased advancements will likely come from studying aging rather than eliminating disease.
This comes from the idea that even if diseases are eradicated, the ravages of aging still impact the body, making it so that life expectancy can’t increase much more.
The study authors also suggest that more focus needs to be put on improving healthspan—how long a person remains healthy—rather than just lifespan.
How long can a human live? Jeanne Calment, the world’s oldest person, offers a ceiling of 122 years and 164 days. But researchers have pondered that the limit could be around 150 years, and others say it could be many more years than that. However, a new study published by scientists at the University of Chicago argues that the increase in human lifespan induced by modern medicine may be reaching its biological limit.
In other words, we’re not getting any older.
Published in the journal Nature Aging this past October, lead author S. Jay Olshansky argues that any significant advancement in improving human lifespan will likely come from tackling the damaging effects of aging rather than curing disease.
“Most people alive today at older ages are living on time that was manufactured by medicine,” Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, said in a press statement. “But these medical Band-Aids are producing fewer years of life even though they’re occurring at an accelerated pace, implying that the period of rapid increases in life expectancy is now documented to be over.”
In fact, the continued focus on extending lifespan instead of healthspan—the concept of improving the years that someone is healthy, and not simply alive—could have harmful effects. A recent report from the University of Oxford and University College London stated that the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) is living longer, but not healthier, which suggests a widening gap between lifespan and healthspan.
Olshansky has analyzed this slowing rate of lifespan gain since 1990, and argued that the ceiling for life expectancy likely wouldn’t exceed 85 years of age. Not only has life expectancy not surpassed 85 in nearly any county, the U.S. famously saw a decline in life expectancy, and in 2023, it was the lowest it’s been in two decades (though Harvard pins a lot of the blame on the U.S.’s woefully inadequate healthcare system).
“Our result overturns the conventional wisdom that the natural longevity endowment for our species is somewhere on the horizon ahead of us—a life expectancy beyond where we are today,” Olshansky said in a press statement. “Instead, it’s behind us—somewhere in the 30- to 60-year range. We’ve now proven that modern medicine is yielding incrementally smaller improvements in longevity even though medical advances are occurring at breakneck speed.”
Olshansky emphasized that more attention needs to be paid to geroscience (the science of aging) in order to find ways to improve people’s healthspan while also eking out a few more years. In an extreme example, expert João Pedro de Magalhães from the University of Birmingham in the U.K. suggested that the animal kingdom could hold answers—specifically, the bowhead whale, which is the longest-lived mammal on Earth. Magalhães believes that bowhead whales have better DNA repair strategies than humans, and that the P53 gene appears to contain cancer suppression abilities.
Olshansky admits that more people will reach centenarian (100-year-old) status than ever before, and the Pew Research Center claims that number could quadruple over the next 30 years. However, because centenarians are such a small cohort anyway, it’ll likely have little impact on overall life expectancy.
Modern medicine has drastically extended human life expectancy—both by extending life and curtailing infant mortality rates. Now, medicine stars down its final boss: aging.
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