Will we live to be 150?

BarcelonaA banal conversation captured by an open microphone as Russian, Chinese, and Korean leaders walked toward the Asian leaders' summit has once again raised the possibility of extending human longevity to 150 years thanks to biotechnological advances such as organ transplants to rejuvenate the body. Because, evidently, they weren't talking about prolonging life with ailments and a fragile body; what the dignitaries were really proposing was obtaining the elixir of eternal youth. But is this possible within the remaining lifespan of these politicians, some of whom are already over 70? Spoiler: the fact is, no, neither Putin nor Xi Jinping will live to 150 years.

First of all, we confuse life expectancy with the maximum longevity of our species. Life expectancy is the expected lifespan of a person born at a given time and place. It is derived from the average age at death in that place. It is true that in the last century, life expectancy has doubled in industrialized countries, where advances in hygiene, surgery, and medicine have reduced infant mortality and increased the chances of surviving infections and trauma. While life expectancy at the beginning of the 20th century was 48 years, it is now 83 years in Spain. Therefore, many more people reach this age, and many may even exceed it.

But it must also be said that there are many countries, such as the United States, that, despite being highly industrialized and having very important research laboratories, currently have a lower life expectancy than Spain's and are trending downward, most likely due to the increase in people suffering from obesity and metabolic disorders, such as diabetes. Aside from the emergence of diseases associated with a sedentary lifestyle and overeating, Recently published retrospective studies on the rate of increase in life expectancy show that for people born from 1900 to 1938, life expectancy increased by 6 months with each subsequent year of birth; however, from 1939 to 2000, the rate of increase halved to just 3 months of increased life expectancy per year, indicating that we are gradually reaching our natural limit.

There are many research groups investigating body aging and senescence (a term used to describe the aging of cells), and you may have read that it is possible to extend the lifespan of short-lived animals such as worms, flies, and mice; in other words, to expand the maximum lifespan of a species. So far, we have not managed to make anyone live longer than the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calmant, who died at 122, and inThis seems to be, for the moment, our maximum longevity. You can probably stretch it out a few more years, but there are very few people in the world who live past 110.

Experiments with one's own body

You've probably read that there are Multimillionaires who dedicate their time and money to breaking the limits of human longevityMany people experiment with ways to change their internal clocks—such as lengthening telomeres, the ends of chromosomes—or take a bunch of pills to change their metabolism, using medications that are important for curing diseases, but whose effects on a healthy person are unknown. This is the case with metformin and semaglutide, which are used to help people with diabetes, always under medical supervision, because they limit the use of blood glucose, but which trick the body into thinking it's starving. If this were the desired way to live longer and better, our bodies would have been naturally selected to do so, and we wouldn't need to take these medications.

Transplanting external organs, or blood transfusions for young people, taking immunosuppressants, or interfering with the normal hormone cycle also don't seem to improve the well-being of people who don't have clinical problems to begin with. On the contrary, if we look at what supercentenarian individuals share, it is not precisely the medicines they take or the money they have, but the fact that they carry and They have led a full life, with physical and mental exercise, a good diet and socialization, with activities that satisfy them and make them feel useful.

In the end, the aging of our bodies is not a disease; it is the associated fragility, which manifests itself very differently among us. Some people experience cognitive problems with age but still have good motor skills; or lucid older people with liver or kidney conditions… We don't all age the same. A genetic study of genome-wide variants involving more than half a million people has identified up to 408 genes that are involved in determining different aspects of our fragility, and a new study that has not yet been published Contribution of epigenetics (gene regulatory marks) to the aging process, which is natural for some species, like ours.

We still have a lot to understand about why we age, and why we all age differently. And until we figure out what the mechanisms are and why they are activated differently in each individual, we will not be able to design effective strategies to truly extend people's quality of life. There is still a long way to go before the maximum longevity of the human species is extended to 150 years. Even more so, before human life expectancy reaches this milestone.