What's the Longest Humans Can Live?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We've assumed for some time now that while we can increase the average life expectancy by getting better at treating diseases, there is still this thing called "aging" that is going to kill us at some relatively fixed point.
These results don't suggest to me that we are "never" going to live longer than 115 or so, but rather that we aren't going to get there just by taking away disease roadblocks. We would need to master the natural process of aging that serves to kill us once we have outlived our evolutionary purpose of reprodution.
Related to aging is the length of our telomeres. Doing a search through recent news brings up some interesting related topics like:
Childhood trauma causes shortened telomeres (and shortens life): http://www.medicaldaily.com/childhood-trauma-may-shorten-tel...
Acne-sufferers may have longer telomeres (and live longer): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161003133005.h...
There's now a genetic test that provides more information about your telomeres: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161005005364/en/TELO...
Gene therapy may add years of life to leukocytes (and follistatin may help those with MS and spinal muscular atrophy): http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45947/...
Some anti-cancer drugs inhibit telomerase (which keeps telomers long making cancer cells live longer than they should): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160818111454.h...
Loss of (T)P53 genes cause increased cancer rate (and elephants that have more P53 genes rarely get cancer)- surprise, surprise- because loss of p53 function accelerates acquisition of telomerase activity: http://www.nature.com/onc/journal/v22/n34/full/1206667a.html
It seems that, if we don't kill ourselves or die of natural disasters/famines/diseases, we will have a better handle on disease and aging with more study. I don't understand why people would study statistics on aging and conclude that we can't age more than we already do.
When we develop treatments capable of reducing the incidence of more common diseases, then focus will shift towards aging and the curve may very well start to bend towards longer lifespans.
If you want this to occur sooner, support more overall scientific funding through your donations, your votes, and your advocacy.
Also aging is a _very difficult_ problem. We are only now collecting the tools to understand it, much less fix it.
Eh, depends what we mean by "age". My grandma's doctors were quite frightened when she slipped over in the shower -- she broke her leg! And that was just in her 80s! Seems like a degrading resilience and healing ability against injury over time should qualify as a substantial "background problem" negatively impacting health among most adults.
> “You’d need 10,000 worlds like ours to have the chance that there would be one human who would become 125 years,” said Dr. Vijg.
It says nothing about medical breakthroughs, which could have nonlinear, bell-curve-defying effects.
This is not to say that a medical breakthrough which changes the limit is impossible, but it has to compete against an exponential mortality curve.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_o...
Given that those who are 115 today were 85 when breakthroughs were made three decades ago, I'd say that we simply don't have the data yet to make that assessment.
Imagine someone invents a treatment that prolongs your healthy life in 30 years. How much would Gates, Buffet, and Slim pay for it? For how much would he would sell? Do you think some middle class guy would be able to pay for it?
Finally, if you charge too much people might just wait for your patent to expire and say we'll pay for the cheaper version later (at the risk of dying from age related disease in meantime)
So, given my age, if there was a cure for most age related disease in the next 10-15 years then I expect that the price would be definitely low enough for me to afford it when I needed it.
"A computer will never be small enough to fit in a house" "Man will never reach the moon" "The atomic bomb will never work" "The telephone will never catch on" "Heavier than air flight is impossible" "Everything that can be invented has been invented"
The list of things declared impossible is as long as it is laughable. I hope I'm around long enough to see this article added to the list.
There are things that are certainly impossible according to the law of physics as we know it, such as FTL travel or time travel.
There is nothing according to the laws of physics that prevent us, say, from colonizing Mars.
It's probably more likely that we could colonize Mars before we will have a vessel capable of compressing space and traveling through it in an efficient manner.
For the latter, every astronaut in orbit is a time traveler since they are moving at such great speeds that they experience tie dilation. I believe the Juno spacecraft is the current record holder of time travel since it is the fastest man-made object.
I'm not that smart, but I have my doubts about light being the universal speed limit. Baseless rant incoming:
I never advanced that far in math, but I found the notion of infinitesimal limits and infinities hard to accept and they are most likely beyond observation if they do indeed exist. So I find the idea that it takes an infinite amount of energy to move a massive object at the speed of light to be a signal that perhaps although it is exceedingly accurate, that E=mc^2 doesn't quite tell the whole story. Waxing philosophical::
The only claim it managed to get across to me was that we can expect the end of the lifespan bell curve to get steeper and steeper as average lifespans continue to increase from better longevity, while maximum lifespans (and the number of people who reach them) increase at a much slower rate.
The abstract for the paper itself ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... ), seems to only discuss the statistical existence of an aging limit, not the biological mechanism(s) causing it.
Now that the price of sequencing the human genome is ~$1000, is it worthwhile to sequence all newborns, so that on the off chance that a person is a long lived anomaly we can study what made them so?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Organis...
Looks like they're not immortal. Eventually they run out of energy to regenerate their shell or their shell stops moulting and it rots.
A difference. There are others.
But, really, that's not the reason you're wrong. There are two major reasons that you're wrong:
1. The idea that lobsters experience no senescence is, at best, unproven.
2. Even if we assume that lobsters experience no senescence or vastly less than humans, there is no particular reason to believe that the source of their longevity does not depend on things that are vastly incompatible with humans. If "the only difference" between humans and lobsters is genetics (it's sort of not, see below) it can still be the case that the only way to get the longevity of lobsters into humans is to turn humans more-or-less entirely into lobsters.
Bonus third thing: Understand that genetics and environment aren't two ingredients that you pour together at the last minute and out comes an organism: they're a many layered system of feedback loops. A portion of an environment triggers a genetic expression which then alters the environment which then alters more genetic expression and so forth. You can reductively call that "genetics + environment," but when you actually try to turn "genetics + environment" into a result, you have to deal with the extreme complexity here.
True, but irrelevant. They have extraordinary longevity. That much is proven.
> 2. Even if we assume that lobsters experience no senescence or vastly less than humans, there is no particular reason to believe that the source of their longevity does not depend on things that are vastly incompatible with humans. If "the only difference" between humans and lobsters is genetics (it's sort of not, see below) it can still be the case that the only way to get the longevity of lobsters into humans is to turn humans more-or-less entirely into lobsters.
Also true, but irrelevant. It may be the case that we have to have the exact genome of a lobster in order to obtain this benefit. However, this fact has no bearing on my point: Genetics and longevity are deeply related.
That's true.
> Since other animals that do exhibit senescence share the environment of the lobster
Not entirely -- the environment through the whole lifecycle, including at the microscopic level, matters, and things that aren't lobsters differ in the environment in which the genes are embedded from a microscopic level from lobsters as well (there is, of course, a complex two-way cause-and-effect interaction between this environment and genetics, but that doesn't change that it is a different thing than genetics.)
> we can conclude that the lobster's environment does not confer this property.
It may, perhaps, be a reasonable conclusion that the environment (at any level) alone does not confer the property, but it is certainly less reasonable to conclude that the environment is not relevant to the property and it results from genetics alone.
We can, however, rule out the environment as a sole causal factor. Since the only other possible factor is genetics, we must conclude that genetics plays some role in longevity.
Hence,
> The genetic basis of longevity is highly debatable
is false. Its basis is not debatable.
http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/53A/6/M4...
The paper looks at twins in Sweden. Hence, everyone in the study was subject to more or less the same environmental conditions, while only a portion (the monozygotic cohort) are genetically identical. You can use this design to isolate the portion of variance in longevity attributable solely to genetics, while making no other structural assumptions about the possible mechanism. At the extremes of the age distribution (this includes your lobster people) they essentially found no such component. Over the entire age range you can explain perhaps a third of variability in longevity by genetics.
Also, you seem to be under the impression that lobsters and humans are completely different at a genetic level. This is again false. I don't know offhand what the number is for crustaceans, but humans and frogs share about 80% of disease-causing genes, for example (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100429/full/news.2010.211.ht...). A great deal of the animal genome evolved a very long time ago and is conserved throughout the entire kingdom.
You seem to be completely missing my point. Twin studies do not prove that genetics are not a component of longevity. All it shows is that among the genes the commonly vary between human twins there is little influence on longevity. A far narrower statement than genetics does not influence longevity.
> At the extremes of the age distribution (this includes your lobster people) they essentially found no such component. Over the entire age range you can explain perhaps a third of variability in longevity by genetics.
My lobster people are not captured by any distribution. They do not exist. You cannot simply extrapolate the curve of Swedish twins out to lobster people. That isn't how statistics works - that isn't how anything works.
>Also, you seem to be under the impression that lobsters and humans are completely different at a genetic level.
I am not at all under that impression. What I am under the impression of is that lobsters have extreme longevity relative to humans, and that that can be explained by the ways in which their genome differs from ours (primarily, at least).
Well then, at least we agree that the point you trying to make, successfully or not, is pointless.
Further, DNA sequencing is only part of the issue. The state her cells where in over time is also critical information.
PS: Basically, an identical clone of her would have very low odds of living to 122. Though likely better odds of hitting 100 than the average person.
And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.Also interesting that Noah and co. all lived to be hundreds of years old, in the book.
There is some evidence that in some relatively primitive cultures that it wasn't completely unheard of to live to very old ages. If you won the genetic, cultural, and geographic lottery and lived somewhere there wasn't a lot of disease-carrying vermin (fleas, mosquitoes, etc), ate a relatively good diet, lived in a time of relative peace, and stayed reasonably active, you probably had a decent shot of living a good, long life.
What really drags ancient mortality down is astronomical infant mortality, dying in childbirth, infanticide, and war. In more advanced civilizations, with lots of contact with other peoples, dense cities, sanitation issues, and so on, you then start worrying about plagues.
So I think ancient peoples could have reasonably come to the conclusion that about 120 was the maximum age and attributed it to God.
Even in recent centuries there have probably been a very few people living to 110-120, the trouble was it was incredibly difficult for us to verify in the absence of solid, verifiable record-keeping.
For one thing, they don't actually analyse what people are dying from.
What we consider "natural causes" now, we may discover all sorts of physiological explanations for in the upcoming decades, as we reach new limits of human age.
As diseases, disorders, and illnesses are eliminated, we will have less and less "natural" ways to die.
This article would have made more sense if they found an actual limit to human age, as the headline implies.
Also worth noting is that what the scientists publish is less than the opinions and convictions they hold. On the age limit question the most popular opinion is that the DNA (specifically the chromosomes) runs out of telomeres, without which the replication process is almost guaranteed to be error prone. With that, it does not matter much what the old people are dying from because anything and everything is going to kill them.
Another anecdotal opinion (not sure if there is a paper or not) I have heard is that the blood and marrows of the people in the 110+ age range show that the active stem cells from the systems are nearly depleted. That may or may not be related to the telomores but the consequences are similar, the body will not be able to produce workers for any of the vital/non-vital functions. So anything and everything is going to kill you.
When the published papers hint at a limit[1], although may be justified by the content of the paper alone, the authors also do so under the influence extra knowledge and opinions[2].
[1] It can be anything.
[2] If you know this sort of thing is happening -- and it is relatively common in scientific papers, you can easily see it. For example, the last sentence of the abstract "... subject to natural constraints." Also last paragraph of the paper hand waves the causes to genetic and cellular systems, but just vague enough so that the paper can stand on its own.
https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-...
"Here, by analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints."
I don't think this isn't a real surprise, but it shows that you can't link the rise in life expectancy to maximum life spans.
For example, fewer infants dying doesn't mean that humans can live longer, but the overall average goes up.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/882/
There's probably a number of things like this we don't know yet.
EDIT: It is a concern for AIDS patients and other immune compromised individuals, however.
Perhaps we can eliminate it from our bodies, in a similar manner to what was done to eliminate HIV in this recent case. https://www.rt.com/uk/361424-british-hiv-patient-cured/
Obviously it has been a long time since humans have experienced a natural lifespan in the one rigorous no-technology definition of the term. Is maximum lifespan moving much? Hard to say. The data gets really sparse out beyond 110, where estimated mortality rates are 50%+/yr, and really sparse the further back in time you look.
So it isn't unreasonable to hold the position that maximum life span is increasing, but slowly. Adult life expectancy at 60 is going up a year every decade, but there are so few people living to > 115 that you can't really say much about their statistics. Maybe that is going up too.
Equally it isn't unreasonable to hold the position that transthyretin amyloid aggregation is a fairly equitable process that will absolutely kill everyone prior to 130. That it acts as a hard full stop on how far you can get with, even if you avoid everything else. (That this form of amyloid is what kills the majority of supercentenarians is the conclusion drawn from the limited autopsy data for people that old).
This of course is because no currently available medical technology greatly impacts transthyretin amyloid (though Pentraxin Therapeutics completed initial human trials of a clearance therapy in 2015 - stuck in regulatory/Big Pharma hell, but it works). You can be as heavily treated with the best of medicine as you like, but that amyloid is still accumulating, and eventually it clogs your cardiovascular system and you die.
If there was no transthyretin amyloid in the picture, I'd wager we'd have 120yr-olds in the same way that we have 110yr-olds today - a larger number of them, but still small. We'd also have 10-20% less heart disease at all ages, and a range of other conditions that are caused in old people by this form of amyloid. Amyloid clearance is a good thing, there should be more support for it.
They identify seven major classes of cellular and molecular damage that must be remediated in order to defeat aging:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
4 of them are still alive.
Space travel might drive this as well. Humans who want to travel to and live on Mars will want to be resilient to changes in gravity and to radiation. And once we open the door to genetic modification, longevity becomes one goal among many.
“It seems highly likely we have reached our ceiling,” said Dr. Vijg, an expert on aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “From now on, this is it. Humans will never get older than 115.”
I am guessing someone will live past 115. There has already been 1. Probability is very small, but I don't think its 0.
The only real question in my mind is whether we are the first generation to live forever, or the last generation to die?
Really? Right now life expectancy for people in their 80s is increasing by substantially less than a year each decade, and that rate is slowing:
http://i.imgur.com/7J2BPqA.png
Your hypothesis is that rate will increase from abou 0.6 years per decade (down from ~1 a decade ago) to 10 years per decade, within 20-40 years?
This is what that looks like:
http://i.imgur.com/4eS78VU.jpg
Immortality means a slope like those yellow lines. You're saying the curve is going to either turn up sharply like line A or line B, and there is no chance of line C continuing for the next few decades.
In other words, something dramatic would have to change. But there are no current indications that this is likely.
"The only real question in my mind is whether we are the first generation to live forever, or the last generation to die?"
It would take decades of testing before human trials could begin on any type of treatment. Initially it'd probably only be trailed on the elderly and it'd probably have a high rate of cancer as a side-effect (cause making cells that don't know how to die might be a bad thing)
All of those things are fixable too, and the medical ones are heavily correlated with aging. Cancer, in particular, is becoming more prevalent because it's almost a "default": if you don't die of anything else, and you continue to experience aging-related degeneration, you have a high likelihood of getting cancer.
> And anyway, entropy has the final say no matter what you do to upload or back yourself up.
Give us a few billion years to work on that one.
Yes, there are multiple components of aging and degeneration, and all of them will need a solution. What's absurd, though, is saying "oh, it's multiple things, so it must be impossible to fix".
Some of the current research on Alzheimer's suggests that memories may not be lost, just inaccessible, and may thus be recoverable.
You're probably also against doctor-assisted suicide.
First, the trope of 115 years, or 120 years or 122 or 125 years, or whatever, as some kind of limit probably survives for a constellation of reasons. It's fun to be able to tell optimists that they're fundamentally wrong. And it's cheap and easy to do so. It's also comforting to not have to wonder if you're missing out on extreme longevity by--I don't know--not exercising enough or not eating your vegetables, or whatever. It also sounds like "a discovery" or a new way of understanding things. So, mimetically, this thing has power. You want to tell people about it, and they want to tell others. They cycle of news continues. But this has no bearing on the claim's predictive value or theoretical foundation.
Second, what kind of "natural limit" could this be? We're describing, essentially, a statistical phenomenon, by the author's own admission. Things break over time, and the accumulated damage accelerates further breakage, and then everything gets too broke to continue. That seems to be the idea, to me. But, there isn't anything fundamental about that, to me. It seems like we don't know how to repair things, yet. (This makes the mention of Aubrey de Grey in another one of the articles I saw today especially appalling; de Grey is spurring and funding research in figuring out how to repair the damage of aging.) Every time it is explained that the authors "did research" or "analyzed a database," their sample was drawn from a time when aging was poorly understood, and therapies to target aging were nonexistent. (For example: history up until at least 2016.) This is like pointing to a graph of falling temperature as nightfall approaches and concluding that it is impossible to build a campfire!
It's just maddening. <takes deep breath> I have a couple of related observations. 3 scientists just won the Nobel prize for demonstrating synthetic molecular machines. I'm not claiming that this is obviously the answer to aging or will bring it about Real Soon Now, but aren't we, at long last, at least operating at the scale at which the damage from aging occurs? Can't we even imagine new techniques arising from that? Another observation is the work that Aubrey de Grey has been up to, and has been sponsoring and advocating. I would recommend to anyone that they at least look into that. He's at least addressing aging directly, and talking about its biochemical machinery in a focused way. And what about CRISPR/CAS9? Or the more recent CRISPR/Cpf1?
Finally, I can't believe that I feel like I need to say this, but "aging" isn't magic. It gets talked about in a very folk-wisdom kind of way, as a bunch of received wisdom about some mystical process. But, some aspects of it have to succumb to some kind of analysis or observation, and the--not entirely unreasonable, I think--hope is that restoring a cell, or an organ, or a person to some approximation of a less time-ravaged state might eventually be within our grasp. To just declare otherwise seems to me to be just rank superstition, an unjustified hypothesis about a field that is beyond one's ken, even if it is not beyond the ken of researchers, present or future, in the field.
Eventually there will be technology that allows us to repair that damage. It just might not be for a hundred years. But to say that it will never happen is pretty ridiculous.