How many people can live? Gerontologists claim that people have already been born who will celebrate their 150th anniversaries, and within the next 20 years it will be possible to live for 10 centuries.
How long to live?
Americans say about themselves that they are madly in love with sensations. Most likely, that is why the news that Chinese Li Ching-Yun died at the age of 256, blew up America and became the most read.
The New York Times and Time Magazine wrote about this back in 1933. However, doctors are not inclined to believe this, and documents confirming this fact have not been found. But the very thought that someone lived for two and a half centuries still haunts dreamers of a long life.
On the other hand, many gerontologists are convinced that we live much less than nature allotted to us. The officially documented longevity record belongs to the Frenchwoman Jeanne Kalman, who took her life easily and "without worries." She lived for 122 years. Geneticists never found anything special in her body.
Who wants to live?
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Popular science journalist David Yuin gathered an audience of all kinds of elderly people and asked what life expectancy they dream about - 80, 120 and 150 years, or even infinity. Most of the respondents answered that they are quite happy with 80 years old, and they often think of death as an inevitable event.
This is despite the fact that people have been provided with a host of drugs and medical devices that can radically prolong life. Businessperson Jun Yoon attending that meeting voiced the real cost of longevity. We are talking about a hundred years or more. In his opinion, even now it may cost no more than one million dollars.
Interestingly, most gerontologists believe that sincere love for life is a prerequisite for longevity, and the thought of death, like a smoked cigarette, shortens the year given by nature by a few minutes.
Medicines for life
Doctor Laura Helmut claims that "we have a 50/50 chance that in the next 25 years we will take mortality under a hundred years under control." She gave a personal example of how current advances in medicine affect life expectancy.
“My great-great-grandmother died at the age of 57, probably of a heart attack,” Laura Helmut shares her observations. - My great-grandmother died at the age of 67 from a stroke. My grandmother is on medications for high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. She will be celebrating her 90th birthday next week. Thus, she became the first person in my family to live long enough to see my great-grandchildren. Prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease is a huge achievement in the field of longevity."
The next medical victory, which will dramatically increase life expectancy, will be a complete cure for diabetes. This was reported by specialists of the Genetic Engineering Technology company on the pages of Science Translational Medicine. They managed to create antibodies that activate the cells of brown adipose tissue, utilizing fats and normalizing blood glucose levels. Meanwhile, current statistical observations show that people who do not have diabetes live decades longer than diabetics. Thus, the average person who monitors their health in the near future with a high degree of probability will have the opportunity to live a hundred or more years.
Millennial life
Aubrey de Gray, a professor at the University of Cambridge, is an indisputable authority in modern gerontology. It would seem that only because of this, he should be a skeptic or, in any case, a cautious pragmatist. If only because for too long the best minds were unsuccessfully looking for the elixir of youth. However, the scientist claims that the duration of a human life can be increased tenfold. “People who live to be 150 are already born,” says Aubrey de Gray. “Moreover, in the next twenty years, a person will appear who will celebrate the new year of the third millennium.” It's all about drugs for old age, the first generation of which has already appeared.
Dr. Aubrey de Gray describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage in all organs of a person. “The idea is to do prophylactic geriatrics,” he explains, “to put it simply, periodically repair molecular and cellular damage before it reaches a level of pathogenicity.” He sees the way to maintain cellular health in stem cell therapy, the use of which will help replace diseased tissues with healthy ones.
In this case, it is possible to get away from the costly cultivation of human organs and their transplantation instead of damaged ones, and with poorly predictable consequences. The fact is that transplantation is always fraught with complications and risks for the whole organism, if only because, for example, "an old, though not diseased liver, will not always be able to work harmoniously with new kidneys."