
What's the Longest Humans Can Live? - helloworld
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/science/maximum-life-span-study.html
======
pyrophane
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this result doesn't seem particularly
controversial or astounding.

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.

~~~
catscratch
> We would need to master the natural process of aging that serves to kill us
> once we have outlived our evolutionary purpose

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...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/childhood-trauma-may-shorten-telomeres-
cause-early-aging-adults-399966)

Acne-sufferers may have longer telomeres (and live longer):
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161003133005.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161003133005.htm)

There's now a genetic test that provides more information about your
telomeres:
[http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161005005364/en/TELO...](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161005005364/en/TELOYEARS%E2%84%A2%E2%80%94A-Genetic-
Test-Reveals-Cellular-Age-Encoded)

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/...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45947/title/First-Data-from-Anti-Aging-
Gene-Therapy/)

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...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160818111454.htm)

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](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.

------
chrisamiller
Medical research is generally aimed at the most pressing problems facing a
society. Infectious disease was a focus for a long time, cancer is one of the
biggest targets now. Aging has not been a priority yet, because the vast
majority of people die of something else (infections, heart attacks, cancer,
etc) before they die of the problems specific to extreme old age.

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.

~~~
D-Coder
"Aging has not been a priority yet, because the vast majority of people die of
something else..."

Also aging is a _very difficult_ problem. We are only now collecting the tools
to understand it, much less fix it.

------
neolefty
Note that this is a purely statistical analysis of the situation:

> “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.

~~~
draaglom
It does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening
all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much.

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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_of_mortality)

~~~
theli0nheart
> It does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening
> all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much.

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.

------
issa
Despite this happening over and over again, I can never understand the
attitude underlying statements like the one this article is making.

"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.

~~~
kiba
_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.

~~~
pointytrees
The laws of physics say we can't accelerate through the speed of light, but it
doesn't say we can't travel faster than light, nor does it say time travel is
impossible. Particles traveling faster than light can travel back in time.
Communicating with those particles has proven to be difficult. Also, traveling
faster than light is pretty difficult. But, the main law is that you can't
accelerate through the speed of light. Another possibility is compressing
space so that you're not traveling faster than light, but you're covering more
space.

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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)

------
imgabe
Do they mean that the average life expectancy at birth will not exceed 115?
Because the article opens by noting that the current record is 122, so
obviously some individuals will exceed 115, seeing as several already have.

~~~
bharath28
That article was incredibly hard to read and poorly written. The message was
so confusing, i didn't know what to make of it - i came away with the same
conclusion as you did.

------
pazimzadeh
It's too bad that the cost to sequence a human genome was above $100 million
dollars in 1997. Of course, by the time Jeanne Calment was 122 years old her
genome would have accumulated thousands of mutations, so what we would have
needed is to sequence her in 1875, the year that she was born (someone correct
me if I'm wrong).

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?

~~~
mhurron
To start sequencing everyone's genome as they're born seems a little Gattaca.
We might as well fingerprint everyone and submit them to a national database
while we're at it.

~~~
tempestn
Seems pretty likely to me that if we stick around long enough we will
definitely sequence everyone's DNA as a matter of course. What we'll want is
to have a decent ethical and legal framework around that by the time it
happens.

------
marsrover
I've always found Genesis 6:3 interesting, when talking about human longevity.

    
    
        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.

~~~
pboutros
Am not religious, but that's nuts!

Also interesting that Noah and co. all lived to be hundreds of years old, in
the book.

~~~
marsrover
Indeed. However, Noah and co. were born before Genesis 6:3. Also interesting
to note.

~~~
kogus
Genesis 6 is the beginning of the "Noah's flood" narrative. Noah doesn't die
until Genesis 9. Reference:
[http://biblehub.com/genesis/9-29.htm](http://biblehub.com/genesis/9-29.htm)

------
wodencafe
The statistics in this article are questionable.

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.

~~~
has2k1
The point of the article (and the paper on which it is based) is to infer the
existence of a limit. The method of inference is not by pure logic, rather it
is partly probabilistic. That is what you have to be comfortable with because
all probabilistic/statistical arguments have a similar form.

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.

------
adonovan
Gravity and Levity presented in 2009 a much better intuitive model and
mathematical principle that explains this bold pronouncement:

[https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-
body-...](https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-
built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/)

------
dahdum
The article is poorly written, but the actual abstract is pretty clear:

"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.

~~~
ianai
Without considering it much, this feels like an abuse of data and statistical
methods. It's like they've got 20 years of data and are extrapolating out to
infinity. It's like modeling real estate prices on 20 years of data and saying
whatever happened in those 20 years is all that can happen in all time frames.
Forecasting 101 tells you the folly of that idea. If you have 20 years of data
then you have 20 years of data. Maybe what they've uncovered is something like
"max human age without treatment". Surely they can't rule out the effects of
future medical advancements.

~~~
dahdum
I think it's just sensationalist science journalism like usual. The research
is well done, the reporting stinks.

Obligatory: [https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)

------
stcredzero
I doubt such a study can be valid. We still don't know much about the
microorganisms that we exist symbiotically with. Case in point:
Cytomegalovirus. Most of us carry this virus. It basically takes up the memory
of our immune system, but only slowly over time. As it is now, it's not a
concern, but if we had lifespans that were into the mid to upper 100's of
years, this thing would probably be a leading cause of death.

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.

~~~
djsumdog
In the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, the characters live in a
fictional world where they have to deal with such issues. Longevity treatments
have moved people into very old ages (190 ~ 250 IIRC), but as they age,
memories become a huge issue. When they start dying again at very old ages,
despite the treatments, it's quite unsettling.

------
reasonattlm
The sort of question for yourself to take away from this is "what does
'natural lifespan' mean?"

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.

------
mr_overalls
Any discussion of aging and systematic lifespan extension is incomplete
without mentioning the work of the SENS Research Foundation, a research &
outreach organization whose goal is to help build the industry that will cure
the diseases of aging.

They identify seven major classes of cellular and molecular damage that must
be remediated in order to defeat aging:

[http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-
research](http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

------
dgudkov
Shouldn't the question be "What's the Longest Humans Can Live _Well_ "?

------
artur_makly
my grandpa is 102. Russian genes! To think he was born during the Russian
Revolution is mind blowing. i think his gen more than ours underwent more
positive Quantum leaps than mine ever will.

------
GnarlyWhale
No one tell Ray Kurzweil.

~~~
DavidHm
Don't worry, his bubble of denial is inviolable.

------
diziet
There have been 40 people who have lived past 115 years:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people)

4 of them are still alive.

~~~
coldtea
So, 40 in 7 billion. I don't think this refutes the article's analysis of the
averages.

~~~
diziet
I just thought it would be an interesting additional piece of information for
this discussion.

~~~
coldtea
And it is. Just making a point of outliers vs averages.

------
elnado
From the article: "“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."
Apparently, there's a man living who's 145 years old from a reasonably
believable source. [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/worlds-
oldest-p...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/worlds-oldest-
person-man-mbah-gotho-indonesia-145-years-old-a7213191.html)

------
Zigurd
What this article is saying in a muddled kind of way is that improvements in
"healthspan" can take humans to about 125 years. Beyond that, more radical
interventions are required, probably requiring genetic modification.

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.

------
samfisher83
Seems like they just made a quote to get attention.

“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.

~~~
duaneb
I'm assuming they mean average.

------
romanr
Nobody is mentioning telomeres? That's the key to longevity, the only key. If
telomeres can be changed to have their counters not expire that will mean an
infinite life.

------
bluedino
I'm not sure if they'll live longer but I'd be interested to see how much
longer and fuller lives that today's 50 year old men on TRT live

------
arisAlexis
Such bad science. Since we couldn't make it until now, apparently there is a
hard limit. Such a logical flaw

------
mabbo
With all the work on longevity going on right now, and the near-infinite
demand for it should it ever come to market, it's almost inevitable that
someone will eventually have drugs/procedures that buy you more years.

The only real question in my mind is whether we are the first generation to
live forever, or the last generation to die?

~~~
goatlover
If you don't die of aging, you'll die of something else, be it cancer, heart
disease, an accident, etc. And anyway, entropy has the final say no matter
what you do to upload or back yourself up.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> If you don't die of aging, you'll die of something else, be it cancer, heart
> disease, an accident, etc.

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.

~~~
duaneb
Great, so you can live for the Alzheimer's.

~~~
hx87
If you stop aging itself, the probability of acquiring Alzheimer's is very
low.

~~~
duaneb
You talk about aging as if it's a single thing. You'd have to solve every
symptom of again to solve it. This is absurd.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I don't (just) want to solve the symptoms; I want to address the _cause_. Many
degenerative conditions are symptoms (directly or indirectly) of aging, and
are heavily correlated with age, but the current approach to treating them is
little better than palliative care of the symptoms. Curing those conditions
would be good, but stopping the degeneration that causes them in the first
place would be better.

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".

~~~
duaneb
Thank god nobody around here is saying that!

------
theothermkn
Variations on this article are popping up all over today. As far as aging is
concerned, I'm just an interested layperson, but there are two things that
strike me about the ideas in this article.

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.

------
ebbv
This article kinda sucks, and it all should have a big asterisk; on average
the longest lived humans will be ~115 unless there is a breakthrough in
repairing damaged DNA/RNA.

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.

------
kingmanaz
Rather than proving an implicit limit in human lifespan via statistics, these
"experts on aging" seem to have instead suggested that increasing cultural
diversity has coincided with a decreasing rate of lifespan extension
throughout the West.

