Category Archives: Human Longevity

Published: Saturday, January 11, 2014 at 9:29 p.m. Last Modified: Saturday, January 11, 2014 at 9:29 p.m.

Even now, one prominent scientist says the life expectancy revolution is giving us roughly a 10-year postponement of death.

Mortality is being shifted outward, said James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. All you have to do is look at the historical change in the start of old age, the point when your chance of death rises above 1 percent. For Swedish women in 1950 this happened at age 57; in 1960 it was age 63, and in 1970 it was 68.

The prospect of living to 100 stirs up lots of emotions, but it is especially daunting for actuaries the folks who juggle sophisticated math equations to set the prices and payouts for pensions, annuities, life insurance and long-term care policies.

If they bet wrong on when baby boomers will die, the insurance and financial services industries could be in turmoil.

Lately, their normally quiet and careful profession has experienced a dramatic upheaval: In the last 10 years, according to best estimates, the number of people over the age of 110 appears to have doubled.

Longer lives have sharpened the problem of underfunded pension systems, and indirectly threatened the retirement security of many Americans.

So in 2002, as it was becoming apparent that standard life expectancy tables were being undermined by a huge longevity risk, members of a professional group, the Society of Actuaries, assembled leading demographers and scientists to help them answer a pressing question: Just how long will a normal lifespan get?

We thought we would meet and we would have an answer, and that would be that, said Anna Rappaport, an actuarial consultant and one of the founders of the societys Living to 100 Symposium.

Were now meeting for the seventh time, and were still asking the same questions.

Read more:
With more living to 100 and beyond, scientific puzzles and actuarial challenges

January 9, 2014

Great white sharks have always been considered one of the longer living fish, but a new study in the journal PLOS ONE has found that they actually live much longer than previously believed.

Using a radiocarbon analysis, study researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) discovered that male great whites can live up to 73 years and females can live up to 40.

Our results dramatically extend the maximum age and longevity of white sharks compared to earlier studies, said study author Li Ling Hamady, a Joint Program student at WHOI. Understanding longevity of the species, growth rate, age at sexual maturity, and differences in growth between males and females are especially important for sustainable management and conservation efforts.

The conventional method to determine the age of a fish relies on analyzing growth increments in mineralized tissue like ear bones, vertebrae, and fin rays. As these tissues grow during a fishs life, they form annual rings in the process, comparable to the growth rings in trees.

The problem with using this method in great whites is the oscillating light and dark banding patterns in shark vertebrate can be thin and less distinct than in other species. The bands also dont necessarily signify annual growth.

Ageing sharks has traditionally relied on counting growth band pairs, like tree rings, in vertebrae with the assumption that band pairs are deposited annually and are related to age, said study author Lisa Natanson, a fisheries biologist at NOAAs Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC).

In many cases, this is true for part or all of a species life, but at some point growth rates and age are not necessarily in sync. Growth rates slow as sharks age. Deposition rates in vertebrae can change once the sharks reach sexual maturity, resulting in band pairs that are so thin they are unreadable. Age is therefore frequently underestimated.

Based on these growth-band methods, previous studies identified the oldest white shark individuals from the southwestern Pacific Ocean as 22 years old and the western Indian Ocean as 23 years old.

In the new study, the researcher team decided to take advantage of a unique human activity: thermonuclear device testing that took place during the 1950s and 1960s. Radioactive carbon from the tests was eventually mixed into the ocean and was integrated into the tissues of marine organisms living at the time. The distinct radiocarbon signature gave the study team a specific point in time that could be identified in the vertebra layers essentially a time stamp to help resolve the age of an organism.

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Great Whites May Live Much Longer Than Previously Thought

(mouseover to enlarge) Devraha Baba Age 250+

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"And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died," from Genesis 5:5. According to the Bible subsequent progeny lived for hundreds of years, with some in excess of nine hundred years. Are biblical references to a long life span allegorical or statistical facts? Todays human with an average life span under eighty years may have difficulty comprehending how a human could live so long. But, perhaps a life span into the hundreds of years is not that far-fetched. What if sometime in the future medical science was able to eliminate most diseases, what then would cause people to die? Accidents and wars aside, how old could old age be? How long could the life span of a human be? Hundreds of years? Why not?

Much research has been done and is being done on aging and how to prevent it. Some observations and theories have evolved. One observation has been that animals with a slow metabolism tend to live longer than animals with a fast metabolism. Shrews, for example, have a fast metabolism. They live only a year or two. Turtles have a slow metabolism. The giant tortoise lives nearly 200 years. Studies done on meditators have proven that metabolism slows down during meditation; heart rate and breathing slows down. Results of a study measuring the physiological differences between subjects practicing Transcendental Meditation and just simply taking rest were reported in American Psychologist 42: 879881, 1987. The article stated that Transcendental Meditation produced a significant increase in basal skin resistance compared to eyes-closed rest, indicating profound relaxation. Deep rest and relaxation were also indicated by greater decreases in respiration rates and plasma lactate levels compared to ordinary rest. The implication is that practicing meditation may extend one's life span.

Another theory suggests that hormones play a role in the aging process. In 1989, at Veterans Administration hospitals in Milwaukee and Chicago, a study indicated that a growth hormone produced in the pituitary gland plays a critical part in aging. As one ages, production of the growth hormone declines. Injections of a synthetic version of the growth hormone were given to a small group of men aged 60 and over. There was a dramatic reversal of some signs of aging. The injections increased muscle mass, reduced excess fat, and thickened skin. But, when the injections stopped, the men's new strength decreased and signs of aging returned. Also, older people have reduced levels of estrogen, testosterone, melatonin, thymosin, and DHEA; reductions of which also have an effect on aging.

Still another theory of aging is the free-radical theory. According to this theory, free radicals, which occur during the natural course of metabolism, also act randomly and indiscriminately to damage cell components. Free radicals are chemical compounds that possess one or more unshared electrons as part of their structural configurations. To become stable they aggressively seek out another electron with which to pair. In so doing they attack molecules, such as lipids, proteins and DNA which make up the cell's membrane. Cells have an internal defense system of creating antioxidants to fight against the harmful effects of free radicals. However, their defense mechanism is insufficient to prevent the damage caused by the actions of free radicals over a cell's lifetime. This cumulative cellular damage may contribute to the aging process. Pharmacologists demonstrated that by augmenting the cell's antioxidant defenses with certain synthetic enzymes they were able to reduce the action of free radicals, and thereby lessen cellular damage that the free radicals caused. By administering synthetic enzymes to worms the pharmacologists were able to extend the average life span of worms by 44%. Using this same pharmacological intervention on humans may lengthen the human life span as well.

Caloric restriction is another approach scientists have discovered which extends longevity. Researchers studied the effects of reducing food intake by 30% to 70% on a variety of life forms, from yeast to mammals. The researchers found that they were able to increase the life span of various creatures up to 40%. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied yeast and found that when the energy of a cell drops off (which occurs under conditions of caloric restriction) an enzyme called Sir2 is activated. When activated, Sir2 causes a cell's genes within its chromosomes to be silenced. This reduces the production of extrachromosomal DNA circles, or Ecs. Ecs are toxic to cells and decrease longevity in yeast; they self-replicate, accumulate, and compete with the yeast's genome for vital enzymes and other cellular materials. For this reason reducing Ecs results in extending the life span of yeast. Since Sir2 has been found in humans, the research findings on yeast appear to be applicable to the human aging process as well.

What if a person does not eat at all, but is able to switch his body metabolism into living directly off of sunshine, can he prolong his life? Recent studies made on behalf of NASA, as well as other prior scientific research studies, have proven that humans can live without food. They do not understand why or how, only that it is possible for humans to do so. One such recorded case is of Giri Bala, a woman who had not eaten for 56 years.

Here is a dialogue between of Paramahansa Yogananda and Giri Bala, excerpted from Yogananda's book, Autobiography of a Yogi.

"If I felt a craving for food, I would have to eat."

Read the original here:
Longevity Human Life Span, 250 yrs. Longevity. Longevity Life ...

13 hours ago White sharks are considered vulnerable worldwide. Since individuals are slow growing and mature late, white shark populations could be even more sensitive to fishing, environmental and other pressures. Credit: Greg Skomal, MA Marine Fisheries

Great white sharkstop predators throughout the world's oceangrow much slower and live significantly longer than previously thought, according to a new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

In the first successful radiocarbon age validation study for adult white sharks, researchers analyzed vertebrae from four females and four males from the northwestern Atlantic Ocean. Age estimates were up to 73 years old for the largest male and 40 years old for the largest female.

"Our results dramatically extend the maximum age and longevity of white sharks compared to earlier studies," said Li Ling Hamady, MIT/WHOI Joint Program student and lead author of the study published in PLOS ONE. "Understanding longevity of the species, growth rate, age at sexual maturity, and differences in growth between males and females are especially important for sustainable management and conservation efforts."

Age determination in fish relies primarily on analyzing growth increments in mineralized tissue, such as otoliths (ear bones), vertebrae, and fin rays. These grow throughout a fish's life, adding annual rings, similar to growth rings in trees.

Estimating age in white sharks can be challenging. While vertebrae are constructed of layers of tissue, laid down sequentially over an individual's lifetime, the alternating light/dark banding patterns can be narrow and less distinct than in other species, and the bands don't necessarily signify annual growth.

"Traditionally, ageing sharks has relied on the assumption that band pairs are annual. In many cases this has been proven correct for part or all of a species life, however in more and more cases this is being disproven," said coauthor Lisa Natanson, a fisheries biologist at NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) lab in Narragansett, R.I.

In previous studies, which assumed annual deposition of growth bands, the oldest white shark individuals identified were from the southwestern Pacific Ocean at 22 years old and the western Indian Ocean at 23 years old.

For this study, researchers took advantage of radiocarbon produced by thermonuclear device testing done during the 1950s and 1960s. Radiocarbon mixed from the atmosphere into the ocean, and was incorporated into the tissues of marine organisms living during that time period. The rise in radiocarbonmeasured as 14Cgave researchers a specific spot in time pinpointed in the vertebra layers, which can be used as a "time stamp" to help determine the age of an animal.

The National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility at WHOI conducted radiocarbon analysis on collagen in the white shark vertebrae. All of the vertebrae samples came from white sharks caught in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean from 1967 to 2010 that were archived at the NEFSC lab in Narragansett, which has the largest collection of this kind. The samples were also digitally photographed with a camera attached to a stereomicroscope using reflected light for counting growth bands.

Continued here:
New study finds extreme longevity in white sharks

Eating raw food benefits health and human longevity in so many different ways. I find that most raw food diet reviews and articles I have read are a bit repetitive. This is alright, but in this article I touch on many of the facts that are usually skipped over by other authors. After this you'll be convinced of the power that live raw food plays in your diet for longevity. The following nutrients are some things not available in cooked food, but you can get them by eating raw foods:

~Hormones: Various live superfoods and herbal adaptogens contain natural hormones and hormone precursors that are very beneficial (such as maca, mucuna pruriens, cacao beans, various sprouts, bee pollen and royal jelly). The addition of plant based hormones and natural steroidal compounds in a living food diet for longevity becomes more crucial as you gain years.. These raw food benefits help maintain the proper levels of hormonal health commonly associated only with young people.

~Oxygen: We get oxygen from our food and water as well as through breathing pure clean air. Cancer and many other diseases simply cannot exist in an adequately oxygenated body (which is why hyperbaric oxygen chambers are such powerful life saving tools in Hospitals). This is why it is crucial to get the raw food benefits of extra oxygen, the worlds most deficient nutrient and basic fuel! Most people are starved of oxygen through: 1. not doing proper diaphragmatic breathing, 2. eating cooked food which uses up more oxygen to metabolize, 3. eating animal products which uses up more oxygen to metabolize, 4. not engaging in the benefits of physical exercise on a regular basis, 5. living in houses which are full of stagnant oxygen depleted air, 6. living in cities which are full of stagnant oxygen depleted air.

~Phytochemicals: Perhaps the greatest recent discovery in nutrition has been the role that phytochemicals play in health and longevity in humans. It is more clear than ever that eating raw food benefits your endocrine (hormonal) system because of these powerful chemicals which include all natural antioxidants, polysaccharides, nucleic acids, alkaloids, etc.

~Enzymes: The pioneering research of Dr. Edward Howell demonstrated how critical the role of enzymes play in digestion as well as every other bodily function. He discovered that humans are born with enough enzyme stores to theoretically live about 200 years! The downside to this is that cooked food (which always has all of the enzymes within it destroyed when heated above 115F) uses up your body's metabolic enzymes (the type that are required for basic biological functions of life) to convert into digestive enzymes. Eating enzyme rich raw food benefits these limited stores since on average, a live raw food contains half of the enzymes needed to break itself down during digestion.

~Paramagnetism: Live raw food benefits your body's electrical field simply because it still has it's own paramagnetic field. Kirlian photography is one way that this has been demonstrated (thanks to Christian Joubert for the kirlian photograph of cabbage from his site http://www.esseniaecovillage.com). Live foods add a paramagnetic charge to your body, thus increasing the radiance of your vital life force. Nobel Prize winner Dr. Fritz Popp discovered that humans retain, absorb and emit photons (light energy). 97% of human DNA has also been shown to give off photons. You absorb the photons from food to fuel your bio-electric field. Cooked food literally requires your body to fill the dead matter with photons so that it can be assimilated, thus weakening your body.

~Water: Cooking begins to dehydrate food. Some forms, such as grilling, baking and frying do it more than boiling or steaming, but in the end, all cooked food has less water in it then it started out with. A living food diet retains the natural moisture of food that is requires for digestion. The body shouldn't have to contribute excessive amounts of water to the digestive process. Add on top of this the severe chronic dehydration that most people suffer from and you have accelerated aging. If you want to look juicy and fresh for as long as possible, you have to eat juicy and fresh as much as possible!

You can find raw foods rich in the above mentioned qualities by clicking on this link or any of those in the sidebar to the right.

The founder, Dr. Ann Wigmore often talked about how one of her most thrilling experiences was the day she first observed cancer cells taken from a human body and placed under a microscope begin to thrive on cooked food, yet dying off when in the presence of only live raw food. It is now a well established scientific fact that cooking destroys all of the raw food benefits listed above. Some people will exclaim that they mostly only steam or boil their food and that this is a "happy medium". When someone does this, the resulting loss of the above nutrients aren't perhaps as great as someone eating mainly barbecued, fried and/or baked foods every day, but it's still degrading these basic necessary benefits of raw food.

The Linus Pauling Institute has found that boiling cruciferous vegetables for a mere 9 minutes results in a 59% loss of the phytochemical indol-3-carbinol, which in other studies done abroad, as well as at this same institute, is the key nutrient that is being promoted as one of the most powerful anti-carcinogenic compounds in the human diet. Absolutely nothing of value has been added by only slightly cooking this food! The following list further outlines this bio-chemically destructive insanity that is known as cooking. There are live raw food benefits listed above that are lost through cooking, but below is a list of the toxic compounds created through cooking:

See original here:
Secrets of Longevity in Humans

ENID, Okla. NORCE employees have received a second buyout offer, just one month after the first 27 voluntarily left their jobs on mutually agreeable terms at the state facility.

Administrators met with workers Wednesday at Northern Oklahoma Resource Center of Enid to give them a chance to leave state employment before their jobs are eliminated. NORCE is expected to close by August 2015.

This time around, the offer is the same. Up to 30 employees will be given a chance to resign and receive several benefits. Like the first buyout, the first 30 who volunteer for it can leave and receive the following:

Payment equal to their current health insurance premium for 18 months. This applies to the employee only.

A longevity payment that would have been paid on their next anniversary.

One week of pay for each year employed with a minimum of $5,000 and, at most, $26,000.

A payout of accumulated sick leave equal to one-half of the employees hourly wage.

Shut-down slowdown

Since a state oversight panel voted to shut down NORCE more than a year ago, the number of residents there has rapidly diminished. Parents and guardians now are forced to make plans for community-based care, which often has several developmentally disabled people living together or living with family. This model relies on private health care providers to take over daily nursing and care in place of state-paid workers.

The number of residents at the state-run facility has fallen by half in six months. According to data provided by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, there were 92 residents at NORCE in July.

See the rest here:
Second buyout offer: NORCE facility sheds clients

4 hours ago University of Chicago graduate student Xiao Wang and her colleagues based the results of their Nature paper on RNA modification on analysis of HeLa cells, a line of human cells widely used in laboratory research. Credit: Rob Kozloff/University of Chicago

Researchers had known for several decades that a certain chemical modification exists on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), which is essential to the flow of genetic information. But only recently did experiments at the University of Chicago show that one major function of this modification governs the longevity and decay of RNA, a process critical to the development of healthy cells.

The chemical modification on mRNA in question is called N6-methyladenosine (m6A). A recent study by UChicago scientists reveals how the m6A modification on mRNA could affect the half life of mRNA that in turn regulates cellular protein quantities That discovery could provide fundamental insights into healthy functioning and disorders such as obesity, diabetes, and infertility.

The m6A modification "affects a huge number of messenger RNA in human cells, and yet we did not know its exact function," said Chuan He, professor in chemistry at UChicago and a recently selected investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He, Xiao Wang and 11 co-authors from UChicago, University of California, San Diego, and Peking University reported their findings on m6A in the Jan. 2 issue of Nature.

RNA in human cells becomes constantly depleted as it produces proteins, an instability that is essential to biology. "Whenever a cells starts to differentiate, transform into a different type of cell, it needs to express a different set of proteins using a different set of messenger RNA," He said. "It can't be the original set."

The disposal of old RNA allows for the addition of new RNA and the production of different proteins. The Nature study documents that this process is regulated by the insertion or removal of a methyl, a chemical group commonly found in organic compounds.

"Biology is about protein expression regulation: which proteins, how many and at what point," He explained. "If you have the right pattern you get healthy cells. If you get the wrong pattern, you get disease."

It is well known that genetic factors can control protein expression, but the methylation and demethylation of RNA can be epigeneticoperating independent of the sequence of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). "This is a very important yet under-explored field," said Wang, the study's lead author and a graduate student in chemistry at UChicago. "It's also a field that is expanding very quickly."

Researchers had long known the presence of the m6A methylation on messenger RNA, but why this occurred remained unknown. He and his associates took a major step in 2011 when they discovered the reverse of the methylation process, demethylation. This discovery involved a so-called "eraser protein" that removed the methyl from RNA, a defect of which leads to obesity. "We basically said, 'Look, if you have certain defect of this function, you get obesity, so there's something going on fundamentally interesting. This methylation appears to play important roles in biological regulation."

He and his associates have now shown that the methylation affects the decay of messenger RNA. "People who are interested in messenger RNA decay or all kinds of cytoplasmic RNA biology now have a new pathway to consider," Wang said.

View original post here:
Discovery spotlights key role of mystery RNA modification in cells

Quick guide to disaster recovery in the cloud

Boffins have devised a storage medium that could hold data for up to one billion years and claim recent accelerated ageing tests have shown "million-year" survivability.

The study's authors are Jeroen de Vries of the University of Twente MESA and Institute for Nanotechnology, and colleagues Dimitri Schellenberg, Leon Abelmann1, Andreas Manz and Miko Elwenspoek.

Their paper (PDF), in pre-print in ArXiv, is titled "Towards Gigayear Storage Using a Silicon-Nitride/Tungsten Based Medium".

Its abstract states: "If we want to preserve anything about the human race which can outlast the human race itself, we require a data storage medium designed to last for 1 million to 1 billion years."

Well, yes, er ... back to the technology.

The authors, involved with The Human Document Project, write: "To ensure that knowledge about human life is available for many future generations or even future lifeforms we require a form of data storage suitable for storage at extreme timescales."

The storage medium is "tungsten encapsulated by silicon nitride which, according to elevated temperature tests, will last for well over the suggested time."

Current 4TB hard drives can store data for about 10 years before the content starts decaying, the authors say. Tape will last a few decades and archival paper could last 500 years with the right environment.

The study's authors write: "A new type of storage medium is required where the longevity of the data is more important than the storage density," and this WORM-type medium should last for one million to one billion years with stored data being readable using electro-magnetic waves:

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'BILLION-YEAR DISK' to help FUTURE LIFEFORMS study us

The End of Growth?

There is a school of thought that sees the first and second industrial revolutions as having been driven by specific innovations that are so unique and so fundamental that they are unlikely to be repeated. Where will we find any future innovation that is likely to have as much impact as the combustion engine or electricity or (pick your favorite)?

This is a widespread school of thought and is nowhere better illustrated than in the work of Dr. Robert Gordon, who is a professor of economics at Northwestern University and a Nobel laureate. I have previously written about his latest work, a papercalled Is US Economic Growth Over?

Before I audaciously suggest that he and other matriculants in his school of thought confuse theproductsof industrial revolutions with theircauses,and thus despair over the prospects for future growth, lets examine a little bit of what he actually says. (You can of course read the original paper, linked above.) To do that we can turn to an article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells that I cited inOutside the Boxlast June. He explains Robert Gordons views better than anyone I am aware of.

[T]he scope of his [Gordon's] bleakness has given him, over the past year, a newfound public profile, Wallace-Wells notes. Gordon offers us two key predictions, both discomfiting. The first pertains to the near future, when, he says, our economy will grow at less than half its average rate over the last century because of a whole raft of structural headwinds.

His second prediction is even more unsettling. He thinks the forces that drove the second industrial revolution (beginning in 1870 and originating largely in the US) were so powerful and so unique that they cannot be equaled in the future.

(A corollary view of Gordons, mentioned only indirectly in Wallace-Wellss article, is that computers and the internet and robotics and nanotech and biotech are no great shakes compared to the electric grid and internal combustion engine, as forces for economic change. Which is where he and I part company.)

Gordon thinks, in short, that we do not understood how lucky we have been, nor do we comprehend how desperately difficult our future is going to be. Quoting from Wallace-Wells:

What if everything weve come to think of as American is predicated on a freak coincidence of economic history? And what if that coincidence has run its course?

Picture this, arranged along a time line.

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John Mauldin Forecast 2014 - The Human Transformation Revolution

Jan. 5, 2014, 3 a.m.

''I want to end my career bowling at the same pace I started it.'' With these words, Australian pace bowling great Brett Lee tells Daniel Lane how the fire within still burns as brightly as ever as he continues to battle Father Time.

When Brett Lee, these days a blur of energy and motion in the Sydney Sixers' distinctive magenta shirts, charges in against the Adelaide Strikers at Adelaide Oval in Sunday's Big Bash League match, he will attempt to defy logic - and the frailties of the human body - to be the first fast bowler to hit 150km/h every year for two frightening decades.

History tells the tales of pacemen who have unleashed Lee-like lightning bolts - Fred ''The Demon'' Spofforth, Albert ''Tibby'' Cotter, Harold Larwood, Frank ''Typhoon'' Tyson, Wes Hall, Jeff Thomson, John Snow, Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Shoaib Akhtar, while, in recent times, Dale Steyn and Mitchell Johnson struck fear into tough, hard men.

However, none boast the longevity of the 37-year-old from Oak Flats, near Wollongong, who said the fact his fast and furious reign has lasted 20 years was a personal badge of honour.

''No one's done it for 10 years,'' Lee said of his ability to still break cricket's equivalent of the sound barrier. ''When you think of Shoaib Akhtar and the other guys, they haven't been able to sustain it for that 10-year basis. If I hit 150 now, it'll have been for 20 years I hit 147 [for the Sixers] so I'm getting close.

''I'm loving the fact I can still play at 37 and feel like I'm producing the goods. If I felt like I was hindrance or a handbrake to the team, well, I certainly wouldn't be out there. With my reputation, with my cricket, I wouldn't hold on for the sake of it. It's all about competing and being one of the strike bowlers for the team - that's the reason why I'm playing.''

Lee has suffered a hospital ward's worth of pain for his art. He battled possible career-ending stress fractures as a teenager, had a string of ankle surgeries and wrestled with an assortment of ailments that would have tested anyone's resolve. But the need for speed was his siren song and, regardless of how cruelly the craft treated him, he could not resist the lure of taking the new ball again.

''There's a lot of mental toughness that goes into it - it's not just pure physical strength and durability,'' said Lee of the long, tough slog. ''There's the need to endure the forces and to have the will to keep going. I think people are now starting to realise how hard it is to be a fast bowler and that's what I pride myself on - that I've been able to bowl [at top speed] for 20 years.

''The longevity, that's my proudest achievement. It's not taking [over] 300 [Test] wickets or 380 one-day wickets for your country it's putting your body through so much stress and so much strain and knowing you can come out the other side. I had 10 operations, six ankle ops. For some people, one ankle operation is game over. So I endured the comeback time and time and time and time and time again and putting my body through hell - but I've enjoyed it.''

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Brett Lee: Two decades of lightning