Category Archives: Human Longevity

Though investing might seem challenging at times, one of the smartest choices you can make is to focus on companies with clear-cut business advantages. Companies that offer visible advantages over their peers tend to have sustainable and growing businesses, which usually means a healthy long-term return for investors.

What companies possess these advantages? That's a question we recently asked three of our Foolish investors. The stocks they came up with that you should strongly consider looking into include rare-disease drugmaker Alexion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALXN), airplane manufacturing juggernaut Boeing (NYSE: BA), and search engine kingpin Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL).

Image source: Getty Images.

Sean Williams (Alexion Pharmaceuticals): We don't need to turn to monopolies and oligopolies to necessarily find companies that have clear-cut business advantages. Instead, rare-disease drugmaker Alexion Pharmaceuticals serves as a fine example.

Alexion Pharmaceuticals currently has three Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs in its portfolio: Soliris, Strensiq, and Kanuma. The company's focus is entirely on rare-disease drugs with ultra-orphan indications. In layman's terms, that means Alexion tries to develop drugs that treat very rare diseases. If its drugs get approved by the FDA to treat those diseases, it receives special patent protections from possible brand-name and generic competition. It's also able to pass along some very high price points to insurers and consumers to make up for its development costs. Soliris, which treats paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria and atypical uremic hemolytic syndrome, can run around $500,000 annually, making it one of themost expensive drugs in the world.

How does Alexion get away with pricing Soliris at around $500,000 a year? The answer is simple: It has little to no competition as of yet. Developing new drugs takes years and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, and ultra-orphan indications aren't exactly on most drugmakers' radars. This means Alexion has carved out its own little niche that's given it a clear-cut business advantage.

Image source: Getty Images.

Soliris has been critical in supplying the company with healthy cash flow, enabling it to go shopping. In 2015, Alexion announced an $8.4 billion acquisition of Synageva BioPharma, giving it access to Kanuma, a lysosoamal acid-lipase deficiency drug that's designed to treat about 3,000 people in "major reimbursable markets."Thus far, Kanuma hasn't lived up to the hype, but with Soliris on track for $3.4 billion to $3.5 billion in annual sales this year, Alexion should have plenty of future cash flow to enable more rare-disease acquisitions.

In short, Alexion's focus on rare-disease therapies has given it a clear path to financial success, and that's something investors should take note of.

Rich Smith(Boeing): America's biggest plane maker, and the world's, has a huge business advantage. How big is Boeing's business advantage? 5,646.

That's how many plane orders Boeing has in backlog right now. While it may not be as big as the "over 6,800 aircraft" backlogat Airbus, it's still a lot of airplanes. At the rate Boeing has been producing and delivering planes to customers who have placed orders -- 745 planes per year-- it will take Boeing 7.5 years to work through that backlog. That means Boeing could give its sales force the better part of a decade "off," and still have plenty of business to do, plenty of work for its workers, and plenty of money pouring into its revenue stream -- should it be so inclined.

Image source: Getty Images.

Of course, Boeing is not so inclined. Boeing's big backlog is a huge business advantage for the company, obviating any obligation to offer customers big discounts to secure new business. But Boeing isn't resting on its laurels. Last month at the Paris Air Show, Boeing announced orders and commitments from its customers to buy 571 airplanes, worth $74.8 billion at list prices. In terms of backlog, it added more than nine months' worth of orders and commitments -- and revenues -- to its backlog in just one day.

What's more, Boeing earns a lot more profit from these revenues than does its archrival Airbus -- operating profit margins of 4.8% on its Commercial Airplanes. According to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, that's more than a 50% premium over the 3.1% operating profit margin Airbus earns on its commercial airplanes. It's yet another huge business advantage for Boeing: A huge backlog, and a more profitable backlog as well.

Steve Symington (Alphabet): Alphabet may not be a household name just yet. But as the recently formed parent holding company for Google, as well as its various operating subsidiaries, its business advantages are apparent to even the most inexperienced investor.

For one, Google operates on a scale few other companies could dream of enjoying. Early last year, for example, Gmail surpassed one billion users, marking Google's seventh product to hit the 10-figure mark as it joined the ranks of Google Search, Android, Chrome, Maps, the Google Play Store, and YouTube.Incidentally, at VidCon 2017 last month, YouTube executives revealed that the video platform alone recently exceeded 1.5 billion logged-inmonthly active users (which doesn't include those who watch YouTube videos without logging on), each of whom spends an average of more than one hour per day watching YouTube on mobile devices.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Alphabet is massively profitable and growing quickly. Revenue last quarter climbed 22.2% year over year (24% at constant currency) to $24.75 billion, helped by a 44% increase in aggregate paid clicks and 18.8% growth in Google's advertising revenue. On the bottom line, Alphabet's net income rose 29% to $5.43 billion.

Relatedly, Alphabet takes advantage of Google to fund its decidedly unprofitable "Other Bets" segment, which is primarily comprised of high-potential business that are in their pre-revenue stages. That's not to say all of Alphabet's other bets aren't proving their worth; Other Bets revenue actually climbed 47.9% year over year last quarter to $244 million, thanks to sales from Nest connected home products, Verily life sciences products, and Fiber high-speed internet. Meanwhile, Alphabet continues to plow resources into separate bets like Calico (focusing on human longevity), Google Capital (its capital investments wing), its infamous Google X "moonshot" initiatives, and its Waymo self-driving car project.

Finally, I should note that the world is doing its best to stem Alphabet's advantages. Late last month, the European Commission announced that it will impose a record $2.74 billion fine on Google over allegedly favoring its own comparison-shopping service over those of competitors as displayed in -- perhaps ironically -- Google's Search results. Google has naturally voiced its disagreement with the decision and promised to appeal. But that it must fight these battles in the first place serves as an indication of the staggering business advantage it enjoys.

10 stocks we like better than Boeing

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3 Stocks With Huge Business Advantages - Madison.com

An elderly man swims

(Al Bello/Getty Images)

Jeanne Calment, the French woman who holds the record for the longest verified lifespan, died in 1997 at 122 years old.

Few people, of course, everbecome supercentenarians 110 years old or older and even fewer hit 115.

So few people have exceeded that age, in fact, that a group of researchers published an analysis in the journal Nature last year arguing that the human species' lifespan plateaus around115.

But a number of scientists are now rebutting that analysis with five separate commentaries published in Nature on June 28.

The authors of these piecesargue that the original analysis relied onstatistics that were incomplete or analyzed in a way that led to a falseconclusion. They suggesttwo alternatives: We either don't have enough data to know if the human lifespan has a limit, or theplateau is closer to125 than 115.

"The available data are limited, there aren't that many supercentenarians," Maarten Pieter Rozing, a professor at the University of Copenhagenwho co-authoredone commentary, told The Scientist. "And I think there are no strong arguments that show there is a decline [in the rate at whichlifespans areincreasing]."

Life expectancy has crept up fairly steadily over the past 150 years or so. But Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland, and Jan Vijg, the authors of the original analysis, argue that comparing the life expectancy of supercentenarians to theage at whichthey died can reveal thenatural limit ofthe human lifespan.

(iStock)

The scientists used data on maximum reported age at death split into two sets based on supercentenarians from the US, UK, Japan, and France. Thefirst set covered deathsfrom 1968 to 1994 a period when the maximum age was inchingup. But bythe time covered in the next dataset, from 1995 to 2006, the ageseemed to plateau or even slightly be on the decline (exceptions like Calment aside).

Life expectancy, however, rose throughout both time periods.The scientists therefore concludedthatbecause humans' maximum age didn't keeprising with life expectancy, it appeared a limit had been reached.

Even if we were to cure various diseases like cancer or Alzheimer's, those scientists still claimed thathumans would probablybe unlikely to live past 115. And they put thechances ofa person live past 125 atless than 1 in 10,000.

elderly chinese couple

(David Gray/Reuters)

The authors of the recent rebuttals say that because there are so few supercentenarians out there, the number of deaths for this age group between 1995 and 2006 is too small to yield reliableconclusions. There just haven't been enough supercentenarians to really pinpoint amaximum age.

As people live longer, it's likely that more will push past that supposed limit, the authors of the rebuttals argue it'll just take time toget there.

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"[T]he idea of a set limit to human longevity is not strongly supported by what is being discovered about the biology of ageing," Rozing and his co-authors wrote in their commentary. "The continuing increase in human life expectancy that has occurred over recent decades was unforeseen. It provides evidence for greater malleability of human ageing than was originally thought."

Over the span of human history, many of the lifespan increases we've seen would have been unimaginable at some point. Thoseliving200 years ago, for example, would have thought it wascrazy that peoplecould regularly liveto be80. Yet here we are.

Rozing told The Scientistthat there'san easy way to find out whose hypothesis is correctabout the maximum lifespan.

"[W]e can just wait and see who's right," he said.

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Scientists are questioning the idea that the human lifespan has a limit - Yahoo News

In case you havent seen Logan yet, living way longer than the average person isnt all its cracked up to be. In fact, it kind of sucks. You see, although centenarians disagree on the secret to a long life117-year old Emma Morano, currently the oldest living person on Earth, says that she eats three eggs every morning111-year-old Agnes Fentons prescription of three Miller High Lifes and a shot of Johnnie Walker Blue Label a day seems to be, sadly, very much a minority opinion.

So its with a healthy fear of our own mortality and a bowl of wheat germ that we relate a story that recently ran in The Guardian about a series of papers printed in the journal Nature, suggesting that the human life span has no naturally occurring upper limit. Professor Jim Vaupel from Germanys Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research tells the paper, at present the balance of the evidence suggests that if there is a limit it is above 120, perhaps much aboveand perhaps there is not a limit at all. And Professor Siegfried Hekimi of McGill University in Montreal predicts that by the year 2300, the oldest person on Earth will be around 150 years old. In a delightfully spiteful turn, all this new research seems to have been prompted by the desire to refute another recent paper, which suggested that human life maxes out at around 115 years.

With the proper advancements in medical care, then, a person could theoretically live for centuries, watching the world get dumber and dumber for decades upon end in their own private hell. But hey, at least we could fix the whole friends and family slowly dying before our eyes part of the immortality = suffering equation, right? Only time will tell.

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Today in mixed emotions: The human life span may have no upper limit - A.V. Club

Now scientists from around the world are refuting this claim.

The original research paper, by Jan Vijg and his colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, was published in Nature last October. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints, they wrote.

The researchers settled on the magical 115 number by using two databases: the International Database on Longevity and the Human Mortality Database. They identified the five top maximum reported ages at death (MRAD) for four countries, and plotted them on a graph. These four countries (France, Japan, UK, and the US) have the highest number of supercentarians, people who live to be 110 or older.

The graphs led the authors to conclude that the maximum human lifespan has already been reached. They found that the MRAD continued to rise until 1990s, around the time of the death of Jeanne Calment, the worlds longest living person on record, who died at the age of 122. Since then, Vijg and colleagues argued, the MRAD has plateaued.

RELATED:Humans Aren't Likely to Ever Live Longer Than 125 Years, Study Claims

But almost immediately after the study was published, controversy and criticism followed. This week, Nature released separate critical responses from five unaffiliated research groups. The researchers of the Dong et al. study responded to each one.

Their whole article was a fairly large extrapolation, Nick Brown, a Ph.D. student in psychology from the University of Groningen and a member of one of the research groups, told Seeker. There is such a small sample size of supercentarians around the world that the result isnt even statistically significant, he added.

Other scientists pointed to flaws in study design and methodology.

They made basic errors in how they went about assessing the statistical significance of their conclusions, wrote Maarten Rozing, a longevity researcher from the University of Copenhagen who joined two colleagues in criticizing the paper, in an email to Seeker. We therefore think that their findings do not contradict the possibility that lifespan will continue to increase.

Researchers also criticized the study authors for splitting the data in 1994.

If the partition date is moved two years, from 1994 to 1996, it no longer shows a lifespan plateau, noted another group of critics.

None of the dissenting researchers claimed that immortality is possible. The common consensus seems to be that there is simply not enough information to know whether or not human life will biologically end at a fixed point.

RELATED:Life-Extending Discovery Renews Debate Over Aging as a Disease

The right answer is that no limit to human lifespan can yet be detected, wrote Siegfried Hekimi, a biologist at McGill University and another critic of the paper, to Seeker over email. But, he added, it does not mean there is no such limit.

Brown echoed this sentiment.

We would say that there is no evidence at all right now for a limit on the human lifespan, he said. But that doesnt mean a limit will not exist in the future. It would be a bit like coming along in 1940 and saying airlines arent going to get any faster because you cant put more propellers on the plain, Brown remarked.

There was a technological limit on flight speed at that time, but no one had yet foreseen the invention of the jet engine. New anti-aging technologies are being developed every day right now, theres just no way to know if a hard limit exists.

Vijg, responding to the criticism, disputes that this was his claim in the first place.

We would never claim that there is a hard ceiling, he told Seeker. Its always possible that something happens that we cannot foresee.

But in terms of current technology, he went on, their research shows that it is highly unlikely for anyone to live past the age of 115 without significant medical advances in the near future.

RELATED: Young Blood Transfusions Sell for $8,000 at This California Startup

Vijg also disagrees that there was anything wrong with his teams statistics. They had a small sample size, he acknowledged, but with supercentarians, youre dealing with a rare breed.

And while neither Vijg or his co-authors are demographers or statisticians themselves, Vijg pointed out that all three peer reviewers of their article were top of the line demographers.

If the sample size was too small, believe me, we would have known it, he said. This is Nature for Gods sakes.

Nature is indeed a well-regarded academic journal, though some people have used the debate over this paper as an opportunity to criticize the secrecy of the journals peer-review process.

In the end, finding a maximum age number might not even matter. Most scientists who focus on aging are more concerned with average lifespan anyway, Brown pointed out.

This is a completely irrelevant measure to almost everybody except for the people who like reading newspaper stories about extremes, Brown said.

He characterized the dispute over the findings as a perfect example of what has been coined Sayres law.

Academic politics, said Columbia University professor Wallace Sayre in 1973, is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.

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Dispute Erupts Over the Limits of the Human Lifespan - Seeker

The HLA region, located on chromosome 6, is one of the most diverse regions in the human genome with thousands of alleles present in the human population. The HLA complex is responsible for regulation of the human immune system and thus plays an important role in diseases of autoimmunity (such as rheumatoid arthritis), cancer, organ transplant compatibility, allergic reactions and response to vaccines.

Since HLA gene regions have a high degree of DNA sequence similarities it has been difficult to accurately predict HLA type using whole genome sequencing technologies. Instead, HLA typing has been done through more cumbersome serotyping and targeted sequencing, costing hundreds of dollars per test. Given HLI's expertise in complete and accurate whole genome sequencing, machine learning and other informatic areas, the HLI-led team set out to develop a new tool, xHLA, to see if it could indeed be used with current generation sequencing technology for more precise and rapid HLA typing. They also wanted to compare xHLA to current HLA typing methods on the market.

The team tested xHLA against seven other HLA typing methods using three whole genome and three whole exome public datasets and showed that in all cases xHLA outperformed the other tests. The xHLA's runtime was approximately 3 minutes for each 30x whole genome sample compared to 15 minutes to 5 hours for the other algorithms. One of the differentiators of xHLA is that it uses protein level sequence alignment which results in a more comprehensive alignment matrix giving higher accuracy than other methods.

The team concluded that this new tool should enable rapid and accurate HLA typing for any individual who has their genome sequenced by HLI. HLI currently offers physician ordered whole genome sequencing as a product, HLIQ Whole Genome and through the suite of Health Nucleus products which are: Health Nucleus Platinum, Health NucleusX Gold (HNX Gold) and Health NucleusX (HNX). In one whole genome sequence test HLI can offer screening for genes and variants proposed by the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG), pharmacogenetic testing, inherited cancer testing, carrier screening and now, rapid and accurate HLA testing.

Venter, who is HLI's co-founder, executive chairman and head of scientific strategy, commented, "This paper is proof of the power of informatics and the need for complete and accurate clinical grade genomic sequencing to solve important scientific and clinical issues. The xHLA algorithm should enable seamless, accurate and rapid HLA typing for all genomic sequencing done today. HLI clients can get their HLA type as a part of their genome report, something that no other center can currently offer."

In addition to researchers from HLI, scientists from Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research, Minneapolis, MN; the J. Craig Venter Institute, La Jolla, CA; and the Department of Pathology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA all participated in this work.

About Human Longevity, Inc.

Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) is the genomic-based, health intelligence company empowering proactive healthcare and enabling a life better lived. HLI combines the largest database of genomic and phenotypic data with machine learning to drive discoveries and revolutionize the practice of medicine. HLI's business areas include the HLI Health Nucleus, a genomic powered clinical research center which uses whole genome sequence analysis, advanced clinical imaging and innovative machine learning, along with curated personal health information, to deliver the most complete picture of individual health; HLIQWhole Genome and HLIQ Oncology. For more information, please visithttp://www.humanlongevity.comorhttp://www.healthnucleus.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/human-longevity-inc-researchers-develop-new-algorithm-to-rapidly-and-accurately-predict-hla-types-using-illumina-next-generation-sequencing-technology-300483023.html

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Human Longevity, Inc. Researchers Develop New Algorithm to Rapidly and Accurately Predict HLA Types Using ... - PR Newswire (press release)

Good news for those making plans for their 110th birthday: The human lifespan is perhaps far more robust than previously thought. The Guardian reports that new research disputes a high-profile claim last year that the human lifespan has maxed out at 114.9 years.

In an extraordinary scientific feud, five research teams banded together to trash that conclusion, publishing their findings in the journal Nature, which is where the original study appeared.

Author Jim Vaupel, a specialist in aging at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, tells the paper there's no evidence for an upper limit on human longevity.

And if there were, he adds, "it is above 120, perhaps much aboveand perhaps there is not a limit at all." Vaupel calls the original study led by geneticist Jan Vijg of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York "the worst piece of research I've ever read" in Nature, adding that he was "outraged" that the journal would publish "such a travesty." Vijg, who's standing his ground, had used existing data to show that after a period of steadily rising longevity, humans appeared to hit a ceiling of 115 in the mid-'90s.

But the new papers pooh-pooh the plateau prediction and, in a sci-fi twist, suggest humans could be blowing out 150 candles by the year 2300. Vijg suggests his nitpicky critics didn't read his work properly, and perhaps have issues with their own mortality.

"When you look at these super-old people, there are not many of them," he says. "That's kind of the point, isn't it?" (A rare aging disease killed the 2nd oldest patient to have it.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: Human Life May Have No Limit

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Could humans live forever one day? A new study says it may be possible - Fox News

The post-bingo exchange of a bunch of geriatric amateurs may seem an act of trespass, but if anyone is a specialist in ageing, it is the aged themselves. We have life cred. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

A hundred and ruddy 20 within 30 years, thats what theyre saying just imagine, being 50 again after all, we are simply material cells ah, but what about the mind?

A post-bingo conversation with some of my crumbly friends in the community centre. We are discussing the new prospect of amortality. It has created a major row among academics, with the publication of a paper by Jan Vijg, an eminent geneticist, suggesting there is an upper limit of around 115 years before we shuffle off this mortal coil being vigorously challenged by Professor Jim Vaupel, a specialist in ageing, and colleagues, who maintain there is no ceiling on longevity.

So the post-bingo exchange of a bunch of geriatric amateurs may seem an act of trespass on bio-techie turf. However, what the learned men in the ivory towers observe is daily experience among us crumbling edifices. What they talk, we walk. If anyone is a specialist in ageing, it is the aged themselves. We have life cred.

Yet amortality is the current cherry on the scientific cake. From the beginning of human time, death has defined human life. Now science has achieved a degree of biological understanding and technological capacity that allows it to hold out the possibility of making lifetimes infinite. Man has become a god.

The basic creed of amortalist theology seems to be that all our organs are simply machines that, like car parts, start to malfunction with use and age, and that, to continue the analogy, can be either repaired or replaced. The idea is that we report in every few years for a service that not only keeps the motor running but, with progress, will positively enhance its performance. This proposal offers a socio-political vindication with an ethical twist. Its exponents cite the right to life clause in international charters, leading to the conclusion that death is therefore a crime against humanity.

Ageing is an issue on which, as a member of the crumbly generation, I feel I can comment with authority. Not only am I old, I also spend a day a week working with people with early-onset dementia. From my perspective, the amortality proposal is the product of academic hubris. It does not factor in the reality of longevity.

That reality is that the body is the least of our worries. It is all in the mind. And, as Noah Yuval Harari and many other experts insist, we simply do not understand the mind. But we do know the consequences of its decline. As the cells misfire, the chemicals unbalance, the synapses disconnect, we are losing our mental faculties along with our keys, spectacles, directions. We are demoralised as our cognitive triggers fail and we alienate neighbours and confuse friends with our social dyspraxia. These memento moris of growing frailty are reinforced by increasingly frequent attendance at the interment or combustion of erstwhile companions. This marble deficit further humiliates us as citizens, unable to separate the ideological wheat from the factional chaff.

The prospect of another 20 years or more of this appals me and my geriatric companions. For the vast majority of us, our aspiration is for a dignified culmination that will impose the minimum burden and distress on our friends and families. We are all too aware of the strain that we put on society through our increasing dependence on medical resources. We are conscious of the calls we make on our own elderly children, who too often are torn between us and their own grandchildren.

Amortalists' theology is that organs are like car parts that, when they malfunction, can be either repaired or replaced

Indeed it goes further; as a community worker, I am witness to the exhaustion of our childrens generation in their 60s; they used to be the material that maintained the social fabric, as trustees, administrators, facilitators of the third sector, of the myriad small voluntary groups, the Rotaries, Lions, the Akelas. Now they have neither the time nor energy to repair its cloth due to their extended family and work commitments.

On a personal level, longevity has become a pre-traumatic stress disorder, but at its core, it is a social and ethical issue. It is already creating massive intergenerational conflict. I am in the way of the young. I block the doorway, obstruct the pavement, hold up queues, cause tailbacks, block beds. I am becoming a waste of space a space that is already crowded enough without adding yet another generation to it. Longevity has transformed the human paradigm and our inherited moral compass is not fit for purpose in this new ocean.

From my personal experience of pre-early-onset dementia, and my communion with those who suffer the real thing, I would appeal to the scientific elite to stop squabbling over the medical equivalent of angels on pinheads and to use their privileged talents to attend to the real needs of the elderly. We need purpose not redundancy, meaning not irrelevance, dignity not distress. In other words, we simply want to lead better lives, not longer ones.

Originally posted here:
Some scientists think there's no upper limit on ageing. Let's hope they're wrong - The Guardian

In modern times, this is one of the most unusual and unbelievable cases of the human longevity.Chinese resident Li Ching-Yuen is believed to have lived for over 190 years or for 256 years. Yes, it seems impossible but there are still some unofficial data which stated some of the unproven facts about Li Ching-Yuen.

Source:India.com

Li Ching-Yuen was a martial artist and Chinese herbalist claimed to be born in either 1677 or 1736 (his true date of birth was never known) according to some US newspaper. He was a resident of Kaihsien, in the Province of Szechwan.

A professor from theMinkuo University said that he had evidencewhich showed that Li was in fact born in 1677. According to the article which was published in 1933 in The New York Times, and was later reported by Snopes, the Imperial Chinese Government congratulated him on his 150th and200th birthdays.

Li had learned the secret of living from a warlord namedWu Pei-fu. Li advised one of his classmates to keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog. Li reportedly married 24 times and had 200 children.

Source: Youtube

No one will ever know how exactly old Li Ching-Yuen was at the time of his death. Also, experts are not sure about the authenticity of the documents which are in the support of the story. The question remains as it is- the story is Hoax or Reality?

Jeanne Louise Calment was a French woman who lived for 122 years, which is officially recorded. She has thelongest confirmed human lifespanon record.

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Li Ching-Yuen, The Man Who Lived For 256 Years- Hoax Or Reality? - PagalParrot

A Silicon Valley specialist in machine learning with a long career at Microsoft has joined La Jolla-based Human Longevity as chief data scientist.

David Heckerman helped invent Clippy, the Microsoft Office Assistant character. After the now-defunct interface, invented in the mid-1990s, Heckerman experienced more success by inventing a machine-learning filter to fight the curse of spam.

The holder of a medical degree and a PhD in computer science, Heckerman has most recently been senior director of the Genomics Group at Microsoft. He has combined his computer and medical background to work on projects such as attacking HIV, using insights from attacking spam.

Heckerman spoke about the use of big data tools for the Festival of Genomics conference, held this week at the San Diego Convention Center. After his talk, Heckerman discussed his path from working on office software products to human genomics.

I guess one way to summarize the way I've been thinking about things over the last 25 years is when something annoys me, I want to try to fix it, he said. So Clippy is an example of that.

Not knowing the proper terminology for Microsoft Office was a stumbling block, Heckerman discovered when he tried to use the companys spreadsheet.

So I'm trying to use Excel and I'm going, how do I how do I make a graph? he said. I'm a mathematician so I think of things as graphs. And then I found out that graph was called chart in Excel. But it didnt know that graph was a synonym for chart. Then I realized there's a lot of problems like this in Excel and the rest of Office.

The solution was to create an expert system linking official names for products and functions to common-language terms. This would allow people to get responses to natural-languag queries.

This technology also was behind Microsoft Bob, another product that got a less than stellar reception from users, Heckerman said with a rueful laugh.

The basic technology was sound, he added. The problem was an overly aggressive presentation. This included annoying pop-up characters such as the talking paperclip that interfered with what people were trying to do. That wasnt his work, Heckerman said.

What I did was the guts behind Clippy ask a question, get an answer An example is if you want to print sideways, you had to know Excel uses the word landscape. You dont have to know that any more.

Another annoyance spam led Heckerman to develop a spam filter.

After my 10th spam mail in 1997, I said thats enough, Ive had it, he said. I built the first machine-learning filter for spam.

After more non-medical work, Heckerman migrated to health-related projects, where his heart was. Microsoft was open to that, he said. And after Human Longevity cofounder J. Craig Venter drove completion of the first human genome, his path was set.

I havent looked back since then, he said.

Human Longevity reached out to Heckerman, he said, and he joined the company about three months ago.

I had been working in genomics for about 10 years, and really respected HLI and the work Craig was doing, Heckerman said. Craig said, I recognize the power of machine learning, and thats what did it for me.

bradley.fikes@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1020

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From Microsoft's Clippy to the human genome - The San Diego Union-Tribune

The average human life span has continued to increase. Will humans ever reach a limit to how long we can live?

There may be no limit to how long humans can live, or at least no limit that anyone has found yet, contrary to a suggestion some scientists made last year, five new studies suggest.

In April, Emma Morano, the oldest known human in the world at the time, passed away at the age of 117. Supercentenarians people older than 110 such as Morano and Jeanne Calment of France, who died at the record-setting age of 122 in 1997, have led scientists to wonder just how long humans can live. They refer to this concept as maximum life span.

In a study published in October in the journal Nature, Jan Vijg, a molecular geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and his colleagues concluded that humans may have reached their maximum life span. They analyzed multiple databases containing data on how long people have lived in recent decades in many countries and found that survival rates among the oldest people in most countries had not changed since about 1980. They argued that the human maximum reported age at death had apparently generally plateaued at about 115. [Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100]

However, the findings of five new studies now strongly disagree with this prior work. "I was outraged that Nature, a journal I highly respect, would publish such a travesty," said James Vaupel, a demographer at the Max Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging in Denmark. Vaupel co-founded the International Database on Longevity, one of the databases analyzed in the previous study.

Vaupel argued that the prior work relied on an outdated version of the Gerontology Research Group's database "that lacked data for many of the years they studied. Furthermore, they analyzed maximum age at death in a year, rather than the more appropriate maximum life span attained in a year in many years, the worlds world's oldest living personwas older than the oldest person who died that year," he told Live Science. "If appropriate data from the Gerontology Research Group are used, then ... there is no sign of a looming limit to human life spans."

Siegfried Hekimi, a geneticist at McGill University in Montreal, and his colleagues similarly found no evidence that maximum human life span has stopped increasing. By analyzing trends in the life spans of the longest-living individuals from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Japan for each year since 1968, they found that both maximum and average life spans may continue to increase far into the foreseeable future.

Maarten Rozing, a gerontology researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and his colleagues said the authors of the previous study committed errors in their statistical analyses. "We think that the claim that human life span has reached its limit should be regarded with caution," Rozing told Live Science. "Overall taken, there are very strong arguments to believe that our life span is still increasing, and, as long as our living conditions keep on improving, there is no reason to believe that this will come to a halt in the future." [7 Ways the Mind and Body Change with Age]

Similarly, in an analysis of Japanese women, who make up a growing number of centenarians, or people over 100, Joop de Beer, a demographer at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, and his colleagues suggested that the maximum human life span may increase to 125 years by 2070. "There is no reason to expect that a limit to human life span is in sight," de Beer told Live Science. He added that two kind of criticisms can be made about the prior work: "They did not apply their method correctly," and "they did not apply the correct method."

But the researchers did caution that, although the prior work might not have presented a strong argument for a limit to maximum human life span, it does not mean such a limit does not exist. "The evidence is mixed, but at present, the balance of the evidence suggests that if there is a limit, it is above 120, perhaps much above, and perhaps there is not a limit at all," Vaupel said. "Whether or not there is a looming limit is an important scientific question."

"Average human life span is clearly increasing continuously," Hekimi said. "The failure to identify a current limit to maximum human life span suggests that the increase in average life spanmight continue for quite a while."

Vijg defended his team's October study. "We agree with none of the arguments put forward sometimes because they were based on a misunderstanding, sometimes because they were plain wrong, and sometimes because we disagreed with the arguments themselves," he told Live Science.

Jay Olshansky, a biodemographer at the University of Illinois at Chicago who did not take part in either the previous work or the new studies, found the rebuttals "a bit amusing." He said the key problem with all of these arguments about maximum human life span is that, of the 108 billion or so humans ever born, "only a handful have ever lived to extreme old age beyond age 110, and it's only in recent times that the number of centenarians has risen."

"The rebuttals are mostly focused on slightly different ways of looking at the same limited data," Olshansky said. "Basically, if you tilt your head a little to the left or right and look at the same old age mortality or survival statistics for all humans, you might come to slightly different conclusions."

Future research should analyze the statistics of human aging as well as the human genome, which "will tell us whether people that have particularly long lives have a particular genetic makeup and whether this makeup changes with changes in the average life span," Hekimi said. "Carrying out such studies and finding out will take a while."

The five new studies are detailed online June 28 in the journal Nature.

Original article on Live Science.

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Is There a Limit to the Human Life Span? - Live Science