Human longevity: Research on animals and centenarians shows …

Retirees bowl in Sun City, Ariz., at America's first active retirement community. Human longevity is a confluence of so many factors interacting in so many complex ways, making it unlikely that there will ever be a surefire way to live to 120.

Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

In an age of breakneck technological and scientific progress, it can seem at times like anythings possible. Cars are driving themselves. Robots are tooling around Mars, taking pictures, and beaming them back to Earth. People are moving things with their minds.

For all the exponential advances, though, some technologies remain firmly in the realm of science fiction. We cant engineer genius babies. Were never getting our hoverboards. And, perhaps most dispiritingly of all, we havent figured out a way to cheat death.

It isnt for lack of trying. Research centers around the world have teams devoted to the study of human longevity, and scientists have been working furiously for years to uncover the secrets of long life in everything from mice to yeast to hydra. In fact, theyre making a lot of progress, and theres good reason to be optimistic that theyll someday hit on a breakthrough that will allow people to live significantly longer than they do today. But if youre sitting around waiting for the singularity, you might want to stand up and go for a jog instead.

Recent headlines make it seem like the cure for old age is just around the corner. Brain Experiment Could Give You an Extra 20 Years, one promised. Telomerase reverses ageing process, another declared. Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality? asked the New York Times Magazine. And National Geographics May cover featured a beaming infant and a tantalizing claim: This baby will live to be 120*. You might think the asterisk would point to a disclaimer, but its a fakeout: The disclaimer reads, Its not just hype. New science could lead to very long lives.

Sadly, such bold predictions are in fact mostly hype, says Jay Olshansky, a gerontologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The story was great, Olshansky said of the National Geographic piece, which detailed the rapidly growing body of scientific research on the genetic and molecular mechanisms involved in the aging process. But the titles all wrong. They shouldnt be making up numbers like that. So far, only one person has verifiably lived to be 120, and no one since the year 2000 has even come close.

The legitimate good news is that scientists are finally starting to tackle the problem of aging in a serious way, and some of their early findings are encouraging. Whereas medical research has focused for centuries on finding the causes and cures of specific diseases, a new crop of researchers is taking a different approach. Theyre looking for the mechanisms involved in the aging process itself. The thinking is that if you focus on curing just one disease, like diabetes, people will simply die from cancer or a stroke instead. But if you can figure out what makes the body more vulnerable to a broad range of diseases with each passing year, the impact on human health and longevity could be far greater. Olshansky calls this the longevity dividend.

Key to this quest are a number of long-running studies of specific populations of especially long-lived people. In rural Ecuador, researchers have pinpointed a genetic mutation that appears to make an isolated group of villagers unusually small of staturebut also less vulnerable to cancer and diabetes. In Hawaii, studies of Japanese-American centenarians pointed to variations in a gene called FOX03 that has also been tied to longevity in other species. And studies of centenarian Ashkenazi Jews in New York City homed in on the apparent genetic source of their unusually high levels of good cholesterol, which seems to fight heart disease. Several of the genes and mechanisms identified in these studies have been shown to affect the aging process in lab experiments on mice and other species.

The New York study is helmed by Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He told me hes optimistic that a breakthrough in understanding human aging could be on the horizon, given the pace of recent discoveries. But he also pointed out some obstacles.

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