Will Humans Ever Live 200 Years?

When 116-year-old Gertrude Weaver died of pneumonia this week in Arkansas, she had held the title of worlds oldest person for all of five days. And she was still a bit younger than 122-year-old Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who passed away in 1979 and holds the record for oldest human.

Do the genes of super-seniors like Weaver and Calment hold the key to living longer? Given new kinds of drugs and technology, can we push the limits of human lifespan beyond 130, to even 200 years?

Futurists like Aubrey DeGrey have said that eliminating just a few diseases and coming up with new treatments for aging could lead to 1,000-year-old humans. DeGrey, who has been pushing his ideas on rejuvenation and life-extension, has gotten some deep-pocketed company in the past year.

California hedge fund manager Joon Yun proposed a $1 million Palo Alto Longevity Prize to kickstart research into extending the life of lab mice by 50 percent. So far, 15 teams have signed up for the contest, which begins June 15.

In 2014, Google announced a spinoff called Calico to research interventions to slow aging and counteract age-related diseases, while former human genome researcher Craig Ventner has created a new firm called Human Longevity, Inc. to sequence the databases of super-oldsters like Weaver and hack the genetic code that keeps us living longer.

But other scientists say that no amount of money can push the human body past its limits. They believe that good lifestyle habits can extend our lives, but not radically change our natural human lifespan.

Should the goal be to get a few people to 130, or is there a more achievable goal of getting a hugely larger number of people living much greater portions of their lives in good health? asks Thomas Perls, professor of medicine and geriatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Perls is director of the New England Centenarian study at Boston Medical Center, which is looking at the genes of people who live longer than 100 years, as well as those super-centenarians who live longer than 110 years. Hes found several genes that may hold the key to fending off diseases of aging, but the puzzle still hasnt been solved.

We have got to understand why these people age so much more slowly than the rest of us, Perls said.

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Will Humans Ever Live 200 Years?