Is it possible to live to be 120?

Human life expectancy has more than doubled since the time of the Enlightenment, when the average was just 40 years.

This is not to say that there were no old people in Europe, but many people (including children) fell victim to disease, war injuries and failed births before they reached that age . Now this figure is around 80. The question is, therefore, whether 80 or 90 years is the maximum that most of us can aspire to with an environment that minimises the impact of the 'external' factors that cause us to die.

Nick Stroustrup, a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, ​​explains that 'life expectancy' is actually quite difficult to estimate for the simple reason that "the future is uncertain." This study is based on the "tradition of modelling historical mortality data. But it is not enough to come up with a theoretical age limit for human life," he explains. At this centre, longevity is investigated with very peculiar beings: identical worms. Its more than 20,000 specimens seek to answer why two genetically identical beings, living in similar conditions, will not live the same amount of time.

If we look at what happens in other species, aging is not inevitable. There are species that live only a few months. Biological aging is the underlying process that leads to demographic aging: the rapid increase in the risk of death with age. It is not a very biological definition of the subject, but it is the most widely used one at the demographic level.

Most people in the field of aging are coming around to the idea that, mechanistically, aging is multifactorial and that many biological mechanisms contribute to a systematic functional decline. In other words, getting older means becoming more likely to suffer from disease .

In 2021, we asked Dr. Eugenio Viña, professor and winner of the National Prize for Biomedical Research in 1998, who has spent four decades studying genetic and nutritional factors that influence aging. “It is true that we age because we oxidize, but that is not the whole truth. There are other things that lead us to energetic and vital collapse,” explained the professor. On that side, we do not find a figure that marks the age limit of human life.

“Telomere shortening is another aspect of aging. Chromosomes, which package DNA, have caps called telomeres. Every time the cell divides, they shorten a little bit. There comes a point when this protective layer is so short that it can no longer duplicate itself.” There are at least seven other distinctive markers of aging in our cells.

One of the most important changes is called methylation . In methylation, a chemical is added to our DNA to keep everything running smoothly, and with age, methylation generally decreases, increasing the risk of turning on genes that express deterioration and disease. Therefore, knowing the amount and locations of DNA methylation could be a useful way to measure aging, say the scientists.

It has become one of Silicon Valley's obsessions. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, claims that thanks to the scientific advances in which he is investing, he will live to be 120 years old. A modest goal compared to the plans of Google, which aims directly to cure death. To achieve this, the technology giant has created Calico (California Life Company), a company in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested and which is surrounded by the utmost secrecy. Also in California is Human Longevity. It was founded in 2014 by the pioneer of genomics, Craig Venter, and has raised 300 million dollars in its first two years of work. It will decipher the human genome of hundreds of thousands of people on an industrial scale to create a large database. As genomes are sequenced and analysed with big data, we will better understand why some people live longer than others. "By studying how to prevent ageing, we will learn to treat diseases associated with it that until now lack effective treatment," explains Blasco. «Until now, those who wanted to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease only studied patients with this disease. The same goes for cancer, Parkinson's disease or cardiovascular diseases... But just as infectious diseases are fought by attacking the viruses or bacteria that cause them, why not attack the causal agent of age-related diseases? When we understand why we age, we will live many more years and be much healthier .»

In addition to gene therapy, serious progress is also being made on the pharmacological route . In the future, there could be anti-aging drugs with molecules such as spermidine, metformin, rapamycin and resveratrol. The favourite candidate to become the youth pill is metformin. It is not a new compound. It has been used for more than 50 years in the treatment of diabetes, but several studies have shown that patients who take it suffer less cancer, dementia and cardiovascular diseases.

A few months ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the first clinical trial on humans, the first in the field of anti-aging, and will serve to demonstrate whether metformin "rejuvenates" 3,000 volunteers between 70 and 80 years old, and the results will be known in the next decade.

Another compound that could become an anti-aging drug is rapamycin. The National Institute of Ageing in the United States has shown that rapamycin lengthens the life of mice by 13%. Now, the University of Washington is testing it on dogs and, according to The New York Times, the first results are encouraging.

“The transition to a life span of up to 150 years will probably be slow, so we will have time to assimilate reaching that age and accept the possible psychological consequences that it entails,” explains Juan Manuel García González, a sociologist specializing in super-longevity and first author of the recent study Research on people aged 100 and over.

Living in longer-lived societies could affect our way of relating to each other or things as basic as our concept of love or family , explains philosopher Juan Antonio Valor Yébenes. Our concept of age will not be the same, and neither will being young or old, as well as the activities we associate with these times. Everything can change because everything is induced according to our current concept of old age.

So far, "this increase in life expectancy, and therefore in longevity, that is, more and more people reaching increasingly older ages, has already changed our society and has been accompanied by a change in the family model resulting from an increasingly lower birth rate: households are smaller and families are less extensive."

While the academic world continues its race against time to study these questions and try to understand what our old age will be like in the future, the new longevity is advancing by leaps and bounds. The current objective is for the science of the present to serve as a “starting point for the growing number of social science studies on centenarians that will be published in Spain in the short and medium term and that will host a very diverse range of research.”