"Exploring Human Lifespan: How Old Can Humans Really Get?"

Research on hunter-gatherer populations suggests that people who avoid disease and violent deaths may live to about their seventh or eighth decade. Life expectancy has increased due to improved sanitation and medicine, but the average human lifespan may remain constant at around 70 years. Some geneticists believe evolution has programmed a hard limit of 115 years into our genome. Geroscience researchers suggest that substances can increase the lifespan of laboratory animals.

Joo Pedro de Magalhes, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the University of Birmingham, believes humans could live for 1,000 years if they could stop ageing at the molecular level. He suggests that researchers could reprogramme cells by making small changes to key genes, potentially leading to anti-aging treatments. Magalhes believes that this goal could be achieved by treating pneumonia, a significant cause of death in the 1920s. Magalhes was treated with a single dose of penicillin when he had the same illness as a child. He believes that scientists may similarly create anti-aging treatments, a goal to which he has now devoted his professional career. He states plainly, "I want to cheat death."

How has avoiding death so far turned out?

I don't believe we'll soon have a medication that "cure[s]]]" ageing the way penicillin "cure[s]]" infections. Rapamycin, however, is a very promising drug. Animal studies show that it increases life expectancy by 10% to 15%; it is also approved for usage in humans, such as in organ transplant recipients. There are negative repercussions. I'm hopeful that we'll create medications similar to statins, which we take daily to lower our risk of heart disease, but for extending our lives. It would still be fairly astonishing if you could slow down human ageing by even 10% or 5%.

How rapamycin affects the cell?

Rapamycin affects the cell in a variety of ways, but many of its actions involve slowing down cell development and metabolism, which is why it affects ageing.

Your grandmother endured life till the age of 103. Did she use rapamycin, or was there another factor contributing to her extended life?

I believe it was the beach and sun [laughs]. We are aware that a centenarian's propensity is largely inherited. In addition to eating poorly, my grandmother didn't do much exercise. She didn't smoke, and while she didn't have very awful habits, she didn't have particularly good ones either. She was hardly in the hospital, though, and was generally healthy practically to the end. Her situation comes down to environment and genetics.

You have sequenced the genomes of animals with extremely lengthy lifespans, such the 200-year-old bowhead whale. What can we learn from their genomes and how are their genes different from ours?

Animals that live a long time, like humans, whales, and elephants, deal with similar problems like cancer, but they do so by employing various biochemical strategies. They appear to have considerably greater DNA repair in bowhead whales. A bowhead whale gene would be implanted in a mouse in my ideal experiment to discover if the mouse will thereafter live longer. The p53 gene, which has a very high association with cancer suppression, is another clear example.

Why is it so fascinating to see naked mole rats?

Because they are smaller than rats, which only live for around four years on average, and because they can live up to 30 years, naked mole rats are intriguing creatures. A little rodent that is linked to mice and rats but has a substantially longer lifespan and a high level of cancer resistance is the result.

What is their trick?

It's their capacity to react to and repair DNA damage that contributes to cancer resistance and presumably also to general ageing. However, compared to [the threshold] in humans, the threshold for a mouse cell to develop into a cancer cell is substantially lower. If you cause DNA damage in mouse cells, they will develop cancer; if you cause DNA damage in naked mole rat cells, it will be repaired. Cancer won't strike them.

Does that imply that life spans are genetically predetermined if mice live for a number of years, naked mole rats live for thirty years, and we live for roughly eighty years?

The prevalent notion of ageing focused on wear and tear—damage building up in our cells and bodily parts like vehicles that degrade over time. Since people are not inanimate objects, I have never particularly liked that. Of course, there is harm, and ageing frequently appears to be quite predetermined, almost like a programme. A mouse ages 20 to 30 times more quickly than a person. Many ageing [characteristics], such as loss of muscle mass, are universal across animals and affect everyone. This doesn't seem to be random; instead, it seems planned out. Therefore, I consider ageing to be more of a software issue than a hardware issue.

My theory is that our DNA contains a very intricate set of computer-like programmes that transform us into an adult human. But perhaps some of these same programmes have negative effects as people age.

The health advantages would be astounding if we could restructure our biology to eradicate cancer and avoid the negative effects of our genetic software programme.

I believe it is feasible. Is it likely to occur soon? It seems rather unlikely to me. Even if you understand how ageing functions, creating solutions is difficult. I'm an aspiring science-fiction author, and one issue I've noticed is that there are a lot of books out there that are set in the future, say, 100 or 1000 years from now, with all kinds of technology that allows humans to do amazing things like travel between stars, yet people are still ageing. But I believe that by then, we will understand ageing.