“We don’t have an ageing intervention yet,” says [Dr Stuart Jay Olshansky]
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The only way humans are going to live longer, Olshansky says, is if we discover a way to slow the ageing process. In finding new ways to combat disease, we have simply extended a person’s potential final act.
“In the 20th century, we manufactured an additional 30 years of life, on average, for populations,” he explains. “Back then, life expectancy was close to 50. Today, it’s closer to 80… We need to be enormously grateful for what public health and medicine has given us, because most of us alive today over the age of 60 are living on time that was manufactured for us by medicine and public health.”
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[W]e have essentially been playing “a game of whack-a-mole” with fatal diseases, he says. We must address “the ageing of cells, tissues, organs and organ systems that accumulate damage just by living, by breathing, by eating, by oxidising”. He argues – as he always has – that if we don’t find a way to truly slow ageing, then no matter what biohackers might claim (with extreme diets and sleep regimes), human lifespans will plateau.
