Longevity

Is there a biological limit to longevity?

"Medicine is about transcending biology."

July 5, 2012 by Aubrey de Grey

Percent of people surviving to a given age in various decades, based on data from the Dept. of Demography, UC Berkeley (credit: C. A. Everone/fis.org)

Gerontologists and demographers have argued about this for a long time, with the balance of opinion heavily influenced by the changes seen in the wealthiest nations’ “survival curves” — graphs showing, broadly speaking, the proportion of an initial population that survived to a given age.

Until a couple of centuries ago, these curves looked very much like radioactive decay curves, because one’s chance of dying at any given age was pretty much the same. As medicine emerged and we became protected from most infectious diseases, the curve became more rectangular, implying a biological limit that most people were getting fairly close to./.../