{"id":6265,"date":"2022-09-03T20:56:45","date_gmt":"2022-09-03T20:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movesflash.com\/?p=6265"},"modified":"2022-09-03T20:56:45","modified_gmt":"2022-09-03T20:56:45","slug":"lifespan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/2022\/09\/03\/lifespan\/","title":{"rendered":"LIFESPAN"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n
\n

LIFESPAN<\/h1>\n

What if we could be younger longer? Not years longer but decades longer. What if those final years didn’t look so terribly different from the years that came before them? And what if, by saving ourselves, we could also save the world?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Why We Age… And Why We Don’t Have To!!!<\/i><\/b><\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As a species, we are living much longer than ever. But not much better. Not at all. Over the past century we have gained additional years, but not additional life\u2014not life worth living anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so most of us, when we think about living to 100, still think \u201cGod forbid,\u201d because we\u2019ve seen what those final decades look like, and for most people, most of the time, they don\u2019t look appealing at all. Ventilators and drug cocktails. Broken hips and diapers. Chemotherapy and radiation. Surgery after surgery after surgery. And hospital bills; my God, the hospital bills.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re dying slowly and painfully. People in rich countries often spend a decade or more suffering through illness after illness at the ends of their lives. We think this is normal. As lifespans continue to increase in poorer nations, this will become the fate of billions of additional people. Our successes in extending life, the surgeon and doctor Atul Gawande has noted, have had the effect of \u201cmaking mortality a medical experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what if it didn\u2019t have to be that way? What if we could be younger longer? Not years longer but decades longer. What if those final years didn\u2019t look so terribly different from the years that came before them? And what if, by saving ourselves, we could also save the world?<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe we can never be six again\u2014but how about twenty-six or thirty-six?<\/span><\/p>\n

What if we could play as children do, deeper into our lives, without worrying about moving on to the things adults have to do so soon? What if all of the things we need to compress into our teenage years didn\u2019t need to be so compressed after all? What if we weren\u2019t so stressed in our 20s? What if we weren\u2019t feeling middle-aged in our 30s and 40s? What if, in our 50s, we wanted to reinvent ourselves and couldn\u2019t think of a single reason why we shouldn\u2019t? What if, in our 60s, we weren\u2019t fretting about leaving a legacy but beginning one?<\/span><\/p>\n

What if we didn\u2019t have to worry that the clock was ticking? And what if I told you that soon\u2014very soon, in fact\u2014we won\u2019t?<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s what I\u2019m telling you.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m fortunate that after thirty years of searching for truths about human biology, I find myself in a unique position. If you were to visit me in Boston, you\u2019d most likely find me hanging out in my lab at Harvard Medical School, where I\u2019m a professor in the Department of Genetics and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging. I also run a sister lab at my alma mater, the University of New South Wales in Sydney. In my labs, teams of brilliant students and PhDs have both accelerated and reversed aging in model organisms and have been responsible for some of the most cited research in the field, published in some of the world\u2019s top scientific journals. I am also a cofounder of a journal, Aging, that provides space to other scientists to publish their research on one of the most challenging and exciting questions of our time, and a cofounder of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, a group of the top twenty researchers in aging worldwide. In trying to make practical use of my discoveries, I\u2019ve helped start a number of biotechnology companies and sit as a chair of the scientificboards of advisers of several others. These companies work with hundreds of leading academics in scientific areas ranging from the origin of life to genomics to pharmaceuticals. I am, of course, aware of my own labs\u2019 discoveries years before they are made public, but through these associations, I\u2019m also aware of many other transformational discoveries ahead of time, sometimes a decade ahead. The coming pages will serve as your backstage pass and your front-row seat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Having received the equivalent of a knighthood in Australia and taken on the role of an ambassador, I\u2019ve been spending quite a bit of my time briefing political and business leaders around the world about the ways our understanding of aging is changing\u2014and what that means for humanity going forward.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve applied many of my scientific findings to my own life, as have many of my family members, friends, and colleagues. The results\u2014 which, it should be noted, are completely anecdotal\u2014are encouraging. I\u2019m now 50, and I feel like a kid. My wife and kids will tell you I act like one, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

That includes being a stickybeak, the Australian term for someone who is overly inquisitive, perhaps derived from the currawong crows that used to punch through the foil lids of the milk bottles delivered to our homes and drink the milk out of them. My old high school friends still like to tease me about how, whenever they came over to my parents\u2019 house, they would find me pulling something apart: a pet moth\u2019s cocoon, a spider\u2019s curled-up leaf shelter, an old computer, my father\u2019s tools, a car. I became quite good at it. I just wasn\u2019t very good at putting these things back together.<\/span><\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t bear not knowing how something worked or where it came from. I still can\u2019t\u2014but at least now I get paid for it.<\/span><\/p>\n

My childhood home is perched on a rocky mountainside. Below is a river that runs into Sydney Harbor. Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, explored these valleys in April 1788, only a few months after he and his First Fleet of marines, prisoners, and their families established a colony on the shores of what he called the \u201cfinest and most extensive harbor in the universe.\u201d The person most responsible for him being there was the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who eighteen years earlier had sailed up the Australian coastline with Captain James Cook on his \u201cvoyage round the world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After returning to London with hundreds of plant specimens to impress his colleagues, Banks lobbied King George III to start a British penal colony on the continent, the best site for which, he argued, not coincidentally, would be a bay called \u201cBotany\u201d on \u201cCape Banks. The First Fleet settlers soon discovered that Botany Bay, despite its most excellent name, had no source of water, so they sailed up to Sydney Harbor and found one of the world\u2019s largest \u201crias,\u201d a highly branched, deep waterway that formed when the Hawkesbury River system had been flooded by rising sea levels after the last ice age.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the age of 10, I had already discovered through exploration that the river in my backyard flowed down into Middle Harbor, a branch of Sydney Harbor. But I could no longer stand not knowing where the river originated. I needed to know what the beginning of a river looked like. <\/span><\/p>\n

I followed it upstream, left the first time it forked and right the time after that, wending into and out of several suburbs. By nightfall I was miles from home, beyond the last mountain on the horizon. I had to ask a stranger to let me call my mother to beg her to come pick me up. A few times after that I tried searching upstream, but never did get anywhere close to the fount. Like Juan Ponce de Le\u00f3n, the Spanish explorer of Florida known for his apocryphal quest to find the Fountain of Youth, I failed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to understand why we grow old. But finding the source of a complex biological process is like searching for the spring at the source of a river: it\u2019s not easy.<\/span><\/p>\n

On my quest, I\u2019ve wound my way left and right and had days when I wanted to give up. But I\u2019ve persevered. Along the way, I have seen a lot of tributaries, but I\u2019ve also found what may be the spring. In the coming pages, I will present a new idea about why aging evolved and how it fits into what I call the Information Theory of Aging. I will also tell you why I have come to see aging as a disease\u2014the most common disease\u2014one that not only can but should be aggressively treated. That\u2019s part I.<\/span><\/p>\n

In part II, I will introduce you to the steps that can be taken right now\u2014and new therapies in development\u2014that may slow, stop, or reverse aging, bringing an end to aging as we know it.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yes, I fully recognize the implications of the words \u201cbringing an end to aging as we know it,\u201d so, in part III, I will acknowledge the many possible futures these actions could create and propose a path to a future that we can look forward to, a world in which the way we can get to an increased lifespan is through an ever-rising healthspan, the portion of our lives spent without disease or disability.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are plenty of people who will tell you that\u2019s a fairy tale\u2014closer to the works of H. G. Wells than those of C. R. Darwin. Some of them are very smart. A few are even people who understand human biology quite well and whom I respect.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those people will tell you that our modern lifestyles have cursed us with shortening lifespans. They\u2019ll say you\u2019re unlikely to see 100 years of age and that your children aren\u2019t likely to get to the century mark, either. They\u2019ll say they\u2019ve looked at the science of it all and done the projections, and it sure doesn\u2019t seem likely that your grandchildren will get to their 100th birthdays, either. And they\u2019ll say that if you do get to 100, you probably won\u2019t get there healthy and you definitely won\u2019t be there for long. And if they grant you that people will live longer, they\u2019ll tell you that it\u2019s the worst thing for this planet. Humans are the enemy!<\/span><\/p>\n

They\u2019ve got good evidence for all of this\u2014the entire history of humanity, in fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sure, little by little, millennia by millennia, we\u2019ve been adding years to the average human life, they will say. Most of us didn\u2019t get to 40, and then we did. Most of us didn\u2019t get to 50, and then we did. Most of us didn\u2019t get to 60, and then we did. By and large, these increases in life expectancy came as more of us gained access to stable food sources and clean water. And largely the average was pushed upward from the bottom; deaths during infancy and childhood fell, and life expectancy rose. This is the simple math of human mortality.<\/span><\/p>\n

But although the average kept moving up, the limit did not. As long as we\u2019ve been recording history, we have known of people who have reached their 100th year and who might have lived a few years beyond that mark. But very few reach 110. Almost no one reaches 115.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our planet has been home to more than 100 billion humans so far. We know of just one, Jeanne Calment of France, who ostensibly lived past the age of 120. Most scientists believe she died in 1997 at the age of 122, although it\u2019s also possible that her daughter replaced her to avoid paying taxes. Whether or not she actually made it to that age really doesn\u2019t matter; others have come within a few years of that age but most of us, 95 percent to be precise, are dead before 100.<\/span><\/p>\n

So it certainly makes sense when people say that we might continue to chip away at the average, but we\u2019re not likely to move the limit. They say it\u2019s easy to extend the maximum lifespan of mice or of dogs, but we humans are different. We simply live too long already.<\/span><\/p>\n

They are wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We\u2019re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive\u2014decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility\u2014is no virtue.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prolonged vitality\u2014meaning not just more years of life but more active, healthy, and happy ones\u2014is coming. It is coming sooner than most people expect. By the time the children who are born today have reached middle age, Jeanne Calment may not even be on the list of the top 100 oldest people of all time. And by the turn of the next century, a person who is 122 on the day of his or her death may be said to have lived a full, though not particularly long, life. One hundred and twenty years might be not an outlier but an expectation, so much so that we won\u2019t even call it longevity; we will simply call it \u201clife,\u201d and we will look back with sadness on the time in our history in which it was not so.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the upward limit? I don\u2019t think there is one. Many of my colleagues agree.14 There is no biological law that says we must age.15 Those who say there is don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about. We\u2019re probably still a long way off from a world in which death is a rarity, but we\u2019re not far from pushing it ever farther into the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of this, in fact, is inevitable. Prolonged healthy lifespans are in sight. Yes, the entire history of humanity suggests otherwise. But the science of lifespan extension in this particular century says that the previous dead ends are poor guides.<\/span><\/p>\n

It takes radical thinking to even begin to approach what this will mean for our species. Nothing in our billions of years of evolution has prepared us for this, which is why it\u2019s so easy, and even alluring, to believe that it simply cannot be done.<\/span><\/p>\n

But that\u2019s what people thought about human flight, too\u2014up until the moment someone did it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today the Wright brothers are back in their workshop, having successfully flown their gliders down the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk. The world is about to change.<\/span><\/p>\n

And just as was the case in the days leading up to December 17, 1903, the majority of humanity is oblivious. There was simply no context with which to construct the idea of controlled, powered flight back then, so the idea was fanciful, magical, the stuff of speculative fiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then: liftoff. And nothing was ever the same again.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are at another point of historical inflection. What hitherto seemed magical will become real. It is a time in which humanity will redefine what is possible; a time of ending the inevitable.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, it is a time in which we will redefine what it means to be human, for this is not just the start of a revolution, it is the start of an evolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

By David A Sinclair, PhD & Matthew D LaPlante 
\n<\/span>From Lifespan by David A. Sinclair, PhD, with Matthew D. LaPlante. Copyright \u00a9 2019 by David A. Sinclair, PhD. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LIFESPAN What if we could be younger longer? Not years longer but decades longer. What if those final years didn’t look so terribly different from the years that came before them? And what if, by saving ourselves, we could also save the world? Why We Age… And Why We Don’t Have To!!! As a species, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6265","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-featured"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}