Can Humans Live for 800 Years? (Good Update on Longevity Research, lists of oldest people alive)

note; the lists at end of article of oldest people alive curiously don’t contain the folks the Chinese think are the oldest. But that may just be a language barrier. There is a lot hidden amongst its 1.5 billion people – the formal census of 1.3 billion is probably an undercount. It migt be as high as 1.8 billion….. Of course all the research here is “material” biased, i.e. they don’t allow for intervention from spiritual dimensions in the process. – Michael

WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOR EVER?
A SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH COULD MEAN HUMANS LIVE FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS
By Steve Connor
The Independent
Wednesday, January23, 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/who-wants-to-live-for-ever-a-scien
tific-breakthrough-could-mean-humans-live-for-hundreds-of-years-772418.html

A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has
been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of
longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of
ageing.

If this work could ever be translated into humans, it would mean that we
might one day see people living for 800 years. But is this ever going to be
a realistic possibility?

Valter Longo is one of the small but influential group of specialists in
this area who believes that an 800-year life isn’t just possible, it is
inevitable. It was his work at the University of Southern California that
led to the creation of a strain of yeast fungus that can live for 10 weeks
or more, instead of dying at its usual maximum age of just one week.

By deleting two genes within the yeast’s genome and putting it on a
calorie-restricted diet, Longo was able to extend tenfold the lifespan of
the same common yeast cells used by bakers and brewers. The study is
published later this week in the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.

There is, of course, a huge difference between yeast cells and people, but
that hasn’t stopped Longo and his colleagues suggesting that the work is
directly relevant to human ageing and longevity. “We’re setting the
foundation for reprogramming healthy life. If we can find out how the
longevity mechanism works, it can be applied to every cell in every living
organism,” Longo says.

“We’re very, very far from making a person live to 800 years of age. I don’t
think it’s going to be very complicated to get to 120 and remain healthy,
but at a certain point I think it will be possible to get people to live to
800. I don’t think there is an upper limit to the life of any organism.”

For most gerontologists — people who study the science of ageing — such
statements are almost heretical. There is a general view in this field that
there is a maximum human lifespan of not more than about 125 years. Jeanne
Calment, the oldest documented person, died at the age of 122 years and 164
days. According to the orthodox view of ageing, she was one of the few lucky
enough to have reached that maximum, upper limit of human lifespan.

The attitude of most mainstream gerontologists towards the idea that people
may one day live for many centuries — or even 1,000 years, as one
scientific maverick has suggested — is best summed up by Robin Holliday, a
distinguished British gerontologist, in his recent book Aging: The Paradox
of Life. “How is it possible to make these claims?” Holliday asks. “The
first requirement is to ignore the huge literature on ageing research… The
second is to ignore the enormous amount of information that has been
obtained by the study of human age-associated disease; in other words, to
ignore the many well-documented textbooks on human pathology. The third is
to propose that in the future, stem-cell technology, and other technologies,
will allow vulnerable parts of the body to be replaced and/or repaired. The
new ‘bionic’ man will therefore escape from ageing,” Holliday says.

Like many experts on the science of ageing, Holliday is deeply sceptical
about the idea that the ageing process can somehow be circumvented, allowing
people to extend their lives by decades or even centuries. “The whole
[anti-ageing] movement not only becomes science fiction; it is also
breathtakingly arrogant,” Holliday says. An immense hinterland of
biomedicine suggests that death at a maximum age of about 125 is inevitable,
he says.

But that is precisely what Valter Longo is suggesting with his work on the
yeast that can live longer than 10 weeks. “We got a tenfold life-span
extension, which is, I think, the longest that has ever been achieved in any
organism,” he says.

By knocking out two genes, known as RAS2 and SCH9, which promote ageing in
yeast and cancer in humans, and putting the microbes on a diet low in
calories, Longo achieved the sort of life extension that should in theory be
impossible. As Anna McCormick, head of genetics and cell biology at the US
National Institute on Aging, remarked: “I would say tenfold is pretty
significant.”

Calorie restriction is now a well-established route to extending the lives
of many organisms, from yeast and nematode worms to fruit flies and mice.
But the jury is still out on whether calorie restriction can extend the life
of humans, although a diet rich in calories certainly increases the risk of
obesity, diabetes and other life-shortening conditions.

Biologists believe that restricting calories causes many animals to flip
into a state normally reserved for near starvation. Instead of spending
their precious energy reserves on reproduction, they shut down everything
but their basic body maintenance, in preparation for better times ahead when
breeding would stand a better chance of success.

This idea fits in with the more general view that animals tend to follow one
of two life strategies — either one of high fecundity and short lifespan,
or one of long lifespan and low reproductive capacity.

Mice, for example, divert much of their limited resources to high
reproduction, having several litters of young a year, but they have a short
life of just a couple of years. But bats, which are roughly the same size as
mice, have just one or at most two offspring a year, and can live for 30
years or more.

Why one species of animal lives longer than another of comparable size, and
why some animals appear to age faster and die younger, have been the subject
of extensive scrutiny for decades. As bats and mice show, it is possible for
genes to extend lifespan — so the question is: why do they not do it more
often, or even all the time? And the logical extension of this question is:
why do we age at all? Why don’t we live for ever?

One of the most convincing answers to this is known as the disposable soma
theory. In short, the idea is that genes can extend an organism’s lifespan,
but only as a trade-off between the costs and benefits of doing so. It is
possible to keep on mending the machinery of the body as it suffers daily
wear and tear, but there comes a point when it is no longer worthwhile and
the costs become too expensive, much like the point when fixing an
increasingly decrepit car gets too much. At this point the body, or “soma”,
becomes disposable. By then, though, from the gene’s point of view, it won’t
matter as long as it has managed to “escape” this broken-down body and
replicated itself inside the younger, fitter bodies of the next generation.

Longo says that the disposable soma theory, invented by Professor Tom
Kirkwood of Newcastle University in the late 1970s, is one of the strongest
ideas around to explain the nature of ageing.

However, Longo has another theory that is causing a second group of
scientists to tear their hair out. He believes that ageing may not simply be
a side-effect of the wear and tear of life, but is also a genetically
programmed condition designed to rid the population of aged individuals to
make way for younger ones.

It is an alluring idea, albeit one thought to have been discredited by the
evolutionary biologists George Williams and John Maynard Smith 40 years ago.
It is a common assumption among non-scientists that ageing and death occur
in order to make way for the next generation, but this suggests that ageing
is a genetic programme honed by natural selection. It also assumes that it
is an altruistic act brought about for the benefit of the future population.

Evolutionary biologists know that such an idea is based on “group selection”
and that mathematically this cannot occur because it will always be
undermined by more selfish mutants. Organisms carrying the altruistic genes
for premature ageing and death would, for instance, be susceptible to
selfish-gene cheats that decide to exploit the situation to their own, and
their offspring’s, advantage. They could simply live a bit longer than their
peer group and so make sure they are the ones that exploit the available
resources left behind by their prematurely dead peers.

But Longo is convinced that his experiments on manipulating the genes of
yeast show that ageing is not a mere side-effect of life, but a deliberate,
genetically programmed process honed by natural selection. “Basically, it is
the first demonstration, to our knowledge, that ageing is programmed and
altruistic,” Longo says. “The organisms we have studied die long before they
have to in order to provide nutrients for ‘mutants’ generated within their
own population. Thus, billions of organisms die early so that a few
better-adapted individuals can grow.”

This raises the possibility that the same process happens in humans, and
that, as a result, many people are dying earlier than they need to.
“Programmed human ageing is just a possibility. We don’t know whether it’s
true yet or not. But if ageing is programmed in yeast, and the [metabolic]
pathway is very similar, then isn’t it possible that humans also die earlier
than they have to?”

Valter Longo says that no one has so far proved him to be wrong on his
programmed-death idea. But this may be one heresy too far for the rest of
science.

…………..

From the Archives: Jeremy Laurance reports from Japan, the country with more
centenarians than any other.

ENDURING TALES: THE WORLD’S OLDEST PEOPLE

Jeanne Calment

Jeanne Calment’s mother, father and brother lived to 86, 93 and 97
respectively. But nobody has eclipsed Jeanne herself, who died in 1997 aged
122 years and 164 days. Born in 1875, she met Vincent van Gogh when she was
14, and attended the 1885 funeral of Victor Hugo.

Shigechiyo Izumi

As well as holding the title of the oldest man to have lived, Izumi, from
the Japanese island of Tokunoshima, holds the record for the longest career.
A farmer, he worked from childhood until the age of 105, in a career that
spanned 98 years. In spite of a weakness for sho-chu (a barley whisky) and
taking up smoking at 70, he lived to 120. He died in 1986.

Edna Parker

Indiana-born Parker, 114, has outlived all her children, but her family
includes 13 great-great-grandchildren. Now recognised as the world’s oldest
living person, she grew up on a farm. Still walking, she hobbles around her
nursing home, where she enjoys reading and reciting poetry.

Charlotte Hughes

Hughes, a retired schoolteacher, is the oldest documented person in the UK.
She married her husband, Noel, at the age of 63. He died aged 105, but
Hughes went on to reach 115, dying in 1993.

Florrie Baldwin

Baldwin, born in 1896, lives in a Leeds nursing home. Britain’s oldest
living woman says she remembers meeting Queen Victoria on a royal visit, and
reading about the end of the Boer War. She has outlived her husband,
Clifford, by 35 years.

Henry Allingham

Allingham has found fame in recent years as the oldest veteran of the First
World War, one of only a handful still alive. Born in 1896, south
London-born Allingham, 111, is also Europe’s oldest living man, and in the
world is second only to Japan’s Tomoji Tanabe.