Living lobster 🦞

Living longer is good, actually. The problem is we often endure a number of unhealthy years at the end of our longer lives. A global study found people are spending more years in poor health at the end of life, rising from about 8.5 years in 2000 to about 9.6 years in 2019. 

Longevity research is trying to delay the start of the big age-linked diseases so people spend fewer years in illness or frailty. Ultimately, to live longer. Achieving this probably looks like a range of targeted therapies and treatments rather than one silver bullet.

Thousand candles

The longest authenticated human lifespan is Jeanne Calment, at 122 years and 164 days. But there’s another figure percolating. Longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey believes the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born. 

What would investing, saving and working look like over a several-hundred-year lifespan? The question of what to do with one’s life, one’s time, would take on a whole new weight. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, after all. And that’s a lot of days.

We’ve already come a very long way thanks to many of the modern miracles we take for granted, like clean water and vaccines. Globally, the average newborn could expect to live about 32 years in 1900. By 2021, that figure was about 71 years. A big driver was a major cut in child mortality, a rare win for humanity.

Word science

Let’s nail down the jargon. Lifespan is how long you live. Healthspan is how long you stay in decent shape. Morbidity is the period living with illness or disability. Compressing morbidity is shrinking the bad-health period at the end of your life. Geroscience is the study of the biology of ageing. And gerotherapeutics is the treatments aimed at stalling ageing.

The biggest healthspan levers already exist. Not smoking, exercising, good diet, good sleep, less alcohol, more social connection – all do a lot of heavy lifting. Parts of the world where people practice many of these behaviours are known as blue zones. But they may be nothing more than mirages caused by pension fraud and poor record-keeping.

Longevity tech will never replace the above. But it will add better measurement and detection, and new therapies for the damage that lifestyle can’t undo. We’re probably not living to a 1,000 just yet. But in all likelihood, you, dear reader, will live more years in better health than previous generations.

Elixir vitae

Biologically speaking, death isn’t one thing. It’s infection, cancer, heart disease, dementia, accidents. Killing death would mean knocking these things back, everywhere, all the time. Nature does have a few tricks up its sleeve, though. Lobsters, for example, keep growing and maintain high telomerase activity, which helps cells keep dividing instead of hitting a normal replication limit. But lobsters still die :( through disease, predation, or the sheer energy cost of moulting. 

The jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can, under stress, return to an earlier stage in its life cycle. Hydra – tiny freshwater animals, tube-shaped relatives of jellyfish and corals – constantly renew their cells and can regenerate damaged tissue. Naked mole-rats are unusually long-lived for their size. But none of these creatures are immortal. Besides, humans are more complex and these tricks come with trade-offs.

Mr Potato Head

Could we regrow spent or damaged limbs and organs, in order to shore up more time? Limb regeneration research is older than you might think. Lazzaro Spallanzani described salamanders regrowing tails and limbs in the 1760s.

In salamanders like the axolotl, amputation triggers a blastema, a mass of regenerative cells that rebuild the missing part. Crucially, strong nerve signals keep regrowth going. But in adult mammals, the body will default to sealing the wound, forming a scar, and the regrowth programme stays switched off.

Regeneration research has therefore tried to slow the scarring process. One line of attack targets the chemical signals that drive fibrosis. Another targets the physical mechanics of scarring, using drugs aimed at preventing thick, rigid scar tissue. Researchers have also explored tuning the immune response, nudging macrophages – the stormtroopers of the immune system – toward repair rather than fibrosis.

For now, in humans, only the fingertip shows meaningful regenerative capacity. Evolution tends to keep what keeps us alive – the advantage of being able to manipulate the environment is hard to overstate. But the technology may advance so that humans could replace lost tissue rather than patch it up. Living for centuries might mean cycling through body parts, replacing those that are damaged or worn out. But what if we could stop them from wearing out in the first place?

May cause cancer

In the US, ageing is generally not treated as a disease in the same way as diabetes or Alzheimer’s. Which means it is hard to run late-stage trials that ‘treat ageing’. Therefore, most longevity biotech firms target recognised diseases.

One of the boldest ideas is that some aspects of cellular ageing might be reversible. Reprogramming aims to nudge cells toward a more youthful state. There is a catch. If you push cells into a more active state, you also risk encouraging the wrong cells to grow. Also known as cancer.

The hardest arena in this battle is the brain. Dementia is one of the main reasons extra years become bad years. It’s also one of the hardest areas to treat because the brain is complex and unforgiving. Better metabolic health and better cardiovascular health may help reduce risk. Better early detection may help people intervene sooner. But genuine breakthroughs here are slower.

Zombie cells

As you age, more cells become damaged and stop dividing. But they don’t die, per se. They hang around and pump out irritating signals, like that last person at the party you just can’t shift. Senolytics are drugs designed to remove these zombie cells, or at least stop them from causing trouble.

‍Inflammaging refers to chronic, low-grade inflammation that tends to rise with age and is linked to many age-related diseases. While newer work argues the story is more complicated than older = more inflamed, ageing often looks like the body stuck in alarm mode. Lots of longevity research is trying to dial this state down.

As people get older, the bodies’ natural defence system tends to respond less well to threats. Researchers call this immunosenescence. If you can restore immune function in older adults, you reduce their risk of disease.

Life goals

Some researchers have argued humans have a rough upper ceiling in the 150-year region because our ability to bounce back from stress declines with age – though that doesn’t rule out big gains in healthspan. 

A 150-year life makes the idea of a single career path look quaint. You don’t spend fifty years doing one job and then retire at 65. You live like Arnie and pack several lives inside one lifetime. Employers may also become payers towards longevity care because healthier workers mean fewer sick days and longer careers. A healthy worker is a happy worker and a happy worker is a productive worker. 

If people are healthy longer they can work longer, which helps. If longevity tech works, the dependency ratio improves because 80-year-olds stay in the workforce. This is a deflationary force for labour costs but a massive boon for GDP. 

The 150-year mortgage

Longer lives would see healthcare shift to maintenance. Expect more screening. More monitoring. More rehab. More focus on strength, mobility, balance, and cognition.

More living generations at once means more great-grandparents. Even great-great-grandparents. Inheritance arrives much later which changes housing deposits and retirement planning. People might spend more years supporting older relatives while also supporting adult children and grandchildren.

This generational stack means financial planning would likely pivot toward inter-generational gifting, and specialised insurance products, to unlock capital while the younger generations still have the vitality to use it.

Over a 150-year life, investing would look different, too. Less of a pot for retirement and more like scaffolding supporting multiple lives, punctuated by the odd paradigm shift – war, inflation, tech advances, new systems of government. And because you’re alive long enough to have seen it all before, those once-in-a-lifetime crashes would lose some of their sting. Hopefully. 

While compounding is the eighth wonder of the world, 150 years of 2% inflation reduces purchasing power by more than 90%. To maintain a lifestyle for a century, an investor would effectively be forced into equities and real assets over the long haul. The traditional 4% withdrawal rule simply cannot survive a 60-year retirement. On a 1,000-year horizon, a retirement pot isn't enough. You’d need permanent asset ownership.

Time rich

Probably, most people don’t want near-immortality. They want a longer, later life that’s less brittle, more robust. More time with loved ones and the capacity to enjoy the finer things. Not the medicalised grind that often typifies the end-of-life experience.

The optimistic future is fewer years of decline – not just for the rich. Because a healthspan gap compounds fast: more time and energy, more earning power, more room for mistakes. And more time to try again. Keeping people sharp and independent and useful for longer is the goal, then. Boring, but perhaps better than a thousand birthdays.